It's been more than an year since the unveiling of the original Nokia 808 PureView smartphone - it's only now that we see the technology implemented into a Windows Phone. And from what our encounter with the Lumia 1020 shows, the wait was well worth it. The smartphone is bound to make the Microsoft platform the new leader in smartphone imaging and the new focal point for everyone interested in mobile photography.
The camera aside, the Nokia Lumia 1020 doesn't bring anything over the Lumia 920. In fact it even lacks wireless charging capabilities, requiring an optional accessory for it. And yet, we do like the 1020 AMOLED screen better than the LCD on the Lumia 920, but the Lumia 925 already has that in a much more +compact shell.
Nokia Lumia 920 • Nokia Lumia 925
However, we still feel that the Lumia 1020 is in a better position to attract customers than its predecessor was 8 months ago. Windows Phone has significantly matured in that period and now has very little gaps in the apps department. This means that those wanting to try the latest and greatest in the camephone department and get a taste of the live tiles no longer have to worry about sacrificing the overall smartphone experience. And yes, a notification center would be nice, but it's not a real deal-breaker.
What might turn out to be a bigger problem however is the high asking price of the Lumia 1020. The smartphone is set to debut in the US on the AT&T network for $300 with a two-year contract. This makes it over $100 (depending on the deal you get) more expensive than the HTC One (also 32GB) and Samsung Galaxy S4 (16GB with microSD card slot) and the same price as a 32GB Apple iPhone 5. If that kind of pricing carries over when the smartphone hits Europe, it means that you'll have to pay about €700/£600 for it and that is really way more than Nokia can afford to charge for its flagship at the moment.
HTC One • Samsung I9505 Galaxy S4 • Apple iPhone 5
It's beyond doubt that this will be the best cameraphone on the market for some time to come (probably until Nokia releases its successor), but the fact remains that it's got a chipset more than twice slower than its competitors and a screen of less than half the resolution. There's also the issue of the size - the Lumia 1020 is larger and heavier than just about every other flagship out there.
As we see it - the Nokia Lumia 1020 really has the potential to become a hit. Not only that - it can lay the foundations for something bigger - make WP8 desirable before quad-core 1080p flagships arrive in the holiday season and cause explosive growth. Or it can remain a niche product that only a few enthusiasts care about if the pricing remains like that - your call, Nokia.
The Photos hub is where you can view your photos taken using all the different camera lenses.
The main view of the Photos hub offers four options - camera roll, albums, date and people. A swipe to the left reveals what's new, which displays your Facebook friends and liked pages' new picture galleries.
Pictures hub
Albums feature the camera roll, the preloaded system pictures and all of your SkyDrive albums automatically.
Camera roll • Album, date and people views
The people section is where you can select your friends and contacts so that their galleries on Facebook get displayed right there in your Photos hub. It's a nice feature for social network users but will be only an empty section for those that aren't too fond of Facebook.
The camera roll presents your entire collection of photos and videos captured with the device in a 4x5 grid. You cannot change the layout. Viewing a photo can be done in either portrait or landscape mode. Zooming in on a photo is done by either double tap or a pinch.
One nifty new addition is that the selected photo will now indicate which lens was used to take it. You can then tap on the lens name and that will take you to that lens interface, where you can make further adjustments of the effect.
Below each image is a shortcut to the lens used to make it • Tapping it lets you edit from the lens itself
Nokia's Music hub alongside the Music + Videos tab
Nokia is pushing its own music service called Nokia Music ahead on the default Music + Video app. It offers free music streaming (it works out of the box) and has an extensive library of tracks. While it is mostly streaming oriented, you can make tracks available offline (they remain on the device only temporarily though).
Nokia Music app • making a track available offline
But Nokia Music competes with services like Pandora too - you can give it a list of artists you like and it will automatically build a playlist to your taste. Nokia takes pride in real people creating the mixes (including celebrity-made mixes) instead of computer algorithms.
Creating a custom mix
Unlike competing services you can also browse a specific artist and even buy songs to keep if you like. There are plenty of charts (e.g. Top sellers, Best of 2013, Songs for Fall) if you're looking for something new too. There's even a custom equalizer setting.
The default Windows Phone 8 media players are on-board too. They reside together in the Music + Videos hub, which now bears the Xbox logo or the last played media thumbnail. When you start it, it shows the History, which gives you quick access to the last two items played, or you can go to the full menu and start the music or video player, listen to or watch podcasts, or go to the Marketplace.
The music section is made up of albums, songs, playlists, genres and artists. Videos features all, television, music videos, films and personal - think of them like more of categories you can assign your videos to when syncing with Zune. The third section is where you can store all of your downloaded audio and video podcasts.
The Xbox music hub
The music hub has a simple and straightforward interface. You won't have any difficulties using it. However there are some things missing, like an equalizer. Another missing feature is the ability to scrub through a song with your finger - you have to press and hold on the FF/rewind buttons to simply jump back and forth.
Browsing the music library • Now playing screen
As a music player, it's pretty standard - your tracks are sorted by artist, album, playlists or you can view all songs. The interface is very similar to that of the stock music player, but under the album art it lists the next three songs to be played - really helpful if you're using shuffle. There's no way to manually reorder the upcoming songs, but you can reshuffle them if there's one you don't like.
The video player is integrated into the Music + Videos hub. It has a very simple interface - you have fast forward and rewind controls, a timeline and a video size button that toggles full-screen viewing.
The Video tab • Video player in action
The video player in Windows Phone 8 is identical in terms of performance to the one found on other recent Lumias. It plays XviD (though we had some issues with this codec), DivX and MP4 videos up to 1080p resolution. The few things it won't play are MKV files and videos using the AC3 audio codec. There is no subtitle support at this point.
Since Windows Phone 8 is no longer Zune dependent, you can easily upload videos from your computer via the USB mass storage mode.
Individual items can be pinned to the homescreen - like a song or video.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 appoints two camera apps at work - the default Windows Phone 8 camera application as well as Nokia's new Pro Camera app that's designed to allow for advanced settings fiddling.
Nokia Pro Camera app
Nokia has created a special app for the Lumia 1020 dubbed Nokia Pro Camera and is one of the phone's key software features. It is there to compliment the 41MP camera with a simple user interface that allows users to fine tune the camera settings. It may sound intimidating, but Nokia has done a great job at making the app simple to use for both novices and professionals alike.
Starting the Nokia Pro Camera reveals a familiar interface, first introduced with the Smart Camera app. The important distinction is the top transparent box in the top center containing six camera adjustments. From left to right they are flash, white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed and exposure compensation.
Nokia Pro Camera app user interface
Tapping on each of them opens a ring-based interface on the right part of the screen. You can access all of them simultaneously by sliding the on-screen shutter button to the left. This will stack sliders for all six settings next to one another allowing you to easily fiddle with them at the same time. The settings you modify are kept at what you chose, while the others are adjusted accordingly by the app.
As we mentioned earlier, the Pro Camera lens has another cool trick up its sleeve. It snaps two photos at once - one in full resolution and another one in 5MP, which benefits from the pixel oversampling technology, while at the same time being far easier to share. You can zoom in up to 3x for the 5MP photo without serious degrading the image quality (you'll be losing the supersampling but it's still much better than the digital zoom in other phones) and you don't have to make a decision on the spot - you can zoom out and in after the fact and even reframe the photo.
The settings menu gives you neat options
The Nokia Pro Camera app isn't limited to shooting still images, it can also manage video capturing quite well. Tapping the video icon on the bottom gets you to the video part of the app. There you have access to just some of the settings - flash, white balance and focus. The focus can be set to either manual, auto or infinity.
Video recording also makes use of OIS and oversampling. Zoom is enabled even during video capture and it can go up to 4x in 1080p mode and 6x in 720p resolution. The Nokia Lumia 1020 also has two mics (one on top, one on bottom) with the company's proprietary Rich Audio Recording for distortion-free sound recording in loud environments. The 1080p videos are recorded at 30fps, of course.
Shooting video is straightforward
You can start shooting videos by either tapping on the screen or pressing the dedicated hardware shutter key. Pausing video recording is still not an option on Windows Phone 8. Thanks to the dual high-quality microphone setup on the Lumia 1020, the audio quality is very crisp and boasts a lot of detail and texture.
Windows Phone 8 default Camera app
The default Windows Phone 8 camera UI is pretty simple - you have your viewfinder and some controls on the right. From top to bottom they are the still/video camera toggle, front/back camera toggle, a flash mode setting and the Lens button. On the left you have an arrow that takes you to the images taken with the camera, alternatively you can swipe to get there.
Camera app • Camera lens
There's also a slew of settings, ranging from scenes and effects to white balance, contrast, saturation, sharpness and ISO among others. You have a dedicated Macro focus mode but no face detection. The flash can be set to auto, forced or off. A separate setting allows the LED to work as an AF assist light.
In the latest camera software Nokia has raised the maximum ISO setting from 800 to 3,200 and has tweaked image processing in low-light conditions.
SkyDrive is available for photo auto-upload (it's turned off by default), but you can install third-party apps to handle this functionality as well.
Lenses is an interesting feature, allowing third-party camera apps to enhance the core camera functionality without the need to access them separately and get use to their different UIs. The so-called Lenses are like plugins for your camera and they are available directly in the native camera app. They show up in the list of installed apps too in case you'd like to pin a Lens to the start screen, for instance.
The shutter key will wake the phone up with a single press and launch the camera app. You can set Nokia's exclusive Smart Camera or Pro Camera to be launched instead.
So, we've mentioned Smart Camera several times already and it's time to explain what it does. It's the next generation of Smart Shoot and is based on technology developed by Scalado (now owned by Nokia).
It shoots a burst of 10 photos at 5MP resolution and allows you to edit those photos later. When editing a Smart Camera photo you choose one of several modes by swiping through their respective cards, each with a helpful label.
Official Nokia Lumia 1020 Smart photo
The basic feature here is best shot - automatically selecting the best photo out of the 10 (you can manually override the selection). You can also select the best expression for each individual face in the photo.
The multiple photos can be used to remove moving objects as well.
Smart Camera can pick the best expression for each face • or remove moving objects
Then there's Action shot - a moving object is overlaid on the photo several times to create a sense of motion. You can pick which of the 10 photos are used to create the action shot and the multiple copies can either be opaque or semitransparent.
The other mode that enhances motion is Motion focus - it locks the moving object, but blurs the background around it. Imagine turning the camera to track a fast moving object, that's the effect that Motion focus simulates.
Here's a promo video done by Nokia that shows an example use of the Smart Camera
Anyway, Nokia has other Lumia-exclusive Lenses too. There's the Panorama and Cinemagraph (creates animated GIFs), but also GlamMe (to enhance self-portrait shots) and a few more. As of July 2013, the Cinemagraph lens has been updated and now supports 720p resolution for the .GIF files.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 headliner is its 41MP camera at the back. And while the resolution is the same, the camera module has been significantly redesigned since the Nokia 808 PureView came around.
One of the few things that the two PureView sensors have in common is that even though they technically are 41MP units, they aren't actually able to take 41MP photos. Here you can see all the different image aspects and their respective resolution. The sensor has a total active surface of 7728 x 5368 pixels, which does amount to 41MP, but depending on the aspect ratio you choose, it will capture either a 7728 x 4354 pixel image (34MP) in the 16:9 mode or a 7152 x 5368 pixel image (38MP) in the 4:3 mode.
Using the new Nokia Pro Camera app, the Lumia 1020 can save a photo in both 34MP and an oversampled 5MP variant. We'll touch more on that later on. Mind you, the default camera app is limited to shooting only 5MP photos in both 4:3 or 16:9 modes.
Probably in an attempt to keep the size of the module down, Nokia has decided to make the Lumia 1020 camera sensor smaller than the one in the 808 PureView. It's 1/1.5" instead of 1/1.2" and this means it has somewhat smaller pixels - 1.12 microns instead of 1.4 microns.
However, the new sensor has a BSI design, which improves light sensitivity. This means it offers lower noise levels in low light, so that probably makes up for the difference in size. There's also the fact that the new 6-element ZEISS lens has a wider aperture than the old one (F/2.2 instead of F/2.4) so it lets more light in.
Finally, there's the Optical Image Stabilization, which is still a rarity among smartphones, but an immensely useful thing to have. The Finns have naturally reworked the thing to accommodate the larger sensor and now you get to take shake-free videos and far better pictures in low light, provided that the subject you are shooting isn't moving.
In case you are not familiar, Optical image stabilization compensates for the movement of you hands and lets you take longer-exposure still shots without introducing blur due to camera shake. Longer exposures, in turn, allow lower ISO setting to be selected and still get the same exposure, only with less noise.
The downside is that those longer shutter speeds are only good for still subjects - any moving object would surely become a blurry trail on the photo.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 camera lens is nicely wide at 26mm - here's how its field of view (in both 4:3 and 16:9 mode) compares to the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. The advantage over the Samsung flagship is quite significant and even the 28mm One can't fit as much in the frame.
The final improvement that Nokia made to the Lumia 1020, compared to the 808 PureView is the reduction of the minimal focus distance from 20cm to 15cm. This means that the Lumia 1020 is able to get closer to the subject and produce more detailed macro shots.
Now that we've got the technical stuff out of the way, we can move on to the new Pro Camera app that puts the whole thing in motion.
