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Hands On With the Nokia Lumia 1020

Posted by samzenpus on from the take-a-look dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Nokia's new phone, Lumia 1020, feels very similar in the hand to Nokia's Lumia 900 and 920, with one exception: it has a camera bump. The 41-megapixel uber-camera projects out very slightly as a black disc on the back. In terms of functionality, though, the camera provides for smooth zooming only a pinch away. However, it takes a noticeable amount of time to lock focus and save images. At one point during hands-on testing, the camera app crashed so hard that it required a phone reboot, which is hopefully just a pre-release firmware issue. The phone itself carries a brightly colored polycarbonate body that rolls around the edges to cradle a 4.5-inch, 1,280-by-768 screen. Lumia 1020 is powered by a dual-core, 1.5-GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 processor which plows through apps well. Speaking of apps, there's a ton of bloatware on here, as you'd expect from any AT&T device. AT&T adds four apps right at the top of the app list. Nokia Lumia is set to hit AT&T shelves on July 26th for $299."

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Meh by tmark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With a camera phone, I'd say that the time it takes "to lock focus and save images" is arguably far more important than the number of megapixels.

    Even with DSLRS, we've long ago reached the point where the average person needs more MP than are available, and none of *them* are at the 41 MP count. They also have far better optics than what is almost certainly in this (Zeiss nametag or not), and it is well understood in that domain that the importance of glass far outweighs the importance of whatever body you happen to be using.

    If the point was just to get better low-light performance by packing on more pixels and then binning them, I wonder why they didn't just design sensors with bigger photosites - at least then, reasonable save times and storage consumption would be a possibility. I know that camera novices get sucked into the MP marketing hype, but does anyone buy a phone for the MP in the camera ?

    1. Re:Meh by rcw-home · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What makes you think the lenses are not good?

      Because it's a 1/1.5" sensor (3.93 crop factor) at its widest focal length and 1/4.5" at it's narrowest, with an f/2.2 lens, which means a relatively small ~3mm aperture which will necessarily yield muddy pictures, similar to most point-and-shoots?

    2. Re:Meh by mystikkman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A camera phone being similar to a point and a shoot is a good thing. Why compare it to DSLRs?

  2. Re:Why hasn't Nokia crumbled yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    smart devices contribution margin:
    2010 Q2 8,1
    2010 Q3 9,3
    2010 Q4 11,6
    2011 Q1 6,2 (Symbian declared dead)
    2011 Q2 -6,2
    2011 Q3 -5,9
    2011 Q4 -7
    2012 Q1 -18,3
    2012 Q2 -32,9
    2012 Q3 -48,9
    2012 Q4 -21,6
    2012 Q1 -16,2