Nokia announced the Lumia 920 as the first phone with the Windows Phone 8 OS back in November 2012 and it had the best camera on a smartphone which had awesome low light capabilities. Then came Lumia 925 which improved the camera quality, but people were still expecting Nokia to release the PureView camera of Nokia 808 into a Windows Phone. Finally in July 2013, Nokia announced the Lumia 1020, the Windows Phone with massive 41 MP PureView camera along with Xenon flash.
Nokia Lumia 1020 follows the same design and features of Lumia 920, but comes the PureView camera. With the best 41MP camera with OIS, will Nokia Lumia 1020 be able to match up with the competition? Lets find out how it fares with respect to design, hardware, camera, performance and battery life in this detailed review.
Before reviewing the phone aspects, lets have a quick look at the specs.
Specifications of Lumia 1020:
Color- Black / White/ Yellow
CPU Speed- 1.5Ghz Dual core
CPU Type- Qualcomm Snapdragon S4
Display- WXGA (1280 x 768) 4.5 inch ClearBlack, AMOLED with Corning Gorilla Glass 3, Sunlight readability and Pure Motion HD+
RAM- 2GB RAM
Storage – 32GB
Network- 2G (GSM / EDGE)3G (HSPA+42Mbps / HSPA+21Mbps) 4G LTE
Dimensions- 130.4 (L) x 70.4 (W) x 10.4 (D)
Battery- 2,000mAh / Li-Polymer
OS- Windows Phone 8
Camera – 41 MP, PureView with Xenon flash. Optical image stabilization, PureView, Backside-illuminated image sensor, 6-lens optics, High resolution zoom 3x.
Here is the video review of the device, if you want the text version, read on.
Design and Build Quality:
The Lumia 1020 has a the same design as that of Lumia 920, with the polycarbonate unibody design. One of the good things about Lumia phones have been their quality. The polycarbonate material provides good fit and finish to the device. Lumia 1020 comes in both matte and glossy variants based on the color of the device.
Design wise, the device has the physical buttons on the right side for power, volume and the camera button. At the bottom you have the speaker, microUSB slot an also a slot for lanyard. On the top there is the 3.5mm jack and also the SIM tray. At the back, the phone has the massive 41MP camera along with Xenon and LED flash. The camera unit projects out from the phone.
There is also two pins at the back for wireless charging snap on covers. The phone does not ship with wireless charging built-in like the Lumia 920. Overall, Lumia 1020 design is similar to Lumia series with good build quality and feels solid in hands.
[flagallery gid=6]Display:
The display on Nokia Lumia 1020 is a 4.5 inch 720p with a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels. Presently when we have most of the flagship phones with Full HD 1080p resolution, the display might feel out-dated on the specs. The screen on Lumia 1020 is Super AMOLED with Gorilla Glass 3 instead of the IPS + LCD on Lumia 920. There is also the PureMotion HD+ and Pure Black display technologies which makes it easy to read.
One of the best aspects of the display is that the viewing angles are really good and so is the brightness level even if you select automatic brightness. Another great feature of Lumia phones have been the sunlight readability and Lumia 1020 excels here. Nokia has also added a display related app for you to adjust the screen to different situations.
Overall, we feel that the display on Lumia 1020 is really good and you won’t have issues with the display.
Camera:
The camera is one of the best aspects of this phone, it packs a 41MP camera with Xenon flash along with LED flash. Nokia also announced a new camera app called Nokia Camera which debuted with Lumia 1020 and this is the default camera app on the device. The unique feature of this app is the interface where you can control the camera aspects like ISO, white balance, exposure, focus etc. You can also switch to video camera from the same interface.
From the settings aspect, you can save the images in two modes, one is the normal 5MP mode and second is the 5MP+ 34MP mode where 34MP is the high resolution photo and the 5MP is typically for sharing in social sites and email. You can also reframe the image after you have captured it using the Nokia camera app.
As expected the photos taken with the camera are excellent. Once you have taken the photo, you can zoom into the photo without loss of quality and then reframe it using the app.
The video camera can record videos at 1080p at 30fps although you can change the frame rate from the settings. The video camera also employs the same lossless zoom technology and produces really good videos.
Here is a daylight sample from the camera recorded at 1080p.
One of the issues with the camera is the speed of taking photos. Since the camera saves images both high resolution and 5MP ones, the time taken is pretty high (around 2-3 seconds) between captures and this can be an issue when you are taking multiple photos quickly. But if you like photography, this is the best camera phone you can pick right now.
[flagallery gid=5]Performance:
Nokia Lumia 1020 runs the latest Windows Phone 8 OS and it is upgradable to Nokia’s Amber update. There are quite a lot of new added features like the ability to block calls, data sense and more with the Amber update. When it comes to the OS as a whole, Windows Phone 8 still lags behind Android in many areas and mostly there are related to the amount of settings and customizations available on Android.
The app section is fast catching up as we have Vine, Instagram and many more popular apps in the WP platform. One good feature about Windows Phone is that they can run on dual core processors with even 512MB RAM. Lumia 1020 comes with 2GB RAM and performance is never an issue on the device. The response is fast and whatever task you run it performs without any lag or issues.
The call quality and the speaker volumes are pretty good as well. Lumia 1020’s best aspect when it comes to OS is the apps which Nokia has released for this platform. There are many useful tools like Nokia Camera, HERE Maps, Nokia Music, Cinemagraph, Creative Studio and more. These apps add so much value to the phone and there is also Your Movies app which was released exclusive for Lumia 625 and Lumia 1020.
The device comes with 32GB on board storage which is pretty good when you need to save the photos from the PureView camera. There is no microSD card support, so expanding the memory is not possible. Lumia 1020 does not come with wireless charging out of the box, you need to use the snap on covers to get the wireless charging.
Battery Life:
The battery on Lumia 1020 is exactly the same that was shipped with Lumia 920 and comes with 2000mAh power. When you compare this with the other flagship phones like the LG G2 (3000mAh) or the Note 3 (3200mAh), the Lumia 1020 feels low on battery power. But for an average user, the battery should last for a day as Windows Phones have never been battery hog. But when you start using the 41MP camera with the flash, this is where the battery goes down pretty quickly and for this reason Nokia has released the camera grip which comes with additional battery for the device when connected.
Verdict:
Nokia Lumia 1020 is the best smartphone with camera. There is no doubt on the best camera phone currently available is Lumia 1020. But there are many aspects where Lumia 1020 needs to improve. The first is the OS, Windows Phone has come a long way with most of the popular apps now available, but there are features still missing when compared to Android. One thing missing with Windows Phone 8 is obviously the notification center and also there are other minor aspects as well.
If you are looking for a camera phone, then Lumia 1020 is definitely worth the buy.
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