The Nokia Lumia 1020 is the best camera phone on Earth. That's a given. The question here is whether that makes it a best buy—and the answer, we're afraid to say, is not quite. While the Lumia 1020 ($299-659) is an easy-to-use smartphone that takes gorgeous images, a relatively slow shot-to-shot time and the generally maverick state of Windows Phone make this fall short of being an obvious choice.
Physical Features and Call Quality
The Lumia 1020 feels like a massive slab of a phone, in the spirit of the Lumia 920. At 5.1 by 2.8 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 5.6 ounces, it's actually lighter than Verizon's Lumia 928, and shorter than both that phone and the Samsung Galaxy S 4. The 1020 is an unusually wide phone, though, and the camera lens bump on the back tends to make it float over a table rather than sit directly on it, making it appear even thicker than it is. If you push down on the phone while it's sitting on a table, it wobbles a little like a see-saw. The phone's width made it difficult for me to use it entirely one-handed, but I have small hands.
The 1020 is clad in now-traditional Nokia matte polycarbonate, coming in black, white, or yellow. The 4.5-inch, 1,280-by-768-pixel Gorilla Glass 3 AMOLED screen has crazily oversaturated colors, and I saw a little visual color bleed when scrolling quickly back and forth. The touch screen can be used with gloves.
The 1020 is a good voice phone. It has a sharp, slightly harsh, but loud-enough earpiece and a very loud if tinny speakerphone. Noise cancellation was adequate if not total, reducing construction and traffic noise to a background hiss. Transmissions through the speakerphone had a tendency to sound a bit distant, but nothing too awful. The 1020 doesn't measure up to the Galaxy S 4 on voice quality, but it'll certainly do.
Like all Windows Phones, the 1020's voice dialing is fine, as long as you stick to dialing; I haven't had much luck with voice commands or dictation. The 1020 had no problem connecting to Jawbone or Plantronics Bluetooth headsets.
The Lumia 1020 operates on AT&T's LTE and HSPA+ networks, and roams on foreign HSPA networks. AT&T has a decent international roaming package with 100MB of data for $25. I got excellent speeds on the Ookla Speedtest.net app, with downloads often exceeding 20Mbps and uploads around 5Mbps, as befits America's fastest wireless network. Don't try to move the 1020 over to T-Mobile, though, as the phone lacks one of T-Mobile's HSPA bands.
We're still testing the sealed-in 2,000mAh battery and we'll get back to you later on that. It's the same size as the Lumia 928's battery, though; we got 9 hours and 32 minutes of talk time on that device, and with the same processor, OS, and screen size, we'd expect this one to be similar.
The phone also packs 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, NFC, and GPS, although wireless charging requires a separate, extra cover ($39.99).
Performance, OS, and Multimedia Playback
The Lumia 1020 runs Windows Phone 8 with Nokia's "Amber" updates (and plenty of other add-on Nokia and AT&T software) and the same 1.5GHz Qualcomm S4 processor that you see in the Lumia 925, 928, and for that matter a bunch of other Windows Phones as well. The phone benchmarked very similarly to those other devices. The UI is smooth and fluid, but the Internet Explorer browser doesn't render pages as quickly as the latest version of Chrome on Android superphones, according to the Browsermark browser benchmark.
Windows Phone's problem, as always, is not that it doesn't have apps, but that the apps are often different (and sometimes not as good) as the ones you find on iOS and Android. Most notably for photographers, there's no Instagram, although there's a bunch of third-party clients: Instance, Wpgram, and Metrogram. Vine and Hipstamatic are coming sometime in the vague future. Games are often just different; my daughter loves Ilo Milo and Max & the Magic Marker, both WP exclusives, but I can't play most of the Square Enix or Kemco RPGs I like on other platforms. And one major category, downloadable video stores, is just plain missing.
Nokia's major contributions are a slew of location-based and photography apps. The camera apps get a little overwhelming: There's not only Nokia Pro Camera, but Nokia Smart Camera, Cinemagraph, Panorama, PhotoBeamer, and Blink, each of which add special modes to the camera. From Nokia's mapping department comes HERE City Lens, HERE Drive+, HERE Maps, and HERE Transit. The driving and transit directions are excellent, but HERE Maps and City lens suffer badly from an out-of-date business database which turned up too many closed restaurants in my area; the search functions also aren't nearly as flexible as Google's.
The phone has 29GB of available memory and no memory card slot. Windows Phone uses a PC connector app to reformat music and video for the phone; it can handle most unprotected video formats, as well as music formats other than AIFF and WAV. Unsurprisingly, music and video sound good through wired or Bluetooth headphones, and Nokia offers a five-band equalizer if you like to tweak your sound. An FM radio works with wired headphones, and both Nokia and AT&T preload their own streaming radio apps. For video, you can go with Netflix or AT&T's own streaming video app, although there are no downloadable video options.
(Next page: Lumia 1020 Camera)
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