Preview: hands-on with the Nokia Lumia 1020

The upcoming Nokia Lumia 1020 debuted on 11 June at a press event in New York City, and the presentation focused almost entirely on the phone's massive camera. The phone shares many of the camera features introduced with the Lumia 920, but it brings the PureView 808's huge 41-megapixel sensor into the equation. This makes for a camera that not only adapts to a variety of situations; it also accounts for a lot of human foibles and gaps in the average user's photography knowledge (and equipment set).

Physically, the Lumia 1020 is as near to the Lumia 920 as can be, save for the camera housing that juts out of the back of the phone. The phone doesn't feel significantly heavier than a Lumia 920, nor does it feel unbalanced. Resting on a table, the sensor plateau in the back will also keep the lens off the table, which we appreciate (and don't always see prioritised in smartphone body design).

 Unfortunately, a camera with the breadth of features and capabilities of the Lumia 1020 is hard to review in full on a show floor. The photos we took with the camera itself were compressed either when they were emailed or stored (they averaged 400-600 KB in size, compared to iPhone 4S photos at 1-1.2 MB). But we gave a handful of features a try and came away fairly impressed with what we saw.

 The Lumia 1020 continues the Lumia tradition of great low-light photos, but it adds the ability to capture good photos even when the subject is moving. One demo room featured a breakdancer just doing his thing in a near-pitch black room. "This is one use case: people dancing in the street at night," the presenter said. (The Lumia 1020: for when you're on a moonlit stroll and become just overwhelmed with the urge to pop and lock because this isn't real life and you are on the set of Step Up 2: The Streets.)

 The presenter invited a group of us to do our best (worst) trying to take photos of the moving dancer with flashes on. We performed the photography equivalent of swinging a bat at a ball and hitting nothing but air. When the presenter tried with his Lumia 1020 (flash on), he was able to capture a fairly crisp, in-focus shot of the man as he left it all on the dance floor.

 Wider shots of the show floor didn't come out like we expected, but we attribute most of the quality issues to compression. Nokia has said little about how the Lumia 1020 compresses or stores its 41-megapixel photos -- whether it can store all of that information raw, for instance, or whether the oversampling and processing is done pre-storage. In the former case we expect people would run out of storage space fairly quickly, so there had better be settings to control that.

 The best part of the camera is a bevy of manual controls within the Pro Cam camera app. By pulling out the shutter button on screen, you get a translucent overlay of manual settings like ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. The app will auto-adjust one or a few of the other settings if you change one (upping the ISO increases the shutter speed and so forth), so it will continue to self-balance the other settings for the scene unless you change them yourself. The overlay design allows you to see how the lighting dynamic is shifting for your photo in real time as you play with the settings. This is incredibly handy and a better setup than letting all the little toggle-menus take up screen real estate. If you pull the shutter button back to where it was, the settings you changed will be locked. Holding a finger down on the screen locks the focus and exposure, which is a welcome feature.

Nokia heavily emphasised the quality of the photos even when they are zoomed in. The company's claims appeared to hold up pretty well in practice during our short time with the phone. Photos can be taken zoomed in, but the camera will still capture the full scene, so it's possible to zoom out on a zoomed-in photo once it's stored in the photos app. When we saw this demo on the phone, the zoomed-in photo was not identifiable as such until the presenter pinched the screen together to reveal the surroundings.
In addition to the Pro Cam app, the Lumia 1020 will also come with Nokia's Smart Cam app, which offers a number of features based on a long, swift capture of a series of photos. There is a "best photo" option, as well as one that can amalgamate all the photos together to either focus on the moving objects and blur the still ones, or vice versa.


There are features aplenty that we have yet to test -- we'll evaluate them all when we get the phone in our own hands, on our own time. In other words, stay tuned for our full Nokia Lumia 1020 review.

This story originally appeared on  ars technica. Click through for their hands-on photos of the Lumia 1020

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Nokia Lumia 920 review

The Lumia 920 is the first Nokia phone to run on the new Windows Phone 8 operating system -- and it just happens to be the Finns' latest hero handset, with a standout screen, dual-core processor, eight-megapixel camera and a feast of Nokia extras.

It's on sale now for around £495.
Design and performance
The Nokia Lumia 920 is not a phone you're likely to miss, decked out in colourful livery (it's available in yellow, white or red, though there's also a plain ol' black version). And it's big -- at 11mm thick and a hefty 185g in weight it's going against the skinny grain, and certainly feels much chunkier than the latest iPhone, which comes in under 8mm.

The casing is a single piece of soft-touch polycarbonate with gently curving edges and no access to the battery. The SIM card pops into an iPhone-style covered slot on top, but as with other Windows Phone devices, there's no option to beef up the 32GB of onboard memory with a microSD card, even though WP8 now supports these. There's also 7GB of free online storage via Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud offering, which is a pretty good deal.

 The 4.5-inch screen sits behind a covering of tough Gorilla Glass and delivers an extremely sharp resolution of 1,280x768 pixels. That's a higher resolution than the last version of Windows Phone could handle, and higher than the iPhone 5's 1,136x640. With Nokia's ClearBlack technology delivering very high contrast, even tiny website print looks clear without the need to pinch to zoom, and colours are bright and generally accurate, without the steroids-like enhanced vibrancy of Amoled screens. It's capacitive, but you don't need to touch it with your skin -- even with gloves on it's still very sensitive.

 The dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor backed by 1GB RAM may not sound too impressive next to the quad-core shenanigans of the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the soon-come Google Nexus 4, but it really couldn't be very much faster in use. As we've come to expect from Windows Phone, apps are very fast to start up, browsing is swift and painless, and HD movies play with silky smoothness. It's 4G capable too, so super-fast downloads and browsing could be yours if you're on EE and in the right area.

 OS and Apps
As we saw recently on the HTC 8X, Windows Phone 8 has given the OS a few updates, fixed a few issues and made a few cosmetic changes, but it's not a toot and branch redesign of the OS. It still has the Start screen that you can populate with the tiles of your choice. Some of these are dynamic and show information or pictures, such as the People tile, which constantly shifts through a mosaic made up of pictures of your contacts. The active tiles are a simpler and tidier version of Android's widgets (something that you don't get on the iPhone at all) and there are now three size options for some of these active tiles too, which gives you more options for how you use them.


The Me app makes it easy to keep on top of all your social obligations. You can set up groups and share messages, pictures and videos with whoever you like. This is backed up by Rooms, which allows you to set limits on who sees what when you're sharing.
Kids Corner is also new with WP8 and allows you to quarantine sections of the phone, so your child can play games, but can't access your email or alter any settings.
Local Scout does a bit of a Google Now and offers dynamic information depending on where you are, including the nearest shops, restaurants and places of interest.

Microsoft Office is on board, making your phone into an effective workstation, able to create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs.
Maps and City Lens
As well as the new stuff from Microsoft, Nokia has a few unique apps of its own that make this a handset worth checking out. Nokia Maps is here and you don't have to rely on a data connection while you're using them -- you can download them direct to your phone. Nokia Drive offers free turn-by-turn navigation -- something you won't see on other WP8 handsets like the HTC 8X.
Point your camera at a street scene, and Nokia's City Lens augmented reality app uses map and local info to display info about what you're seeing -- the quality of results you get will depend on the popularity of the street, but it's fun to use and is likely to get better.

Nokia Music is also free and allows you to create playlists that you can stream as well as download up to 14.5 hours of tunes to carry around with you for offline playback. There's also Nokia Mix Radio, the free service that lets you stream or download a selection of themed tracks from a cache of 17m. It's not quite Spotify Premium, but it is free. There's no FM radio though.
One chink in the Windows Phone armour is its Marketplace app store, which is pretty thinly populated compared to the Apple and Google alternatives. They've got 700,000+ apps each, while WP still only has a bit over 100,000 -- still, it has many of the most popular, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Skype, but there's no iPlayer.

 Power and cameras
The 902 is one of the first phones we've seen with built-in wireless charging. You'll need to shell out for a £55 charging pad from Nokia, but with the pad plugged into the mains, you simply rest the phone on it and it will charge automatically by magnetic induction. We've seen this technology before on the PowerMat and other devices, but they generally require an adaptor or a special case for each phone -- this makes it much easier and intuitive, if not particularly cheap.


The 8.7-megapixel camera uses the same PureView technology we saw in the Nokia 808 -- the one with the 41-megapixel camera which Nokia produced just to show it could. It has a good quality Carl Zeiss Tessar lens with a fast f/2.0 aperture and a dual LED flash but is a bit light on features. As with other WP8 cameras, there's now the option to add software features to the camera with "lenses". In this case there's the Bing Vision barcode scanner, plus SmartShoot, which allows you to remove blurred or moving elements in a posed picture (people walking past in the background, for instance). There's also CinemaGraph, which lets you create moving .gif images within a picture, so it looks a bit like those newspaper pics from Harry Potter. Despite the lower pixel count, it delivers sharp, clear pics with good colour balance and little in the way of artefacts, so long as you have decent light. It can record full HD 1080p video at 30fps and the front-facing camera can do 720p HD.
Despite the large 2,000mAh battery, the 902 didn't deliver very well on power, barely making it through a full day of admittedly fairly intensive use. The battery's fixed too, so you can't carry a spare.

 Conclusion
Microsoft maintains such a tight hold on the specs for Windows Phone that the WP8 experience is going to be very similar, whichever handset you're using. However, the bundled free apps from Nokia, as well as the excellent screen and speedy processor all give this handset the edge as the best WP8 handset so far.

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Nokia Lumia 520 review

Nokia's Lumia series has been setting a pretty high standard for smartphones recently. The 520 is cheapest of the bunch, but it still manages to pack in a lot for a budget smartphone, in part thanks to the Windows Phone 8 operating system.

It's on sale now for around £100.

Design
The 520 looks similar to other Lumias with its gently curving sides and flat face covered entirely by a single sheet of scratch-resistant glass (not Corning Gorilla Glass on this budget model though). Unlike pricier Lumias like the 720 the polycarbonate cover isn't fixed and you can pull it off to change the battery and access microSIM and microSD memory cards.

While those pricier Lumias are often available in different colours, the 520's removable back cover means you can change the colour with your mood for a lot less than it costs to change your phone -- you can choose between black, white, red, blue and yellow. And with the ability to change the colour scheme of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, you can switch that to match or clash with your cover too.
The four-inch screen is a little smaller than the one on the 720 but it offers the same resolution -- 800x480 pixels, which since it's a smaller screen actually offers a slightly higher resolution of 235 pixels per inch (the 720's 4.3-inch screen offers 217 ppi). You won't notice too much of a difference, but it's nice to know, and even if the screen isn't up there with the best, it's still gloriously bright, sharp and vibrant with rich colours and deep blacks -- certainly better than it has a right to be at this price. Also like those more expensive Lumias you can adjust the sensitivity of the touchscreen, so you can work it with a fingernail or while you're wearing gloves.
Features and performance
One of the standout points of the 520 is that it comes with the same dual-core 1GHz processor backed by 512MB as you'll find on both the more expensive 620 and 720 models. Admittedly, it doesn't have the same sort of oomph as the big quad-core powerhouses, but operation is smooth, with only a hint of delay when opening apps. Web pages display quickly without jerkiness and HD games like Asphalt 7 Heatwork perfectly well too. It delivered an Antutu performance benchmark rating of 6,595, which puts it slightly behind some other dual-core Windows devices like the Lumia 720 and the HTC Windows 8S.

 Windows Phone 8 is bedding in nicely as an operating system, and once you get used to its tile-based interface it's very easy to find your way around and to customise. You can now adjust the size of the tiles and some are dynamic, so the Weather tile will give you the basics without having to press it, and People shows a constantly shifting mosaic of your contacts' profile pictures. They're not as detailed as some of the Android widgets but then they show a lot more than Apple's icons -- it's a neat compromise between the two.


Apps and software
The Windows Marketplace is improving, even though it lags well behind its rivals in terms of sheer numbers. Still, you'll find many favourites there including Spotify, Netflix and Skype. However, downloading apps may not always be as easy as it is with more expensive handsets -- the Wi-Fi aerial is noticeably less powerful than the one on the Lumia 720 for instance.
Nokia has added much of its usual fleet of extras as standard, including HERE Maps with its range of views including standard, satellite, public transport and traffic maps. You can download maps for free and use them with HERE Drive turn-by-turn satnav, even when you don't have a Wi-Fi or network connection -- only for UK and Ireland though, you'll need to splash for a higher-up Lumia to get the international maps for free. There's no sign of the nifty City Lens app which shows local businesses and points of interest displayed on your camera's viewfinder -- you'll need the 620 or higher for that. Nokia Music is all here though, with free downloadable playlists of ad-free popular tunes (up to 14 hours) and the Microsoft Office suite lets you create and edit Word and Excel documents.

Camera quality
The five-megapixel camera is the same as the one on the 620, if a notch or two below the 6.7 megapixel number on the 720. It has autofocus, an LED flash and a large F2.4 aperture to let in more light but it does without the Carl Zeiss Tessar lens that appears on more expensive Lumias from the 720 up. You can however add any of the Lenses that Nokia makes available to beef-up its camera offering. These are downloadable pieces of software that add extra functionality such as Panorama for wide-view shots, Cinemagraph, which allows you to add moving elements to still pictures, and Bing Vision, which lets you scan barcodes and QR codes as well as books, CDs and DVDs.

If you want to try Windows, but don't want to risk too much cash, the 520 will give you the flavour without the expense

Picture quality's pretty good considering the spec, and it's perfectly good enough for quick snaps when you're out and about. The video camera drops the resolution to 640x480 pixels but there's no front-facing camera, which could be a deal-breaker if you like to make video calls -- if that's what you're into you'll need to step up to the 620 or beyond.

There's 8GB of memory on board as standard, but you can add up to 64GB via microSD card if you feel the need.
The battery's not as powerful as the fixed models on the more expensive models and it won't provide the same length of performance. Still, you'll get at least a day's normal use out of it, which puts it on a par with plenty of more expensive handsets.

Conclusion
It has a fine screen, a fast processor and like other Lumias it's built to last. If you want to try Windows, but don't want to risk too much cash, the 520 will give you the flavour without the expense and deliver just as good a performance as some of its more expensive cousins. In fact, if you're not too fussed about the camera (which still isn't bad) or Skype video calls it's better value for money than either the 620 or the 720.

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