Nokia Lumia 1020 review

The Lumia 1020 is Nokia's attempt to build the ultimate cameraphone. It's a Windows Phone 8 handset with an enormous 41-megapixel camera sensor, and it uses some seriously clever tricks to produce the best phone images we have ever seen.

We the first version of Nokia's large sensor on the PureView 808, but our enthusiasm was tempered by the handset's soon-to-be-defunct Symbian operating system. The Lumia 1020 has no such problems, as it runs Microsoft's increasingly-popular Windows Phone 8.

The PureView camera sensor is more than just a huge collection of pixels. It's physically larger than the sensors in most smartphones and even some compact cameras. At 1/1.5in, it's twice the size as the sensors in phones such as theHTC One, Apple iPhone 5S and Nokia Lumia 925, and 1.5 times larger than the sensor in our Best Buy-winning Canon Ixus 255 HS compact camera.

Generally, the bigger the sensor, the more area there is to capture light and so the less image noise and better low-light performance. The Lumia 1020's sensor is also a backside-illuminated (BSI) model, where light strikes the sensor from the rear, avoiding any circuitry getting between the light and the sensor's photoreceptors.

This isn’t the only trick up the 1020's sleeve, though; Nokia has also decided to use the sensor's huge number of pixels to help improve image quality further. When you take a picture with the Nokia Pro Cam app, the phone saves two versions; the full 7,712x4,352 pixel image and a smaller 3,072x1,728 (5-megapixel) snap.

There are two reasons to have the smaller image. The first is that it's small; around 1.6MB compared to the 9MB or so for the full-fat version, making it much easier to upload straight to a social network. The second is down to something Nokia calls oversampling. This examines each pixel in the larger image, then works out which it should keep and which should be discarded to make the smaller image the best possible quality.

You can even go a step further, dragging the shutter icon slightly to the left to display all the settings on-screen at once. As so much of photography involves balancing various settings to get the right shot, this is a great way to tweak several settings at once and see the results. It all works beautifully, but we noticed a bug where the camera got stuck in portrait mode, and would only switch back after we restarted the phone. This only happened once during our testing, though.

The Lumia 1020 also comes with Nokia's Smart Cam app, which gives you access to several fun effects such as Action Shot and Motion Focus - see our Lumia 625 review for details. Unfortunately, if you use Smart Cam rather than Pro Cam, you can only take 5-megapixel rather than 38-megapixel snaps, but we feel Smart Cam's effects are more suited to Facebook than A3 printing anyway.

The phone itself is a typical lovingly made Nokia unibody. It loses the cool-to-the-touch metal edges of the Lumia 925 in favour of some serious polycarbonate, so is more reminiscent of the Lumia 920. There's a bulge on the back for the lens assembly, but it's certainly still pocket-friendly. The 1020 also comes with a clip-on case which essentially turns it into a compact camera. This gives you a chunky handgrip so you can use the camera one-handed, as well as a big two-stage shutter button (press lightly to focus, all the way to snap) and an extra battery. With the battery case plugged in, we saw 12h 4m of video playback from the Lumia 1020 - three hours more than the phone on its own.

The camera case adds a chunky handgrip and three hours' battery life

The Lumia 1020 has the same 4.5in, 1,280x720 AMOLED screen as the Lumia 925, which is one of the best mobile screens there is, as well as the same dual-core 1.5GHz processor; Windows Phone flies on this handset, and a hugely quick score of 913ms in the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark shows complicated web pages are not a problem. As with any Windows Phone handset, you need to consider whether the platform does what you need; it's slick and great-looking, but not as flexible as Android and still doesn’t have as great a choice of apps, although the situation is improving.

We're blown away by Nokia's Lumia 1020. It's the first phone that properly replaces a compact camera; we can see ourselves doing most of our photography on the phone and leaving a compact camera, or even a CSC, at home most of the time. It is expensive SIM-free (though not as much as a separate top-end smartphone and compact camera), but is still cheaper than an iPhone 5S on contract. It's an incredible imaging phone and wins an Ultimate award.

Part Code	Lumia 1020
Review Date	20 Sep 2013
Price	£600
Rating
Award	Ultimate

Hardware
Main display size	4.5in
Native resolution	1,280x720
CCD effective megapixels	41-megapixel
GPS
Internal memory	32768MB
Memory card support	none
Memory card included	0MB
Operating frequencies	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 850/900/1900/2100, 4G 1/3/7/8/20
Wireless data	4G
Size	130x71x10mm
Weight	158g

Features
Operating system	Windows Phone 8
Microsoft Office compatibility	Word, Excel, PowerPoint
FM Radio
Accessories	camera case, strap
Talk time	19 hours
Standby time	16 days

Buying Information
SIM-free price	£600
Price on contract	0
SIM-free supplier	www.expansys.com
Contract/prepay supplier	www.carphonewarehouse.com
Details	www.nokia.co.uk