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

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.

Nokia Lumia 720 review

Nokia's Lumia handsets are coming thick and fast. They all run on the Windows Phone 8 operating system and the 720 comes in the middle of the pack, with a midrange spec by Nokia standards, but attention to detail and a feast of add-ons nudges it closer to the high-end than many manufacturers. 

It's on sale now for around £280.

Design
Whatever their price and spec, Nokia's Lumia handsets share a commitment to solid build quality and the 720 is no exception. The polycarbonate unibody design feels tough and absolutely without flex. While you can't open it to get at the battery, there are slots in the side and top for microSIM and microSD memory cards. Buttons on one side include volume rocker, power/sleep and camera shutter, with 3.5mm headphone jack and microUSB port on top and bottom respectively. At just 9mm thick it's easy to slip into the pocket and it's fairly lightweight too at 128g, certainly more so that its higher-specced (and considerably higher priced) cousin, the Lumia 925

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Virtually the whole of the front is covered by a sheet of tough, scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass that protects the 4.3-inch IPS touchscreen. It's less-than-HD resolution of 800x480 pixels, which boils down to 217 pixels per inch, won't set the world alight, and falls way behind the best, such as the Galaxy S4's 1,920x1,080-pixel screen, or even the similarly priced Google Nexus 4's 1,280x720-pixel count. It's actually the same as the screen on the Lumia 620, which you can pick up for around half the price, which is a bit disappointing. Still, it's sharp, clear and bright (which helps a lot when viewing in sunlight), and displays movies, websites and pics very well.
It's responsive too, and you can set the sensitivity to "high" which allows you to use it with gloves, something we've seen on other Lumia handsets as well as Samsung's Galaxy S4 high-ender.

 Software and features
The Windows Phone 8 software takes a bit of getting used to after Android or iOS, but it's so simple, the learning curve is really very short. It's easy to move the tiles from the apps menu to your scrollable home page. It's easy to resize them as well, and active ones, such as your People tile that alternates pictures of your contacts in an ever-shifting mosaic, or the weather tile that gives constant climate updates, are welcome.

 No, the Windows Marketplace doesn't bear comparison with Google Play or Apple's App Store, but it has many essentials like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Netflix, even if it too often gets frustrating when you can't find some other favourites. Still, it has 140,000 apps now and it's growing steadily -- it may be the last platform on developers' lists, but at least the apps are being created, eventually.

 Performance
The dual-core 1GHz processor backed by 512MB RAM is distinctly mid-range these days, especially with many handsets now providing a full 1GB or more of RAM. But while it might feel a little underpowered on an Android handset, Windows' streamlined architecture means you don't really notice any slowdown in general use. Apps open smoothly, albeit just a wee bit sluggishly when compared to more powerful engines, as do web pages and HD games (not that you have a huge range to choose from on Windows) play smoothly. It delivered an AntuTu performance benchmark rating of 7,628, which puts it behind some dual-core handsets like the HTC One SV but ahead of others like the Sony Xperia T.

Nokia has an exemplary package of extras as standard, including HERE Maps with its range of views including standard, satellite, public transport and traffic maps. You can download maps and use them with HERE Drive turn-by-turn satnav, even when you don't have a Wi-Fi or network connection, all for free. You can even download the new City Lens app, which we recently saw demonstrated on the top-end Lumia 925. This shows local businesses and points of interest using augmented reality -- hold your phone's camera up and it will overlay details about what's nearby. Nokia Music is also a big plus, with free downloadable playlists of popular tunes.

Camera quality
The 6.7-megapixel camera is a step up from the 620's five-megapixel model and comes with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, a good-sized F1.9 aperture, LED flash and autofocus. That's a pretty decent spec on its own and you can add further features thanks to Windows Lenses -- bits of downloadable software that add additional functionality such as Smart Shoot, which takes five rapid shots so you can choose the best one. Other Lenses include 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.
Picture quality is very good, easily up there with most eight-megapixel types, with sharp edges and accurate colours. The video camera made a decent show of itself too, recording 720p video at 30fps and the 1.3-megapixel camera on the performs well with Skype video calls in low light conditions.

There's 8GB of memory on board, which is a good start, but unlike many Windows handsets you can also add more via microSD card -- up to 64GB. This being Windows of course you also get 7GB of cloud storage free of charge via SkyDrive.
The good-sized 2,000mAh battery held up very well, delivering a good day-and-a-half of regular use.

Conclusion
The Nokia Lumia 720 is a solid mid-range phone but with better than expected build quality, a better than average camera and a good range of Nokia extras including HERE Maps and Drive satnav, plus Music and the Microsoft Office suite. You get a lot for your cash, and it's worth checking out if you've only been considering yet another Android handset.