Formerly Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive, the mapping and navigation features from Nokia were rebranded to HERE earlier this year. Although they are no longer exclusive to Nokia WP-handsets, only high-end Lumia devices will get the Drive+ global navigation suite for free out of box.
HERE Drive+ offers free, life-time voice-guided navigation anywhere in the world. All you have to do is download a voice in your language of choice and you're good to go. Of course, to make use of the key selling point of Drive - offline navigation - you have to download a map for a country of your choice, too.
Nokia Drive+ does voice-guided navigation
With Drive+ you can easily plan routes (all offline, unlike the early iterations of this app) and you can tweak various settings for each route - fastest/shortest/economical route can be selected and you can choose whether the app will use or avoid motorways, toll roads, ferries, tunnels, unpaved roads and motor trains. There are icons to remind you of the selected settings.
Drive+ uses big, clear instructions on its screen in addition to the voice prompts, which is ideal for in-car use. You can switch between 2D and 3D mode and switch the color scheme (day, night, auto). There are speed alerts and real-time traffic information.
Tweaking the route-planning algorithm • day and night color schemes
We do miss a few options - like setting a starting location other than your current location and downloading maps for an entire continent. Still, Nokia offer quality maps and offline voice-guided navigation out of the box, which puts them ahead of other Windows Phone makers an even other platforms (both Android and iOS require a data connection to plan the route).
Nokia Drive will work in most of the world
The most recent update to the HERE suite (July 2013) adds an overview of traffic conditions in your area, including your drive to and from work with the My Commute app. My Commute shows you an at-a-glance look at your specified commute with a special Live Tile on your homescreen. You can setup up multiple commutes as well.
Commute alerts show up on your homescreen as a Live Tile
Nokia Maps takes on other duties - instead of navigation, it's more of a replacement for paper maps that you can take as you explore a city. It will help you discover new places, read a quick description, see photos, read reviews and check what renowned guides like Lonely Planet, Insight Guides and Qype have to say about it.
Nokia Maps has a ton of info
The Maps app also offers walking, driving and public transport navigation but it only shows a list of instructions. It shares data with Drive so you don't have to download the same maps twice.
Maps can be used for basic navigation too
The former Local Scout and City Lens features have been integrated into the Places section of HERE Maps, and gives you a quick view of restaurants, shops, galleries and other POIs around you, including an augmented reality view via the camera called LiveSight. Tapping the virtual signs in the camera interface pops up more info about the place, as well as directions.
The places interface lets you view POIs on the map as well as through the camera
With Windows Phone 8 being the only operating system that Nokia is working on right now (RIP, Symbian), the Finns have taken care to add as much value to the Lumia brand as possible. And since Microsoft doesn't really allow UI customizations, adding value translates to supplying exclusive apps and services.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 comes with the new Amber update preinstalled but that doesn't change the user experience dramatically. It does add a few features like Glance Screen, FM radio support and a new camera lens (more on that in a minute) but the rest is barely different from the previous WP8 iterations.
The Nokia Glance Screen is one of the coolest features that the Amber update brings along. It's a tribute to the MeeGo lockscreen (and Symbian smartphones of old), where you can constantly see a clock and flags for any missed events right on the black standby screen. And just like on the Nokia N9, Glance screen lets you to wake up the phone with a double tap. The feature leverages on the AMOLED screen to achieve very good power efficiency as only the pixels needed to display the clock and notifications are lit up.
There are several options to the Glance Screen feature. It can either be Timed (after a pre-set period of time it turns off the screen completely to save battery) or always on, if you want to be able to see it at all times.
Weirdly, the Lumia 1020 missed the fourth option called Peek, which is present on the Lumia 925. It allows you to wave over the phone's face to display the clock and notifications, much like Samsung's Quick Glance.
Nokia Glance Screen options
If you don't need the Glance Screen feature, you can disable it altogether. Then you will simply have to push on the unlock button to reveal the lockscreen. It displays the current time and date and shows calendar events, emails and missed calls.
The lock screen • Music controls
There's a reasonable level of flexibility and functionality to the lockscreen - the Live Apps service allows apps to display notifications and images. You can set one app to display big notifications ("detailed status") and up to five more apps to show less ("quick status").
The lockscreen wallpaper can also be controlled by apps - you can let the music player change the lockscreen image to the album art of the currently playing track or let one of the installed apps choose the image (e.g. Bing's beautiful background images or photos from your Facebook account).
The Modern UI is a vertical grid of Live tiles, which can be reordered the way you like. Almost anything can be pinned to the homescreen - apps, contacts, web pages and more.
The home screen and main menu
Windows Phone 8 lets you resize the live tiles. Upon a tap and hold, you'll get an extra resize button, next to the unpin one. You can opt between quarter, normal and double size. If you select the smallest one though, the tile will be just a static icon (as is in the regular menu).
Resizing a tile
Most Live tiles display relevant info such as the current date, pending calendar events, missed calls, unread emails and more (third party apps do it, too). The Marketplace tile displays the number of updates available, while the Pictures tile is essentially a slideshow of your photos. It's nice to have all that info always available at-a-glance. You can look at them as homescreen widgets of sorts.
WP8 can do multitasking - well, not true multitasking, but more along the lines of iOS. Apps not in the foreground are suspended, but the OS has ways to take over and carry out the task for them (e.g. continue playing music). But just like Apple's iOS, if an app needs to run in the background (sat-nav apps, messengers, etc.) it can. The WP offers both kinds of multi-tasking and it's up to developers to choose how their apps behave.
The multi-tasking interface
To switch between apps, you press and hold the Back key. You'll get thumbnail snapshots of the apps, ordered chronologically left to right.
You can scroll the list horizontally to select an app and a tap will bring you back to your running or suspended app. You can't "kill" any of those apps from here - to exit one, you must bring it to front and use the Back key to close it.
If you keep on hitting the back key, you will effectively be closing all of the open apps one by one, which is very unnatural, especially when you've got an open Internet Explorer, which has to go all the way back to the first loaded page before it closes. Overall, it's best to let the OS manage the apps and not worry about which ones are opened or closed.
Opening the settings menu displays two sets of options: like on the start screen, you can swipe between System and Applications. System covers all the settings you can think of like sounds, color theme, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Accounts, etc. The Application settings let you configure each app you have on the device.
We would've liked to see some kind of quick toggles in Windows Phone 8 to spare you the need to go all the way to the settings menu to enable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and the likes.
Another feature we feel is missing is a place where you can see all of your notifications from various apps. Live tiles manage to show notifications from each app to some extent, but they don't really have enough room for things like e-mail subject and such, while Android and iOS notification areas do. Microsoft has confirmed that it's working on just such a feature and that we should see it in a future update to WP 8, although recent rumors point to that being delayed to 2014.
Settings for the phone's storage
Being a WP8 handset, the Nokia Lumia 1020 also supports voice commands - you can dictate or have the phone read text out, you can initiate searches and so on. Unfortunately, the Windows assistant is still far behind the competition as far as recognition speed and accuracy are concerned.
The Lumia 1020 also comes with the Data Sense app, which shows you the amount of data you've used. Both cellular and Wi-Fi traffic is accounted for. There are different data limit types: one-time, monthly and unlimited. The first two accept custom bandwidth limit values, while the latter is applicable if you have an unlimited data plan, but would still like to track your usage.
Data Sense is useful if you're on a limited data plan
The can also restrict the background data usage for all apps, provided you're near the data limit that's been previously set. This will prevent some apps from functioning properly, though.
The new Nokia Lumia 1020 features the nicely helpful Kid's corner. You can select the apps and the types of media content that goes in and password-protect it, so you can safely share your smartphone with your kids without worrying that they will mess up your settings or access inappropriate content. When activated, the Kids corner is accessible by swiping left of the lockscreen. If you've secured it, your kids won't be able to return to your standard lock and home screen without the password.
The Kid's corner
The Nokia Lumia 1020 uses the Qualcomm MSM8960 chipset (1.5GHz dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM and Adreno 225 GPU). That's as good as it gets for WP8 devices at this stage, although Android competition has pulled quite far ahead - the LTE-Advanced Galaxy S4 already broke the 2GHz barrier and with a quad-core Krait processor at that.
A good thing is, the WP8 platform doesn't feel sluggish at all . Navigation is fast and animations are nicely smooth and fluid. There are places where you can feel a bit underpowered - loading heavier apps like Drive+ takes longer than it should on a flagship device and using the Camera Pro app to simultaneously capture full-res and downsampled shots simultaneously extends the shot-to-shot time significantly.
There are two ways to look at the Nokia Lumia 1020 dimensions. At 130.4 x 71.4 x 10.4 mm the smartphone certainly isn't the most compact around - it's somewhat wider and much thicker than the Galaxy S4 (136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm) and that one has a 30% larger battery and 23% bigger screen.
On the other hand, the Lumia 1020 has the same footprint as its predecessor, the Lumia 920 (130.3 x 70.8 x 10.7 mm) and is even slimmer than it if you don't count the bulge for the camera. The comparison with the 13.9mm thick 808 PureView is also favorable for the Lumia 1020. Granted the original PureView handset had a larger sensor, which means much larger camera module, but the Lumia 1020 has a brighter F/2.2 lens and OIS and both of these require quite a lot of room.
Nokia Lumia 1020 sized up against the 808 PureView and the Lumia 925
The weight of 158g is easily felt when you hold the Nokia Lumia 1020 in your hand or in your pocket, but it's still better than the 185g Lumia 920 or the 169g 808 PureView.
Design and build quality
Looking at the front of the Lumia 1020, the smartphone is almost identical to its Lumia 920 predecessor. The only giveaway is the fact that the bulging camera module makes it sit at an angle when placed on a table or other level surface.
The build and finish quality are certainly among the best in business, although we have to admit the design isn't as striking as it was nearly a year ago, when the Lumia 920 launched. But even if it's a little played out now, the unibody feels impressively sturdy and with the color being inherent to the material and not simply painted on top, it will certainly last a for quite a while and scratches will be harder to spot.
The design is a bit worn out now, but the build quality and finish are supreme
At its launch, the smartphone will be available in three color versions - the yellow one (like our test unit here) is the so-called lead color, meaning that it stars in most promo materials, but there's also a black and a white version.
We guess Nokia will add a few more options to the range further down the road (the Lumia 920 is available in 5 different colors), but even as it is now, the smartphone offers more choice than many of its competitors.
Display
The Nokia Lumia 1020 comes with the same PureMotionHD+ AMOLED display as the Lumia 925. There's Gorilla Glass 3 protection on top, to keep scratches away and provide extra impact resistance. The company chose to move away from LCD panels for its flagships after the Lumia 920 and we suspect the reason for this is keeping the thickness to a reasonable level.
The PureMotionHD+ AMOLED screen is pretty nice
Of course an AMOLED panel has many other advantages such as more vibrant colors and far superior contrast. Nokia has even supplied the Lumia 1020 will a cool color profile app that lets you tune the saturation and color balance to your liking - if oversaturated colors aren't your thing you can go tune them down to more realistic levels and if you like that effect you can go all the way up.
Display profile settings
The Nokia Lumia 1020 touchscreen also supports operation with gloves, which might come in handy when operating the flagship in the winter.
As far as image quality is concerned, the Lumia 1020 display performs excellently - it has good brightness levels for an AMOLED screen and excellent viewing angles. Blacks as typical for the technology are as deep as they get.
Display test
50% brightness
100% brightness
Black, cd/m2
White, cd/m2
Contrast ratio
Black, cd/m2
White, cd/m2
Contrast ratio
Nokia Lumia 1020
0
172
∞
0
398
∞
Nokia Lumia 920
-
-
-
0.48
513
1065
HTC One
0.13
205
1580
0.42
647
1541
Samsung Galaxy S4
0
201
∞
0
404
∞
Apple iPhone 5
0.13
200
1490
0.48
640
1320
Sunlight legibility is pretty decent, although not exactly as great as on the 808 PureView and its much brighter AMOLED screen.
The only part of the screen that is not class-leading is its resolution. 768 x 1280 pixels still adds to a pixel density of 332 ppi, meaning that you won't be able to discern individual pixels, but flagship Androids have already crossed the 400ppi mark and are even sharper. Granted, the difference isn't huge, but it's there.
The Lumia 1020 employs a PenTile matrix, which means that it has two sub-pixels per pixels, and that reduces the perceived sharpness on some occasions. It's certainly not too irritating and you probably won't even feel the difference until you put the Lumia 1020 next to, say, the HTC One, but it's there.
