TechFlasher: EE demos Nokia Lumia 920 4G on Oxford St

Rating: Sorry, sir, we’ll have to take those tariffs away

GoMobile News took advantage of a brilliant invitation from EE (formerly Everything Everywhere) to try out its 4G LTE network in person on London’s Oxford Street. We were able to play with any of the 4G LTE devices which EE will offer. Including the Nokia Lumia 920, of course. Only problem? The smartphone hasn’t yet gone commercial so a rather worried EE official had to swiftly remove the tariff information in case we published it. We have to admit that the demonstrations of 4G in action were impressive and we now ‘get’ why people would want to make the switch to 4G. It’s for the rich,busy execs and uber-geeks who are ‘time poor’.The EE store invites customers to take the ’4G Challenge’ by placing their existing handset next to a 4G enabled one.

In our case, the RAZR i was on the EE network anyway so it was a good comparison.

What we picked to do was browse the BBC web site. Not for further Jimmy Saville revelations but for general news.

The difference was amasing. While our 3G handset was still struggling to load the BBC home page, on the 4G handset we’d already picked a story and started to view a video.

If you’ve only got 20 minutes free, this kind of impressive speed is a Godsend.

However, it did reveal an unfortunate aspect to the Lumia 920. It can’t run the BBC iPlayer.

Which is a major failing in the eyes of a typical Brit who has to pay £140 per annum for the BBC’s content but can’t view it.

As a Windows Phone 8 (Apollo) handset, the Nokia couldn’t run Adobe Flash either.

The EE’s network – 4GEE – goes live commercially tomorrow [October 30th 2012] and tonight some 70 UK stores will be rebranded to EE.

Around 30 stores were already Everything Everywhere so they’ve changed already.

Incidentally, if you are on either Orange or T-Mobile already, you’ll be able to switch immediately in-store to 4GEE – unless the store has run out of nano SIM cards, of course.

Our illustration shows that using Speedtest.net, the handset saw a maximum download speed of 54.8 Mbit/s and a maximum upload speed of 17.8 Mbit/s. Not on the same connexion, though.