First impressions: Lumia Icon Windows Phone (unboxing)

The box the phone comes in is pretty much like any other smartphone box. The one thing that gave me a grin was the overlaid description of the buttons and connectors. That’s just cute.

As soon as I lifted the phone up, it powered on. 

The back is a simple white. I was worried I’d get some terribly gaudy Nokia color, and I’m glad that this is a phone that doesn’t scream “look at me, I’m plastic candy!”

Next up was connecting to the network. This took a little work, because I have pretty terrible reception. But within a few minutes, I was using the phone.

This is what comes inside the box. More red.

Three things of note: First, there’s a lot of paper. Given that I read Kindle books on my phone, well … TL;DR. There’s a USB to micro-USB cable and a power adapter. One thing the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy have that the Lumia doesn’t: earbuds.

The top of the phone. If you have earbuds, this is where they would go. It’s also where the SIM card goes. No, that’s not extra memory, although this thing comes with 32G (of which 25GB was free right out of the box), so that’s not bad at all.

As the overlay says, “Charger/USB Port”.

No controls at all on the left side of the phone. It’s flat enough to stand up by itself on my desk, and yet it’s still reasonably comfortable in my hand. That’s kind of cool.

The Lumia Icon, which has a 20 megapixel camera, is pretty serious about camera functions. That’s a dedicated camera button there. For those of you old-time iPhone users, remember when Apple pitched a fit when one of their developers had the audacity to try to use a button to take pictures?

It’s very, very red. It’s also a completely different UI from Android and iOS. I’m very much looking forward to playing with it. Stay tuned!