bought the icon this morning after ogling my coworkers for an hour. The screen feels like a mini tablet for browsing the web, yet is only minutely bigger than the 928. The screen feels like it is more edge-to-edge than the 928, but it is deceptive because this occurs simply due to Screen's bigger size resulting in an increase in screen-to-chrome ratio. Reading articles on The Verge, Engadget, Ars Technica, Anandtech, etc etc were never poor on the 928, but the increase in pixel density was suprirsingly noticeable.
The edges around the device are a clear step up from the 928, and the metal(?) buttons are five tiers ahead of the mushy plastic 928 buttons. The matte backing feels better in my hand, and it looks to be a better white than the glossy white on the 928. Also a design win is NOKs severe chopping of in the Verticle aspects of the device. The top chrome is cut in half, and the bottom chrome is perhaps 5/6 of the 928. The device is thick, but, like the 928, doesn't feel massive because of the curved back. I don't mind it, but I can certainly see why others would.
The 8974 in the device is really snappy. Install times were very quick (sorry about that, part of slow install times are my team's fault), and rendering HTML on some chunkier sites on 928/8X was much faster than I was expecting. Solitaire was noticeably faster, and load times on a couple of the games I tried seemed to have been cut in half (though that might just be bias as there was no side-by-side comparison).
I probably should have waited to see if NOK has some new phones for Verizon with the next version, but last time I said that the 928 took four or so months to come out. My 928 has a crack in it, and, after playing with a coworker's delicious new gadget, envy holds a certain place in my subconscious...constantly subverting my willpower.
