Nokia Lumia 1020 Review: The Camera Phone King
Summary:
After
much hype and anticipation, Nokia introduced the Lumia 1020 with a lot
of fanfare and enthusiasm, and the Windows Phone 8 device doesn't
disappoint.
Hardware
Though it looks similar to Lumias of yore, the Lumia 1020 comes with greatly improved ergonomics. The Lumia 1020 is both slimmer and lighter than its predecessor, sacrificing built-in wireless charging in favor of reduced heft and weight.
In terms of design, the front may look similar to the Lumia 920, also on AT&T’s network, but the overarching fabula design is very much borrowed from the MeeGo-powered Nokia N9 released in late 2011 and the following Lumia 800, which debuted Nokia’s entry into the Microsoft-powered smartphone ecosystem.
Curved edges, tapered surfaces, and a nice arched display all contribute to the success of Nokia’s polycarbonate smartphone design, and in many ways the Lumia 1020 is an extension and a refined evolution of those design principles.
On the front, you have a curved glass display. The curved glass is a marriage of form and function, and the design complements the Windows Phone 8 OS extremely well as the curved sides make it easy–and much more fluid–to swipe and perform gestures.
The
evolution of Nokia’s excellent camera experience on smartphones with
the Nokia N8 (Symbian) in green, the black Nokia 808 PureView
(41-megapixel Symbian phone), the Lumia 920 (bottom right in glossy
yellow), and the Lumia 1020 (upper left in matte yellow)
Refresh rate is fast for the screen and Nokia calls this its ClearMotion display technology, and when coupled with the bonded ClearBlack display users won’t notice any glares and the display is bright enough to use even under direct sunlight.
And speaking of displays, your Lumia’s window to Windows Phone is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3 panel. Gorilla Glass 3 allows for slimmer, yet stronger and more impact-resistant glass, so you get a strengthened panel that protects against scratches.
There’s also a front-facing 2-megapixel camera on the top.
My only complaint about the front is that the bezel is–like past Lumia designs–on the thicker side so it seems like a lot of wasted space, or that Nokia could have increased the display size to fit in this area. The upside with such big bezels is that there is plenty of room to accommodate the trio of capacitive touch Windows Phone navigation keys on the bottom. Because of this, the Back, Windows (home), and Search keys are not placed directly at the bottom edge of the phone, and consumers will appreciate this fact as it means that you won”t accidentally press one of the keys, like I typically do when using Samsung’s Galaxy S4, when just idly holding the phone.
The rear is where Nokia really shows off its camera chops. You have a large circle, which resembles a lens housing on a point-and-shoot or compact mirrorless camera system, that protrudes from the polycarbonate finish.
The camera module here includes an LED autofocus and video light and a Xenon flash to the top of the actual camera lens, which now has 5 plastic lens elements and a Gorilla Glass 3 element to encase it all. The six-lens design helps with sharpness and clarity when shooting in daylight, and in reality I find that it reduces a lot of glare and ghosting found on prior Lumias, including the Lumia 928 on Verizon Wireless. You get Nokia, the 41-megapixel, Zeiss, and PureView branding all in this black circle, which is constructed from aluminum.
The sides are curved, and the top and bottom rear end are tapered, a design carryover from the Lumia 900 days on AT&T last year. There is also two exposed metallic dots, which works with an optional wireless charging cover and wireless charging pad, so you can charge your phone without having to directly plug in any wires.
The left spine of the phone is bare of buttons, and the matte finish makes it a pleasure to hold and grip. In fact, the phone’s matte finish really aids into making the device feel good and also helps prevent the phone from slipping out of the hands, unlike with glossy covers.
And while the matte finish may help with gripping the phone in the hands, the finish may also attract stains, especially when you place your phone in the pockets of dark denim jeans. The matte finish on my white Nokia 808 suffered from a stain where the dye of the wrist strap bled onto the phone, leaving a black streak.
On the top, you have the micro SIM card tray, in which the card is accessible only with the included SIM ejector tool (or paperclip should you misplace your tool). There is one of two stereo microphones used for video recording as well as a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
The right spine is a bit busier, housing the volume rocker buttons, the power button, and also a dual-stage camera shutter key. You can activate the camera–even when the screen is off–by pressing and holding the shutter for a few seconds. Unlike Lumias of yore, doing so will launch Nokia’s new Pro Camera app and not the default Microsoft camera app. We’ll talk about this in a bit.
On the bottom, you have a lanyard loop so you can attach the included wrist strap to your phone, which helps when using as a camera to prevent slippage. There’s also a micro USB charging port, and to the right of that you have micro-drilled speaker grills. Behind the grill are two components–the speaker and also the second stereo microphone.
Software
Nokia really comes into its own with the Lumia 1020, importing many useful features from its old Symbian platform and marrying it to Windows Phone to have a more complete, better experience. One of those features is a clock screen that shows the time, even when the screen is turned off. Called Glance, the functionality enables Lumia 1020 owners to glance at the time without having to turn on their screen every time.
Nokia’s Glance screen displays the time even when the screen is off.
The
camera hump on the back is useful in creating a nice angle for the
display, making it easy to glance at the time or screen when the phone
is placed on a flat table.
Nokia Pro Camera App. The Pro Camera app is simple enough to use–for many beginners–as just a point and shoot UI. Instantly, you’ll notice that Pro Camera is a bit different than the default Windows Phone camera app experience as now, when you tap on the screen to focus, it works more like many Android phones and the iPhone. Now, tap to focus is just that–focusing. In the Windows Phone default app, tap to focus will focus and snap the picture in one swoop. You will still need to either press the on-screen focus or the hardware shutter button.
Manual exposure adjustments with Nokia Pro Camera app
But capturing simultaneous images has its drawbacks too. If you’re doing posed shots or headshots, it should be fine. If you’re doing sports photography, you may want to turn off either the 5-megapixel capture or the higher resolution one as saving both files and processing them does take a bit longer than usual.
Diving deeper into the camera UI, users can swipe the on-screen camera shutter key from right to left to reveal dials for different exposure settings, giving them adjustments for shutter speed, ISO, manual focus adjustments, exposure compensation, and white balance. What’s still missing is aperture control, but for the most part, enthusiast photographers will have pretty much all the exposure settings they need to have creative control over the shot.
Camera. Thanks to an improved camera hardware design compared to many smartphones on the market today, the Lumia 1020 delivers a powerful punch. It merges the optical image stabilization from the current flagship Lumia 920, 925, and 928 series along with the ultra-large, pixel-rich sensor from the Nokia 808 PureView’s 41-megapixel camera. What you get is a highly detailed shot–suitable for blowing up to poster size if you wish or for cropping to reveal fine details.
Slide the sliders to adjust exposure. Here, we’re adjusting manual focus.
Lossless Zoom. Though some may feel that the 41-megapixel sensor may be overkill for a smartphone–or even for a camera–the point of having that many pixels is the ability to have lossless digital zoom.
Think of it this way, when you’re zooming with an 8-megapixel iPhone 5 sensor, you’re taking a postcard and cropping into the middle, resulting in an end image that’s a postage stamp-sized print, but blown up to a postcard. That means you’ll have lots of noise and grain when you zoom in on a traditional smartphone camera, and details would be lost.
When you’re zooming with Nokia’s 41-megapixel PureView sensor, you’re starting with a poster-sized image rather than a postcard. Cropping and zooming this way would give you a resulting image of maybe a postcard, and so when you compare against an iPhone there really is no apparent loss of resolution or quality when using zoom on the Lumia 1020.
To perform zoom, you can either zoom in when you’re taking the image by performing a swipe gesture. From anywhere on the camera UI screen, swipe your finger upwards to zoom. Or, the second way to zoom is after you have captured the image. You can either crop the image in-camera and re-frame your photo, or you can transfer the high resolution images to your PC and crop it there.
This was captured with the Lumia 1020.
Lossless
zoom in effect: here’s a one-to-one image crop, pixel-for-pixel, from
the high resolution 41-megapixel sample of some of the tomatoes in the
above full-scale image.
Pixel-for-pixel crop from the 5-megapixel image that was captured simultaneously with the 41-megapixel on the Lumia 1020.
This less dramatic zoom, although still a big crop, still retains a lot of details.
This
pixel-for-pixel crop is taken from an image captured from Apple’s
iPhone 5 without flash. For the full-sized image, see the section below
for Image Samples.
On the Lumia 1020, you can zoom before or even after you’ve taken the image. Consider this, when you zoom in on the Lumia 1020, the camera will give you two images. The first image is the current Live View preview on the AMOLED display, showing you the framed, zoomed in shot. The second image is the non-zoomed in, giving a wider angle of view with the camera’s 26mm focal length Zeiss lens. This way, when you go and see the image, you can decide later if you want to have more of the background, and you can edit to zoom out. If you want to zoom in more after you’ve captured your image, you can do so by cropping as well, but the ability to zoom out and rotate the photo after you’ve captured your image is a great tool to have.
In
this image, I zoomed in, and then captured the photo, framing the
Vilage Market signage. If this was a point-and-shoot, I wouldn’t be able
to zoom out from this photo after I had taken it.
Thanks
to PureView, this 41-megapixel image was also simultaneously captured
with the image that I zoomed in on. Fortunately, the 41-megapixel image
retains the full 26mm wide field of view of the lens, so if I opted to, I
can zoom out and get more details of the roof, windows, and
people walking inside this building. This “zooming out” happens from the
image above, after I had captured the photo and returned home. It gives
people the ability to tell stories with photos, and also to retell
stories using different details from the same photo.
Action shot shows the trail of motion.
From the same sequence as the above image, Motion Focus blurs out what isn’t in motion.
From
the same sequence as the above two shots, this one applies the Remove
Motion Object to remove anything that was moving. Great for getting rid
of unwanted photo-bombers.
Camera Performance. Though the camera is feature-rich at this time, I do have a few complaints with the camera, and hopefully these quirks can be addressed via a simple software update in the future. The first complaint is sometimes the camera locks up, and only a restart of the phone would fix this issue. Though the camera would launch and the controls and dials would work, I cannot capture images when this lockup happens. This applies to video mode as well.
Too
many standard camera apps could cause confusion. Though the number of
lenses available augment the experience, it could be complicated for
newbies to the Windows Phone platform.
Video Sample (Galaxy S4 v. Lumia 1020)
Image Samples (Lumia 1020, Galaxy S4, iPhone 5)
Though the Lumia 1020 has a Xenon flash and both the Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5 have single-LED flash bulbs, the image samples below show photos captured in all lighting conditions, without the use of any artificial flash lighting. I wanted to see how each sensor can handle noise, grain, and details in various lighting conditions without the aid of a flash.And though I did post any images taken with the Xenon flash from the Lumia 1020, it appears that Nokia did correct the white balance issue when Xenon is used. Because Nokia developed the Pro Camera app, the Xenon flash now has the proper white balance and won’t render skin tones orange.
Lumia 1020 Image samples
Captured in a dark parking lot, no flash
The Earl Brothers Band on stage at Amnesia, San Francisco; no flash on a dark stage.
Plants outside a dark window at night; no flash
Main quad at Stanford University at night; no flash
In
the above image, you see a man texting. But what about this man walking
away with the street sign legible? This image was cropped from the
above image.
A
crop from the high resolution photo of the above image still retains a
lot of details, and you can now clearly see a man fishing on the pier by
the bridge along with some chairs in the background. This picture was
taken just after sunrise.
Nice,
shallow depth of field where the tomatoes in the front are in focus and
there is a defocused background with the shelves. The bokeh is greatly
enhanced on the Lumia 1020 (compared with sample shots on iPhone 5 and
Galaxy S4 below) thanks to the larger sensor size of the Nokia phone.
Galaxy S4
The backside illuminated sensor of the Galaxy S4 does a good job at night, but is no matched compared to the larger sensor with optical image stabilization of Nokia’s Lumia 1020. Depending on the shots, sometimes the Galaxy S4 does a better job. For instance, the photo of the band playing, the Galaxy S4 does a better job, I think, than the Lumia, but other shots taken at night or indoors with low light during the day were done better on the Lumia.
iPhone 5
Images captured with the iPhone 5 with decent light are good, but lack the details of the increased megapixels on the Galaxy S4 or Lumia 1020. Lumia’s camera achieve better details either through higher megapixel count (up to 41), or over-sampling by analyzing all the pixels and compressing the image into a smaller 5-megapixel sensor. In darker lighting, the sensor of the iPhone does suffer and there is apparent grain and noise in the images.
Flare from lights on this image with iPhone 5′s camera.
Battery Life, Call Quality
As my review unit arrived late due to some delays with AT&T, I was not able to have an accurate battery life test. I’ll re-visit this review with more posts and updates in the future about the Lumia 1020 to give you a gauge of battery life as I use the phone more under more normal circumstances. As it stands now, I mostly use the phone to take camera image samples, check emails, and make quick phone calls, so any battery life indication I would offer would not be indicative of normal usage. As such, I’ll reserve comment on this topic for now.In terms of call quality and data speeds, AT&T’s network in San Jose and San Francisco, California was excellent. In congested San Francisco, California where rival Verizon’s network would slow down for data calls, AT&T’s was still fast. On average, I get between 10 to 30 Mbps on the download side here and anywhere between 5 and 20 Mbps with uploads. In San Jose, Verizon’s network performed almost equally as well, so your mileage may vary depending on network conditions and traffic congestion.
Calls, like on all Nokia phones, sounded warm, loud, and pleasing. The Lumia 1020 had no issues with reception or call quality whatsoever, and I am overall very pleased with the call quality. I think call quality sounds better and warmer than on competing handsets on iOS and Android.
Conclusion
The Nokia Lumia 1020 should be on the short list of phones to consider for anyone who is looking to upgrade to a new device this year. Though Windows Phone’s ecosystem isn’t as robust as Android’s or Apple’s, there are still plenty of apps to choose from, and in most cases where an official app isn’t available, there is a decent third-party alternative. 6Sec is a third-party alternative for Vine and I use Instance as my Instagram client, for example.Still, despite a growing app catalog, there are still some qualms with Microsoft’s platform. Though I love the email app, I cannot attach documents directly from within an email itself. There is still no Xbox video store where I can purchase, rent, and watch movies on the go on my phone, and as a heavy user of Google services, I find the lack of Google apps a challenge, although not an impossible one. There are apps for Google Drive, third-party clients for Google Talk, and even a Google Search hub. I just want a better Google Voice client with push notifications that work.
In terms of what Nokia has done with the platform, it’s nothing short of amazing. From small improvements like the Glance screen to larger apps like Nokia Drive+ and Nokia Music, there is a lot of value that you’re getting with the Lumia 1020, which retails for $300 for a 32 GB phone. While some may balk at the $300 contract price, the phone is competitive with the iPhone given you’re getting 32 GB of internal storage, while at the same time besting every other smartphone on the market with its insanely awesome PureView camera.
The camera alone should make those who are interested in preserving memories and telling stories, people with children or pet, or any photography enthusiast salivating as it’s truly the first highly capable camera that you can always take with you. Bridging the DSLR gap with a smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 1020 may just be the smartphone of the year; I highly doubt Apple or Android will be able to catch up to Nokia anytime soon.
From low light to bright light, the Lumia not only captures superb images, but offers users who demand more from their phones a lot of creative control and flexibility. Now, it’s just up to Microsoft to ramp up Windows Phone to keep the platform competitive.
\ Glance screen a feature borrowed from Symbian
Editor’s Note. As the Nokia Lumia 1020 is a popular device, we’ll continue to post about our experiences with this phone. Given the limited time we’ve had with the device, we’ll explore more about the camera once we better familiarize ourselves with how it handles over time and update our experiences. Additionally, we’ll continue to monitor battery life. As I’ve personally pre-ordered the Lumia 1020, it will become my daily driver and I’ll write more about my experiences with the phone, Windows Phone as a platform, and the apps ecosystem as time goes on.
via: gottabemobile
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