Just because a device isn’t a hot seller doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time. As we observed with the BlackBerry Z30’s impressive capabilities as a messaging device, sometimes a mobile device simply does certain things better than the iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy devices even if it has no hope of ever matching them in terms of sales.
This brings us to the Lumia 1520, the phablet that Nokia launched to little fanfare last year and that has almost certainly not been a smash-hit for the one-time Finnish mobile titan. All the same, Phablist points us to new results posted by mobile benchmarking firm Rightware showing that the Lumia 1520 is the best smartphone on the planet for mobile gaming.
What makes Nokia’s flagship phablet such a gaming beast? According to Phablist’s analysis of Rightware’s benchmarks, a lot of it boils down to “more efficient software.” Both the Lumia 1520 and the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S5 feature the same Adreno 330 GPU and Samsung’s Snapdragon 801 CPU clocks in slightly faster than the Lumia 1520’s Snapdragon 800 CPU. Nonetheless, the Lumia 1520 performs better in Rightware’s tests, which Phablist says is because “the Windows mobile operating system… offers a smooth user experience across all of its devices — something that is not always the case with Android, especially in lower end models.”
Microsoft has struggled to come up with a consistent marketing message for why consumers should buy Windows Phone devices. Maybe using its clout among PC and Xbox gamers to push Windows Phone as the go-to platform for mobile gamers could help change that.
