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
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.
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.
Nokia brought out the big guns at the beginning of the presentation - two PhDs, who were involved in the creation of the Lumia 1020. And it seems that all that knowledge was needed as the team had to completely redesign the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) that was introduced with the Lumia 920 to accommodate the far larger sensor. The new Nokia flagship uses the biggest Back-side illuminated (BSI) sensor in any consumer device and 6-lens optics from ZEISS (the most of any smartphone).
Nokia Lumia 1020
Here goes a brief hands-on video of the Nokia Lumia 1020 and its original accessories.
From the presentation it seemed that the Nokia Lumia 1020 is all about photography - it's not just snapping photos, Nokia also wants to redefine how apps interact with camera. The star app, however, was the Pro Camera lens, which is how you make the best use of the camera.
An exciting look at the camera module and lens of the Lumia 1020
The Nokia Lumia 1020 has a protruding camera on the back (unavoidable with such a big sensor), but overall it's not a huge device - in fact, (camera aside) the Lumia 1020 is 0.3mm thinner than the Lumia 920, with height and width being the same. And the camera bulge doesn't really damage the handling either - you hand is normally sitting lower so you don't really feel the extra thickness until you put the smartphone in your pocket.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 is also lighter by 27g than its predecessor and that's a difference you can feel.
Nokia Lumia 1020
Okay, let's jump straight to the camera, we know that's what you want to see. It protrudes ever so slightly from the back - honestly, with the 808 PureView in mind we thought it would be much worse. And yes, the sensor is a bit smaller here, but the OIS also adds quite a lot to the volume so kudos to Nokia for this one.
Nokia Lumia 1020 next to the Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 925
The camera lives on a black circle that is separate from the rest of the back (and the phone's color). That circle houses the lens, which features a mechanical shutter, a xenon flash and a LED light.
The headline feature - the 41MP camera
As we already noted the Lumia 1020 doesn't use the image sensor found in the 808 PureView. A completely new 41MP sensor was designed for this one. It's smaller than the previous sensor - 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 needs less light for the same image quality, so that probably makes up for the difference in size. And in case it's not enough, the new lens which are faster than the old ones (f/2.2 instead of f/2.4) will certainly do.
Then there's the Optical Image Stabilization (a completely redesigned mechanism) that also improves low-light photography and lets you produce smooth videos instead of the shaky mess that many other smartphones deliver. The xenon flash will give the Lumia 1020 an edge in the dark as well.
The sensor can snap 34MP images in 16:9 mode and 38MP images in 4:3 mode.
As with all Windows Phone handsets, the Nokia Lumia 1020 has a dedicated shutter key. It's a two-position one, so the photography experience is as good as it gets.
Standard WP8 keys - volume rocker, Power/Lock key and the shutter key • 1.2MP front-facing camera • standard WP8 buttons
Nokia also announced an official Camera Grip - it improves your handling of the phone and adds a bigger shutter key. There's more - at the bottom of it is a standard tripod mount and Nokia demoed how that can be useful with some Gorillapods. The Grip also packs a 1,020mAh battery, which augments the 2,000mAh battery already in the device (for comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom has a 2,330mAh battery).
The Camera Grip accessory
The Camera Grip is smaller than it looked in those leaked photo and turned out quite nice to handle. It will cost the somewhat steep $79, so we wouldn't be happy with anything less.
There's no wireless charging built-in, Stephen Elop was asked about it on stage and said that after talking to consumers it seemed that a snap-on charging shell is the better option (adds thickness and weight only if you want wireless charging).
