Can Nokia’s full metal jacket turn anyone on to Windows?

The Lumia 925 features a lighter and thinner body than its predecessors and an enhanced screen which can be read in bright sunlight.

The Finnish firm unveiled the device at a much-hyped London launch event where it described the handset as its best smartphone ever.

The 925 will sell for around 469 euros (about £400) before tax and and will be available as early as next month.

The latest Lumia was revealed as Nokia battles to arrest a steady decline in demand for its devices and reclaim ground lost to rivals Apple and Samsung.

But while the mobile phone giant placed much weight on the 925’s camera function, it failed to match the 13 megapixels featured on Samsung’s Galaxy S4 and experts suggested the Lumia series was still some way behind the iPhone.

Paul Thompson, managing director of mobile advertising company BlisMedia, described the device as a “great-looking phone” but said Nokia’s developments amounted to little more than a “repacking exercise”.

“If you set this against the design qualities of Apple’s iPhone and even the HTC One, it is slightly underwhelming and will not set it apart from its rivals, it doesn’t even raise the bar any higher,” he said.

“I would expect Nokia to continue to struggle to make an impact in the smartphone markets in the US and UK, especially as it has bet big on the windows operating system which has failed to get much traction with consumers despite the millions spent on marketing it.”

Ernest Doku, telecoms expert at comparison site uSwitch.com, described the 925 as the handset that “true Nokia fans have been waiting for”, which would address “all of the critical concerns” levelled at previous models in the same series.

Stuart Miles, founder of technology and gadget site Pocket-lint, said: “Nokia has created a really good-looking phone with some very clever camera features.

“It’s the phone they should have launched six months ago.

“The real question however is whether they can convince people to part with the love of their favourite apps to go with the windows phone OS. If they can’t then Samsung and Apple will retain the upper hand.”

Ramzi Yakob, of digital strategy firm TH_NK, said the Lumia launch represented an “opportunity missed” for Nokia and questioned how long the company could survive by “innovating at the edges of the customer experience”.

“Buy this phone and you can expect a beautiful, but pretty bog-standard, Windows phone device that Nokia has invested a lot of time into, to make the camera as good as possible,” he said.