Nokia Lumia 1020 Short Review – Is It A Phone Or A DSLR?

For more than a decade Nokia enjoyed the top position amongst phone manufacturers. But as new players like Samsung, Sony and apple came up with more innovative products, Nokia lost its crown and its market share fell dramatically. Nokia Lumia 1020 is perhaps Nokia’s finest effort at capturing that lost market share back. According to technical reviews Nokia’s Lumia line of smart phones are really impressive but they have not been a huge hit with the consumers.

Nokia Lumia 1020 was announced at the mobile world congress and it really surprised everyone around the globe. The impact of surprise came from the announcement that it will have a camera based on the 808 pure view technology. If you don’t know what it means than let us inform you that it supports a 41 mega pixel camera sensor. Since its launch it has been appreciated by many for its superior camera features. Let’s take a look at what we have to say about this phone.

Features:

Nokia lumia 1020 features the largest camera sensor amongst all the Smart phones. It has a massive 41 megapixel sensor that produces spectacular images. The camera sensor is so massive that it protrudes out of its back but don’t worry it doesn’t looks that odd. In fact we find it to be a distinguishing style feature. Perhaps it won’t be wrong to say that this phone takes you as close as it gets to a real DSLR camera experience. you might find it surprising but in our tests the image quality from Nokia 1020 were just as good and in some cases even better than most of the point and shoot cameras.

It is capable of recording videos in full high definition at 30 frames per second with a bit rate of 20mbps. One distinguishing feature is that its lossless zoom capabilities apply to both still image capturing and video recording; this is in contrast to many other Smart phones that allow lossless zooming only for still photography.

It has a QUALCOMM dual core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz and a 2GB DDR2 ram. At first these features might not excite you but you must understand that it’s a windows phone and for a phone that runs on a windows operating system we found enough juice in it.

It comes with a 4.3 AMOLED display with gorilla glass 3 protection and the pixel density is 334ppi. We found its display to be at par with those of other high end smart phones.

You can buy it in two different versions, one comes with a 32GB inbuilt memory and the other one features a 64GB inbuilt memory.

 Another distinguishing feature is its wireless charging capabilities. If you are one of those who always mess up their charging pins then you will like this feature a lot, it is known as inductive charging.

Pros:

• The best camera phone ever.
• Wireless charging so you won’t be worried about damaging your charger’s pin.
• Solid build quality and materials

Cons:

• Slightly awkward design.
• A bit heavier as compared to its competitors.
• Extensive use of camera drains battery life.
• Not an android phone, this can become a reason for many people not to buy it.
• Like many other windows phones, it comes with its own bugs.

Verdict:

It’s a camera phone and if you are a photography enthusiast then just go ahead and buy it without giving it a second thought. However if you are not comfortable with a windows phone then you can try other options.

Author Alex Frank is an electronics engineer working in Nokia as a production manager. He has been reviewing the latest Nokia products ever since before they hit the market for mass production.