Throwback: Nokia Lumia 1020 (Premium)

The Nokia Lumia 1020 changed everything when it arrived in July 2013, three years after Microsoft first launched its Windows phone platform. Nokia had had some excellent near misses, including the Lumia 800, 900, and 920 series, but then it finally delivered with the Lumia 1020 and its amazing 41-megapixel camera. After some initial tests confirmed its quality, my family headed off to Amsterdam for our home swap, and I hoped to use the Lumia 1020, and not a digital camera, for our photos during the trip. It worked—I never needed the standalone camera—setting the stage for what is now normal, using a smartphone camera for everything.

Over time, of course, the Lumia 1020’s blemishes became more problematic. The handset was slow, and having to wait for it to take photos quickly grew monotonous. Later smartphones, like Lumia 1520, which arrived within a few months, nearly matched the Lumia 1020’s photographic capabilities and offered much better performance. And then, over time, Android and iPhone caught up to and then surpassed Lumia, as Nokia and then Microsoft struggled through an era of lower-end handsets and diminishing returns.

Windows phone is a hard defeat for its fans to accept. But there was no point higher than the summer of 2013, when Nokia introduced the Lumia 1020 to the world and changed everything.

And I still have the Lumia 1020 and its snap-on camera grip, though the screen cracked at some point while in storage and the move, I guess. Ah well.

I wrote over 15 articles about the Lumia 1020 that summer. So here’s just a bit of what I wrote about this amazing device at that time.

Nokia Lumia 1020 Preview

Nokia delivers a new flagship with an emphasis on high-end photography

July 11, 2013

At a live event in New York City today, Nokia announced its latest flagship smart phone, the Lumia 1020. And while this device may closely resemble its other unibody Lumia designs at first glance, it ships with an amazing 41-megapixel camera that could change smart phone photography forever.

First, the basics. For the most part, the Lumia 1020 very closely resembles the Lumia 920 in ways both good and bad. It has the same unibody design, shipping in this case in black, white, and yellow polycarbonate. Despite that, the 1020 is noticeably lighter than the 920, remarkably so given the huge camera, and I wonder if some work wasn’t done to somehow change the internals of the body to make that unibody shell lighter. Whatever they did, it works. My complaints about the 920’s density do not apply to the 1020.

On the flipside, the 1020—unlike the 920 or 928, but like the 925 or 720—does not include wireless charging capabilities. As with those latter devices, Nokia will sell a clip-on back plate to add wireless charging, but that will add a bit of heft.

Like the 920, the 1020 ships with just 32 GB of storage, and it’s not expandable, which I find curious. It features similar components, too: A 4.5-inch screen running at 1280 x 768 and a dual-core 1.5 GHz Snapdragon processor, for example. But the 1020 comes with 2 GB of RAM, a first for any Windows Phone device.

Of course, the big deal here is the camera. And it is indeed a big deal. Based purely on a few minutes of hands-on time—I’ll be getting a review unit ASAP—and this morning’s launch presentation, here’s the rundown of what’s happening with the 1020 camera:

41 megapixels. As rumored, the Lumia 1020 includes a 41-megapixel camera sensor, which offers a dramatically higher pixel count than any other smart phone camera. The native resolution is 7712 x 5360.

Two shots at once. Of course, more pixels don’t equate to better quality. So what the 1020 does is save two images each time you take a shot: One high-res “master” in 38 megapixels (4:3) or 36 megapixels (16:9) and one 5 megapixel version for sharing. That high-res shot is a key part of the 1020 strategy, as you can later go and post-process it and create further edited versions for sharing. But even the 5-megapixel version isn’t “just” 5 megapixels: It’s an oversampled image that Nokia says takes the best of 7 available pixels for each pixel in the final image, resulting in the highest-possible quality.

Zoom. With those high resolution originals, you can zoom into shots later while editing and create new versions of the photo (or “new stories,” as Nokia says) in which the detail hidden in the shots are laid bare. The demos of this capability were very impressive, suggesting that the super-high-res nature of the 1020 will provide some of the benefits of real optic zoom, but digitally. I’m very eager to test this extensively.

Auto-compensation. Where previous Lumias offered optical image stabilization using tiny coils to steady the image and capture more light while your hand subtly moves, the 1020 does so with ball bearings and magnet-driven motors. You can actually hear it if you’re listening for it, which is sort of excellent. But the result should be blur-free photos, day or night, regardless of the conditions.

Xenon flash. Like some previous Lumias, the 1020 offers a large Xenon flash for dark conditions.

Six lenses. The Lumia 1020 has six lenses—the most in any smart phone—and provides Zeiss wide-angle optics.

Nokia Pro Camera. Exclusive to the Lumia 1020 is a new camera app called Pro Camera that provides simple, on-screen access to individual camera features via a scrollable ring or several features at once via a set of rings. This means you can adjust settings like exposure and see the changes that will occur in real-time through the viewfinder. Very nice.

Video. The 1020 can also record HD video, of course, again with incredible detail, and with distortion-free audio that was truly impressive in demo.

Extensibility. Microsoft already lets developers extend the capabilities of all Windows Phone 8 handsets via special Lenses apps, and Nokia has created a new imaging SDK for the 1020 that will enable a new generation of apps.

Windows Phone 8. From a software perspective, the Lumia 1020 of course runs Windows Phone 8, and it ships with the very latest updates for that OS, including the GDR2 update that will ship to other phones starting in August. It also includes all the great Nokia apps for Windows Phone, of course, in addition to the 1020 exclusive Pro Camera app mentioned above.

Accessories. Nokia has always provided great accessories for its Lumia handsets and the 1020 is no different, with a wireless charging plate and a snap-on grip for one handed shooting, two step shutter control, tripod mount, and extra battery. I suspect most 1020 users will want the grip. ($80.)

Availability. The Lumia 1020 will ship on AT&T Wireless exclusively in the US on July 26, with preorders coming July 16. The cost is $299.99 with a two-year contract, and the device (or at least a variant of it, depending on market) will be made available internationally this quarter.

So far, I’m really impressed. That said, I get that a flagship device is not for everyone. Photography is clearly the emphasis here, and as more than one person noted wryly at the launch event today, it’s a bit odd for Nokia to be launching such a photography-dominated device that can’t even connect to Instagram, one of the most popular photo sharing services on earth. This is fair, but I think the point of the 1020 is to advance the state of the art in smart phone photography, which it appears to do. The sharing features in the underlying platform, Windows Phone 8, are what they are.

I’m looking forward to reviewing this one.

Note: These photos are from Rattle N Hum in New York after the Nokia event. They were taken with my Lumia 920…

Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan

Heading home from Penn Station

Nokia Lumia 1020 Review

Hands-down the most amazing smart phone camera ever created

July 23, 2013

For once, the hype is real: Nokia’s stunning new Lumia 1020 delivers digital SLR-quality photos in a smart phone that is the same size as, but lighter than, the previous flagship Lumia 920. This unprecedented achievement resets our understanding of what’s possible in such a form factor, and it renders every other smart phone camera immediately obsolete.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the single greatest smart phone ever created: The Lumia 1020.

Let me get the obvious stuff out of the way. From a smart phone perspective, the Lumia 1020 is basically the Lumia 920 with a slightly more updated version of the Windows Phone 8 OS—it includes GDR2 and a Nokia update called “Amber,” which I’ll discuss below. Looked at from the front, most would have a hard time telling the two devices apart.

But pick up the Lumia 1020—and I’ve been using this device extensively for the past week—and two changes immediately become obvious. First, the 1020 is—amazingly, given its innards—lighter than the 920. It’s so light, in fact, that it feels like an empty engineering sample. It shouldn’t be possible for a smart phone like this to feel this light. It’s the feather to the 920’s brick.

Second, a surprisingly small camera bump juts out from the back of the 1020, and you can feel that in your hand when you pick it up. You can see from a profile view how little it sticks out. So to the haters out there who have inaccurately described this thing as a great camera with a smart phone attached to it, sorry. You couldn’t be more wrong.

OK, so the Lumia 1020 has the latest version of the very best smart phone OS. It has the proven and desirable Lumia form factor in its bulletproof polycarbonate with just a small camera bump. Got it? Good. Let’s get to the fun stuff.

The camera in the Lumia 1020 frickin’ rocks.

This isn’t a trick. And while it’s fair and correct to point out that the Lumia 1020 lacks optical zoom, giving point-and-click cameras and digital SLRs a slight life extension, the truth is that for most users, the Lumia 1020 combines everything that most people want from point-and-click cameras with some truly amazing digital innovations.

It all starts with the PureView camera hardware, obviously. It features a 41-megapixel sensor with the requisite 6-lens Carl Zeiss optics, and a wide f/2.2 aperture and a Xenon flash that, like other Lumias, I only use for focus. (Nokia offers a nice focus flash feature which works really well.)

The camera is amazing, duh. But because it’s not attached to an optical zoom, you’re going to need to make some adjustments. That is, while you may be used to zooming in while photographing a subject with a dedicated camera, smart phone users know that doing so with a phone camera is an exercise in frustration. That’s because the lack of optical zoom combined with hand shakiness—which is amplified when you zoom—makes the resulting pictures blurry and unusable.

The 1020 compensates for the hand shakiness somewhat by using a unique combination of tiny ball bearings and an electronic motor. But it can’t overcome the lack of an optical zoom, so many manually zoomed images are unacceptable, as they are with other smart phone cameras. But again, you just have to adjust.

Last weekend, for example, I went on a lengthy walk around Dedham and in doing so came across a bumblebee on a plant leaf. With a dedicated camera I would simply zoom in on the creature to get a close-up shot. But I had the 1020, so I just took a normal picture. The result is this.

Looks like your typical smart phone shot, eh? Well, it’s not. Because this 16:9 image uses 33 megapixels of data (7712 x 4352), you can zoom in (on-camera or after downloading to your PC) and see an exquisite amount of detail. You see, the bee actually looks like this.

And this isn’t a particularly good shot, it’s just a representative shot.

Taking pictures with the Lumia 1020 requires one other adjustment, by the way, assuming you’re used to Windows Phone. Using the bundled Camera app with other Windows Phone handsets, you can simply tap the screen at the point you wish to focus and the app will both focus and capture the shot. With the Lumia 1020 and its new Pro Camera app, you do tap the screen to focus. But then you tap an onscreen button to actually take the shot. This is taking a bit of getting used to. (And more than once, I’ve assumed I’ve taken a shot when I haven’t because I’m still used to the old way of doing things.)

That Pro Camera app is amazing on a number of levels. That two-tap manual focus routine I just described often results in pictures with an amazing depth of field that is almost impossible to achieve on most smart phones. Consider these two examples, both from last weekend’s walk.

But the real power of Pro Camera is really seen through its onscreen controls for flash, white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed and exposure value (EV), which are found at the strip at the top of the screen. By default, each is set to Auto. But you can adjust each individually by tapping the appropriate icon and then using a half-circle slider to change the value.

This works amazingly well and you can see how the change you’re making will impact the photo you’re about to take, in real time. This means that these controls can actually teach you to become a better photographer, while offering those who already know what they’re doing better control over their photos. Compare this shot to the previous one to see how the live preview really makes a difference.

Furthermore, the app warns you when a value you’re selecting is inappropriate: The selector you’re sliding will change to red.

Best of all, you can engage the slider controls for white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed and EV all at once, and play with each setting in turn. To get to this view, simply swipe right to left on the onscreen camera button.

Videos are likewise amazing. At the launch event a few weeks back, Nokia showed off a concert clip in which it was obvious that the sound in real life was overly loud and hard to listen to, but when recorded with the 1020, the resulting audio was as crisp and clear as the HD video. Coincidentally, I attended a concert last week and made a single short video clip. As you can see for yourself, the result is a steady picture—I was just holding the device normally, not propping it up in any way—and the audio is FAR better than it was in person.

Pro Camera provides another amazing service. For each photo you take, it actually saves two files to the device. One is the original image at full resolution (so 33 megapixels for 16:9 shots) and one is an oversampled 5 megapixel version that is suitable for sharing on Facebook and other services. But you can at any time “reframe” the original photo using a simple editor that’s built into Pro Camera. Reframing is where you zoom in—as I might have done for that bee photo above—and then re-save the photo using this new framing. Underneath, the system retains all of the data in the original photo and you can at any time go back and reframe it again, bringing back “lost” pixels and more picture. You can also reframe to different aspect ratios.

This reframing capability is tied to that first adjustment I mentioned previously. I didn’t need to zoom in on the bee before taking the shot because I knew I could simply reframe that photo later, and as long as I had focused on the bee, the resulting zoomed-in reframe would look amazing. And it does.

What I’d like to see is a simpler way to “Save As.” As it is now, when you reframe, you overwrite the previous shared version of the file. Obviously, the original is never overwritten.

Beyond Pro Camera, there are other niceties, of course, including Nokia camera and photo apps that you can get on other Lumias, but are all the more impressive with the high quality shots you can take with the 1020. For example, the Smart Camera app takes a quick sequence of shots and then lets you choose between a number of amazing effects, including choosing the best single shot, a cool photo that combines action sequences, a motion emphasis shot in which non-motion parts are blurred so you can focus on what’s happening, and more. Creative Studio lets you apply amazing effects to your photos, like blur and focus shift. And Cinemagraph lets you animate just a discrete area of a photo, kind of like an animated GIF, while the rest of the image remains still.

I know you have lots of questions. Battery life, for example, is no worse than it has been with my Lumia 920, though I’ll need to torture test it a bit to see how using this as an all-day camera changes things. So far so good on that note. But I’ll have a lot more to say about this device over the next month, too: I’ll be taking it to Europe for three weeks and will be writing a series of articles describing my experiences. And I’ll be reviewing the various Lumia 1020 add-ons, like the camera grip and wireless charging plate.

But know this: The Lumia 1020 is my new daily-use smart phone. The Lumia 1020 is the best thing that’s ever happened to smart phone photography and it’s the single best Windows Phone handset on the market. It is one of the most impressive electronic devices I’ve ever used and it has already profoundly changed the way I approach recording life’s most interesting moments. When you consider how important photography really is, the impact of the Lumia 1020 becomes obvious.

Highly recommended. This is the real deal, folks.

Lumia 1020: Nokia’s Newest Phone Goes on Vacation

An absolutely wonderful replacement for a point-and-click

July 31, 2013

As smart phones have improved over the past few years, I’ve looked forward to the day when this device could finally replace a dedicated point-and-click camera for vacations, birthday parties and other special events. After a few false starts, that day has finally arrived, and just a few days into a three-week trip to Europe, I can see already that I’ll never need to buy another camera again.

This dream had its roots with the original iPhone, a smartphone of many firsts, among them a reasonably good camera. I even took a long weekend trip to Paris with an iPhone 3 or 3GS—I don’t recall anymore—that went fantastically wrong in that it was rainy and gloomy the whole time and the photos we took were mostly terrible. Lesson learned: After that, I kept bringing a “real” camera on big trips.

Perhaps not coincidentally, those cameras have improved over time as well. They picked up crazy optical zoom capabilities of 20-25X in recent models. They include GPS functionality so that the pictures they take are geo-tagged. You can get SD cards with Wi-Fi capabilities for wireless uploading (though I did not). But all I was really looking for was reasonably good picture taking capabilities in a smart phone. One device. One device that could do it all.

Folks, the Lumia 1020 is very much that device.

We arrived in Amsterdam on Sunday, bleary-eyed and beat after a red eye from Boston to Dublin and then a shorter flight into Schiphol. Having received a loaner Lumia 1020 about ten days prior, I had taken a few hundred photos around town and in my home in order to test the camera, sure, but also more selfishly to determine whether this device would meet my vacation photo taking needs. The initial prognosis was good. Very good, really. But the proof is in the pictures.

I take a lot of pictures on trips like this. In this case, I’ve been looking at a few things, quality-wise. I knew the phone would perform well in low-light, which it has. I knew that it would work well out in the sun, as any smart phone camera does, and of course those pictures have been fantastic. But I was curious about adapting to the new style of zoom, and whether I’d miss the 20X zoom on my most recent camera. After all, these trips are meant to memorable. I don’t want those memories to be blurry or substandard.

They’re not. I’ve taken photos indoor and out, in bright sun, under cloudy skies, and through pouring rain. And while the 1020 isn’t a perfect 1:1 replacement for a point-and-click it is much more than adequate, leaping over rather than simply edging past the quality bar I had set for myself. I did bring my point-and-click camera on the trip, of course. But it hasn’t come out of my luggage once, and it won’t.

Accurately depicting why this is so is difficult on a website like this. The images I can display here are relatively tiny and don’t adequately express the true underlying quality. Too, you’ll need to accept that the range of photos I’m taking here are as good or better than the photos I’ve taken with a “real” camera on previous trips. I have no reason to lie about this, but I’m also not going to post full-resolution photos of all my vacation photos anywhere either. All I can say is, so far, the results have been fantastic.

I will post more pictures from the trip—and, yes, investigate ways to post in higher resolutions. But I assume the point is clear: If what you’re concerned with is preserving memories, the Lumia 1020 has you covered.

Lumia 1020: 1500+ Photos

Over 1500 photos later, here are some thoughts about really using the Lumia 1020

August 10, 2013

As you may know, I’ve been in Europe since the end of July. I’ve used this extended vacation as the perfect opportunity to field-test the new Nokia Lumia 1020 in ways that are both unusual and comprehensive. And as a result, I have some thoughts about using this device.

First, if you’re on the fence about this phone for some reason, my advice is to go for it. Rarely have I felt so strongly about a hardware product, and in this case, I’ll be following my own advice. When I return home and need to return this loaner phone, I’ll be buying one for myself and replacing the Lumia 920 as my primary phone. (I have multiple cell phone lines for testing purchases, but this is the one I’ll associate with my actual cell phone number.) I’m all-in on this: I already purchased a camera grip, which I wrote about previously, and I’ve ordered a wireless charging cover so it will be there when I get home. More on these accessories in a bit.

Why bother? In a nutshell, the Lumia 1020 is a much better version of the Lumia 920, the phone I previously described as the best Windows Phone 8 handset. The camera, duh. But it’s not just that. The phone itself is lighter and less dense than the 920, and it’s a very meaningful difference.

I don’t perform formal battery life (or other tests), instead choosing to use devices like this in the real world and see how things go. So when we traveled to Europe, I packed my normal point and click camera just in case. It’s never come out of the bag, and it won’t: The Lumia 1020 has proven itself more than capable of producing wonderful memories we’ll be enjoying for years to come. The quality is there.

I also had my wife pack my Lumia 920 in her bag each day as we headed out sightseeing, again, just in case. The theory here was that if the Lumia 1020 failed in some way—battery life, perhaps, or whatever—that the 920 would be available as a backup. It didn’t come out of the bag once, and for this final week we won’t even bother bringing it.

I’ve used the 1020 with and without the camera grip, and what I’ve found traveling around The Netherlands and Belgium over the past week is that it is a must-have accessory for long days out in the world taking pictures. This is mostly because of the additional battery life you get with the grip, and in an odd way I’ve actually grown to like the 1020 + camera grip form factor more for taking pictures even though it’s heavier and bulkier. Go figure, but the phone feels small and almost overly light (if such a thing is even possible) without the grip. But given the performance with and without, I’ll generally be using the 1020 without grip for day-to-day use and then bring the grip along for big events where I’ll be taking a lot of pictures.

From a picture taking perspective, the Lumia 1020 suffers from the same kinds of performance issues you see with any digital device that needs to write large files to solid-state storage: There’s a bit of lag here and there. I mentioned previously that there is roughly a three second wait between shots, which has been consistent. But it’s worth mentioning, too, that the 1020 somewhat obviates what is otherwise a key Windows Phone advantage: Pocket to picture.

That is, with other Windows Phone models, you can pull out the device, press and hold on the hardware camera button, and start shooting pictures fairly immediately, without having to sign-in. (Because everyone has a PIN on their phone, right? Right.) With the 1020, you pull out the device, press the hardware camera button, and type in the PIN; you can’t bypass that step with the Pro Camera app used by the 1020. When Pro Camera does starts up, it takes a further second or two for the onscreen controls to appear so you can start taking a shot. Put simply, it takes longer than with pocket to picture. Something to know about.

There are some neat features in the Pro Camera app I’ve not discussed yet—like the “rule of thirds” framing grid you can enable, as I did, and the ability to turn off shot reviewing, which can speed things up—plus a slew of other Nokia camera/photos apps I’ve been experimenting with on this trip. I will write about all of this stuff soon, but it’s worth mentioning here that these additional points all add up to help put the 1020 over the top. You’re not just getting a better version of a 920. You’re getting a better version of a 920 that has a (much) better camera and better camera app, and one that works better with apps you may or may not have used in the past.

For all the discussion around the “pro” features of the Lumia 1020 and its Pro Camera app, I’m starting to believe that this device is actually a better fit for amateur photographers. Here’s my theory: Any real photographer will be carrying a camera regardless of good the 1020 is. But since the 1020 is just another smart phone, it’s something that will more obviously benefit typical users. Without touching a single option and only using automatic mode, you will simply take better pictures. Use manual focus and—bam!—you will take amazing pictures. Start learning how all those manual controls and other unique Pro Camera features work and—wait for it—you’ve learned a new skill. You will become a better photographer. Folks, this is the gift that keeps on giving.

Friends of ours visited us for a Belgium road trip, and my original intention was to let one of them, a professional photographer, spend the day using the Lumia 1020 and then report back on her experiences. We may still do this after I get home, but what we found was that neither one of us wanted to give up our camera (in my case the 1020). But she was consistently surprised by the quality of the pictures I took, and in side-by-side tests again and again the Lumia 1020 performed just about as well as her expensive DSLR with multiple lenses.

So you gain this huge size and weight advantage, and of course the instant sharing capabilities; she’d have to duplicate shots with the low-quality Android phone camera to share images on the fly. But the 1020 isn’t a true DSLR, so you lose optical zoom and the advantages of all those lenses. And if you zoom in enough on many 1020, you’ll see some lossy/pixelated backgrounds depending on the shot and conditions, where her shots were often cleaner even in the faded-out backgrounds.

For most people, none of that will matter in the slightest. Which is exactly the point: The Lumia 1020 is an amazing smart phone with an amazing camera. Best of both worlds doesn’t even begin to describe this device.

Now that I’m back to work, I’ll be writing more about the Lumia 1020 each day this week.