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).

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 925 review

Nokia's long hard road back to relevance continues with the Lumia 925, a premium Windows smartphone with classy metal body, stonking-great camera and a host of extras.

It's on sale now for around £500.

Design
At first glance, the Lumia 925 doesn't appear very much different from its previous 920 flagship: same all-Gorilla Glass front, same gently curving edges, and same size when it's viewed face on. But look a little closer, and that casing is aluminium rather than plastic, plus it's a little thinner and considerably lighter.

There are a few other changes too. The micro SIM slot has now been moved to the top of the handset to join the 3.5mm headphone jack and microUSB port. On the side there's a volume rocker, power/sleep button and a camera shutter button. The speaker that was once on the bottom has now slid round to the rear where it joins the camera's Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, which protrudes by a millimetre or so.

Screen quality
There's been no change to the 4.5-inch Amoled screen, which was lovely to begin with and has lost none of its sheen. The 1,280x768-pixel resolution boils down to a perfectly acceptable 334 pixels-per-inch (ppi) -- not quite up there with the HTC One's 468ppi perhaps, but it still looks beautifully sharp and vibrant, with Clearblack technology delivering rich, deep blacks whether you're browsing web pages or viewing HD movies. Usefully, you can adjust the sensitivity to suit yourself, so you can navigate when you're wearing gloves.

 

The standard model comes with 16GB of memory on board and Vodafone has the exclusive on a 32GB version for now. This could be an issue since there's no way to add more via microSD card.
Performance
It must be said though, that the processor is a bit of a disappointment. It's not that it's slow, far from it. It's pacy and plays HD videos and games without a hitch. But it's the same 1.5GHz model backed by 1GB RAM as we saw in the 920. And at this end of the market, we want to see advances. 1GB RAM is beginning to look a little underpowered these days too, when handsets like the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z are all packing 2GB RAM.
Surprisingly, the 925 doesn't come with wireless charging as standard, like the 920. Instead you'll have to invest in an additional cover that connects to three metal contacts on the back. Perhaps that's how Nokia got the weight down. Wireless charging may not be a deal-breaker, but it was nice to have it in addition to Nokia's other goodies.
Apps and operating system
It's no surprise, but the Windows Store still lags way, way behind the Apple and Android app stores in terms of the number of apps available. It's getting better, with over 140,000 apps to choose from, and it's good to see key names like Spotify and Netflix on there now, even if you still have to pay for Angry Birds.
It's running Windows Phone 8, which is steadily building up an armoury of live tiles to add to the usual colourful static ones. So your People tile shifts and changes constantly to show different views of your friends, the message tile tells you how many outstanding messages you have, the weather channel gives you instant climate updates and more.

There's a short learning curve if you're more used to Android or Apple devices, but Windows Phone is exceptionally easy to use, with a clear, intuitive interface, and it's fast too -- it may only have a dual-core processor, but for opening apps and navigation it easily keeps pace with its quad-core Android rivals.

 Data Sense allows you to track your data so you don't go over your limit and there's a very capable edit suite for your photos with Creative Studio which gives you plenty of options to enhance and edit your pics, so you can colour key elements while leaving others monochrome, blur backgrounds, adjust focus and more. Kids Corner allows your offspring access to games and movies, for instance, without them being able to get into your emails or Facebook.

 And there's more. Nokia knows it has a lot of ground to catch up, and so it's offering more freebies as standard than you'll find on any Android or Apple device. So you get Nokia Music, with free playlists of tunes you can play whenever you like, even download them so you can play them when you're offline.

 Maps has also had some useful and fun additions. It's now called HERE Maps (no, we're not sure why either) and includes City Lens, which allows you to view the scene around you augmented with business and tourist information. Click on a link to bring up additional info and reviews if they're available and there's onscreen travel information too. There's also free satnav with HERE Drive and you can download maps of every country in Europe if you want them.

 This being Nokia you also get 7GB of free cloud storage via SkyDrive. The Me hub allows you to see all your social network updates in one place and there's Office for creating, viewing and editing Word and Excel documents (but not PowerPoint) -- you really do get an awful lot of bang for your buck with a Nokia handset these days.

 Cameras and photography
And then there's the camera. It's only 8.7 megapixels, but Nokia reckons it's added enough elements to it to make it one of the best camphones on the market. It could be right. There's the Carl Zeiss Tessar lens with an extra glass element designed to achieve sharper pictures, a large F2.0 aperture, a dual LED flash and autofocus.

 As with other Nokia cameras it also has the growing range of "lenses" -- software elements that add additional functionality such as Panorama for widescreen views, and Cinemagraph to let you animate elements of a picture, plus many others that you can download so your camera's capabilities aren't limited to what comes with the phone.

There's also Smart Cam, which takes ten shots in quick succession and allows you to edit them in different ways. So you can photograph a moving figure, and show the range of movement across the same background. Or edit out background elements like passers-by that you don't want.
But all these gimmicks would be useless if the picture quality wasn't good to start off with. They are though -- edges appear sharp, colours are accurate, and it stands up well in low light conditions -- this is a very good camphone, and there's a 1.2-megapixel snapper on the front for video calls too, capable of recording video at 720p.

 The large 2,000mAh battery held its end up fairly well delivering a good day and a half of regular use before needing a recharge.

 Conclusion
The Nokia Lumia 925 is a step up from its predecessor the 920 with its thinner, lighter casing and its improved camera. Screen and processor are largely unchanged and the Windows Store is still thinly stocked compared to its rivals, but Nokia compensates with a strong range of freebie apps and features. All this at a sensible price too.