The IT Nerd

Let me kick off the first of back to back to back to back (yes, four reviews in a row) smartphone reviews with the Nokia Lumia 1020 provided to me by Telus. It’s big selling feature is the 41 megapixel camera. But I’ll start off with the phone itself. It’s a solid feeling phone with some weight to it. The one that I got was a bright yellow that can be seen from space. For those who want a bit more stealth, the phone is also available in black. The case doesn’t attract fingerprints but the screen does. However it doesn’t affect what you see on the screen for the most part. Speaking of the screen (which by the way is a 4.5” WXGA IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1280 x 768 at 334 ppi), it is sharp, bright and vibrant. Definitely in the top tier of phones that I’ve tested lately. Battery life is pretty good. It lasted me just over a day in typical usage. That isn’t bad.

One thing to point out is that the phone doesn’t lie flat on a table. At first I thought it was a major #fail until I clued into what Nokia was up to:

The camera lens extrudes from the back of the phone I’m guessing that it was a requirement to get the hardware to take 41 megapixels pictures in there. I will also note the large flash which is the largest that I’ve seen on a smartphone. So when the phone is on its back it does this:

I suspect that’s deliberate as it ensures that the lens of the camera never touches whatever surface you placed the phone on. Plus it gives the phone a bit of a better viewing angle as well when on a flat surface. Clever!

One thing about this phone: Just like the iPhone, the battery is not removable. It also has non-upgradable memory. You’ll have to live with the 32GB that it comes with. For most that should be fine. Others will have to be careful what they keep on the phone.

The Lumia 1020 like all Nokia phones is powered by Windows 8 Phone and like the other Nokia phones I’ve tested lately, it is a top shelf implementation of this OS with the exception of one item I’ll get to in a moment. The highlights are:

• HERE Drive + is a navigation app that offers voice based turn by turn navigation. It works well enough, but the voice prompts will sometimes give you specific street names, or simply tell you to turn left or turn right. That can force you to look at the phone rather than focus on driving. One advantage that this app has over Apple Maps is that the maps are resident on the phone and you can have as few or as many maps as you want on the phone.
• HERE Transit helps you to navigate from place to place using public transit. It fetches public transit schedules to give you an idea of how long your journey will take. I have no idea if this accounts for delays on the subway and the like, but it is simple to use.
• HERE MAPS is another navigation app which takes into account walking and even shows you passenger rail options.
• You’ve got three camera apps. Nokia Pro Cam and Nokia Smart Cam are for still pictures. Nokia Cinemagraph is for video. More on those in a bit.
• Microsoft Office is present and accounted for.

There’s one thing that’s missing from this phone. It’s YouTube support. More on that in a second.

In terms of speed, this phone is quick. Almost anything I did with it was instant. The lone exception is taking a photo which when you do introduces a couple of seconds of delay which means you could miss a shot. When it came to the all important speed test, this LTE powered phone consistently approached 30 Mbps downstream and 15 Mbps upstream via Speedtest.net. Not too shabby. It also comes with WiFi and NFC as well.

The big feature is the camera. The camera has a 41 megapixel sensor. But when you take a photo, two images are captured. One is a 5-megapixel version that you can share. The other is a 36-megapixel image that you can’t access until you connect the phone to a computer, at which point it can be copied or moved onto your hard drive. Both images are linked on the phone so that deleting the one you’re viewing deletes the other. I used Nokia Pro Cam to take the photos and videos. First here’s a picture taken at Pearson International Airport. Click to see it in full resolution, which because I e-mailed it rather than download it straight from the phone is 5 megapixels:

Nokia Pro Cam allows you to control every aspect of the photo such as ISO, white balance, and the like just like you had a digital SLR. It’s pretty impressive. Now here’s the video. Set it to full screen and to 480p.

The downside to this video is that I am unable to upload it at full resolution which is 1080P to YouTube. So it has to take a trip to Skydrive which compresses it before I can get it into YouTube. The upshot is that it and the still photo are very clear and sharp. If Microsoft could only sort out their issues with YouTube, this would be a powerful camera to shoot video with. Either that or allow me to upload 1080P video to Skydrive.

My final verdict? Nokia has another winner with this phone with the exception of the fact that you can’t upload video to YouTube. The screen is stunning. The camera is great, and it’s a feature rich phone. It’s $199 on a two year term from Telus or $725 outright. It’s worth a look if you want a phone from the Windows 8 phone universe.

This entry was posted on October 21, 2013 at 8:45 am and is filed under Products with tags Nokia, Telus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.