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

Read More

LG Optimus L5 II review

Towards the lower end of LG's Optimus range, the L5 II steps up some important specs from last year's L5 and aims to deliver quality smartphone features at a budget price.

It's on sale now for around £115. 

Design
From the front, the L5 II is standard smartphone glossy black with a single hard home button flanked by touch-sensitive back and menu buttons. But that home button is surrounded by LED lighting that glows in different colours depending on function -- blue for calendar alerts, green for alerts etc. There's also a programmable function button on the side and while the rear casing looks like classy brushed aluminium it's actually very thin and lightweight plastic -- still, if you don't tell anyone...

The four-inch touchscreen screen offers a resolution of 800x480 pixels, which boils down to 233 pixels per inch -- a far cry from the retina-popping delights of the HD high-end, but it still manages to look bright and vibrant, and much better than the original L5's 320x480-pixel resolution, even if it's not quite as sharp as the best.

Features and performance
It's running Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, so one step behind the very latest 4.2 edition, which is what we'd expect at this price. Beyond a light skim over the icon design and some basic transition animations, LG seems to have left Google's OS more or less alone with no unique widgets available, though there is a Polaris Viewer on board for looking at (but not creating or editing) Word and Excel docs.

Interestingly, LG has also added Safety Care, an app designed for the vulnerable or elderly, which sends out alert texts if you call an emergency number and can be set to send out an alert if the phone hasn't been used during a set period.
The original L5's 800MHz processor has been bumped up to 1GHz with an attendant increase in speed, though it still tends to typically experience a brief delay when opening apps and busy web pages can take a little longer to process than feels comfortable. Our AnTuTu performance benchmark test delivered a score of 4,936, which puts it a little ahead of the Samsung Young and Fame -- it's not exceptional, but it won't embarrass you with its tardiness either.

Photography
The five-megapixel camera includes autofocus and an LED flash, plus a few extras like voice control -- you can take a picture by saying "Cheese, "Smile", "Whiskey", "LG" or "Kimchi". And why not? Unfortunately, picture quality isn't really up to the mark, with washed-out colours, all too frequent blur and a paucity of detail. It will record VGA quality video at 30fps but unfortunately there's no front-facing camera for video calls, which seems like a trick missed.

More worryingly, there's less than 2GB of memory available for storing your apps so you'll almost certainly need a microSD card for your tunes and vids which may or may not be provided by the network you buy the phone from (LG doesn't include one as standard). You can't store apps on the memory card though, so if you like to have lots of apps, this isn't the phone for you.
The battery life held up pretty well though, coming close to two full days of busy use.

Conclusion
The LG Optimus L5 isn't going to set any records, or help LG to distinguish itself among the smartphone glut. It's a shame, because it's a decently solid smartphone at a competitive price.

Read More

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.

Read More

Review nokia Lumia 620

The revamped Windows Phone operating system has been doing its bit to dispel Nokia's waning image, as is the wide and varied colour scheme of the new Lumia 620, a lower end Windows Phone 8 handset that comes with a range of retina-searing coloured cases.

It's on sale now for around £220, which means it's competing with the likes of the HTC Windows Phone 8S and lower end Androids like the Orange San Diego, HTC Desire C and Sony Xperia Miro.

Design
The all-plastic case is a bit of a faff to get off -- you have to push down on the camera lens while pulling up on the bottom edge -- but if you can be bothered, you get the chance to switch between a variety of bright colours, with yellow, lime green, cyan, magenta, orange, white and yes, black, all on the menu. Each also has a different colour on the inside, so you get a two-tone effect around the screen when you clip it on.

It feels sturdy enough though (that workhorse ethic comes in handy sometimes) and the bright, glossy colour schemes will certainly help it stand out among the forest of black slabs on the table when you meet up with your mates.
In contrast to some of the minimalist handsets we've been looking at recently there seems to be a surfeit of buttons, with a volume rocker, camera shutter and power/sleep button all on one side. That's your lot though, with the only other extras a microUSB power/sync slot at the bottom and a 3.5mm headphone jack on top.

 Screen quality and performance
A single sheet of glass covers the front, with the three Windows buttons (start, back and search) beneath the 3.8-inch touchscreen. That's a fair bit smaller than the Lumia 820's 4.3-inch or the 920's 4.5-inch. It's just about big enough to do all the things smartphones should -- like providing a good-sized onscreen keyboard and enough space to pinch-to-zoom, but you wouldn't really want it any smaller. It offers a resolution of 800x480 pixels -- certainly not up there with the HD best but none too shabby for all that. It's bright and vibrant, and has no problem sharply rendering small text and photos online. The ClearBlack filter also apparently helps cut down on glare, giving it an even better appearance.

 The dual-core 1GHz processor is backed by 512MB RAM, which is decent enough, but a long way from the quad-core power of the Google Nexus 4 or HTC One X+. As a result, it's efficient, with occasional signs of lag, without that "just think it and make it so" aspect of the fastest handsets. Still, the dual-core power is pretty impressive for a lower-end handset, and it doesn't let the side down. Our AnTutu performance benchmark test turned in a result of 7,266, which puts it on a par with the HTC Windows 8S in terms of raw power.

 Cameras and image quality
The 5-megapixel camera has an LED flash, autofocus as well as touch focus and a range of scene settings. As with other Windows 8 handsets, all the available functionality isn't built in, but you can add different "lenses" from the Windows Store -- so far, there are about 50 available, and most of them are free. Smart Shoot lets you take five shots in quick succession so you can choose your favourite, Panorama does what it says on the tin and Bing Vision scans barcodes, QR codes, book, DVD and CD covers for searching.

 Picture quality isn't bad -- you can get nicely crisp images with sharp edges but colour balance tends to be a little off, with a bit too much saturation and it struggles a little with detail both indoors and out. It can record video at 720p HD resolution and the VGA camera on the front makes a decent fist of rendering your features for video calls.

 Extra features
Even in this price bracket, you can't say that Nokia skimps on features. Extras include a Groupon app, which searches your local area (or wherever you happen to be) for special deals and offers. There's also the Nokia City Lens augmented reality app, which uses the phone's camera to flag up local info and allow you to easily call businesses or tag them for later. Cleverly, you can tilt your phone to take you from street to map view, and get a better look at what's available locally.


You also get the full Office suite for creating and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs and NFC's on board too, so you're ready for tags and mobile payments, though there's no wireless charging option like you get with the higher end Lumias.
Nokia Drive offers free sat nav based on Nokia Maps, which isn't quite the full Google shilling, but seems to make a better fist of it than Apple's effort did, and Nokia Music gives you free online access to an awful lot of music which you can also download.


It comes with a rather generous (for the price) 8GB of memory on board, and you can boost that by a further 64GB via microSD card if you feel the need.
The 1,300mAh battery isn't exceptional but it seemed to do a decent enough job nonetheless, keeping the Lumia 620 going for a good day and a half of steady use.

Read More