Nokia Lumia 1020 is a Windows Phone with a 41-megapixel camera

At a photography-focussed event in New York, Nokia has announced the Lumia 1020.

The Windows Phone-powered smartphone is all about taking pictures, and includes an updated version of the 41-megapixel sensor seen in 2012's Nokia 808 PureView, which captures photos up to 7,712 x 5,360 pixels in resolution, in either 3:2 or 16:9 aspect ratios.

 It's a megapixel count that seems several times greater than the likes of what Samsung and Apple are offering. But the intention is that the phone will output five-megapixels images for sharing with friends, in which each pixel in a JPEG combines the light captured by seven behind the lens. The result, Nokia promises, are significantly more detailed images.

 Nokia has incorporated six lens elements within the optics of the camera, which it claimed is the most in any cameraphone. In SLR systems, the greater the number of lens elements, the sharper the picture. It's a specification that makes a massive difference between cheap lenses and professional alternatives, and it's something that also helps ensure there's no loss of quality when zooming (although, unlike the Galaxy S4 Zoom, the Lumia 1020 doesn't have an optical zoom -- just very good digital zooming).

Don't miss: First collection of photos taken on the Lumia 1020
The Lumia 1020 will come equipped with Pro Camera, an app that offers full access to manual settings such as ISO, white balance, shutter speed, exposure and exposure compensation, as well as manual focus, which can be controlled using a ring overlaid onto the screen -- and it will provide these granular controls to developers to build into their apps. This could result in services like Instagram being able to directly manipulate the lens and sensor settings to produce better pictures.
 There's also a rear-facing Xenon flash for more realistic-looking artificial light in dark shooting conditions.

 Photography aside, the Lumia 1020 has a 4.5-inch Amoled display running at 1,280x768 pixels. It's powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor backed by 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage (a 64GB version is rumoured to follow). There is also a wide-angle front-facing 1.2-megapixel camera. The phone has 4G LTE, a wireless charging option via a clip-on case, up to 13.3 hours of talktime over 3G and can capture video at up to 1080p anf 30fps. The 2,000mAh battery is not removable.

 While the Lumia 1020's CPU is not quite as hefty as the quad-core, or even octa-core chips inside some Android phones, Windows Phone software isn't as demanding on a phone's internal tech as its competitors, and it should therefore cope just fine with anything you throw at it -- for now

The polycarbonate phone will come in yellow, black and white. Nokia has of course also bundled its Music, Drive and Here maps applications. It's also included its own Instagram-esque editing software called Oggl Pro, which allows you to apply filters to your photos and then upload them directly to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

With such specifications behind the camera technology, Nokia appears to have set a new benchmark for smartphone photography. It comes at an opportune time: the US paper Chicago Sun-Times recently fired all of its professional photographers, instead opting to teach its journalists how to capture pictures with smartphones (iPhones for now). Nokia would do well to drop a box of Lumia 1020s on the Chicago Sun-Times building.

 Nokia introduced its first 41-megapixel camera last year when it unveiled the PureView 808 (we scored it seven-out-of-ten). While the camera tech was superb, the phone was rather disappointingly running a dying operating system: Symbian Belle. The camera performed well in low light, but viewing photos was unpleasant experience on the low-resolution display. Nokia priced the Pureview 808 as a high-end smartphone, but its poor specs failed to persuade consumers of its appeal.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 will launch first in the US on 26 July. It will launch in Europe shortly after that date, although a precise date was not confirmed. Nokia will also release a clip-on ergonomic grip with two-step shutter control, tripod attachment and a battery pack, which will cost an extra $79 (roughly £52, but expect that to end up higher on release).

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.