Nokia Lumia 1020 Review! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what is up guys I'm, Kay PhD here- and this is the latest highest end- Windows Phone device from Nokia, mostly because the camera? That's a lot of the reason why anyone is even talking about this phone or considering it at all, but there's a lot more to a phone than just the camera, but we're going to take a look at everything about this latest device. This is the full review of the Nokia Lucia 1020. Now we all know the Nokia Lucia series is a family of Windows Phone devices, and that seems to be their defining feature. This is the highest end, one of the bunch and, to be honest, it's pretty similar to the rest of the Nokia Windows phones. At first glance, it has that big body, it's pretty thick bright, colors, rounded corners, but a squared off top and bottom, and it's got that button layout at the bottom that all the rest of the Windows Phone devices also have. But it's pretty amazingly well-built actually with no seams on the back or any of the sides.

It's basically a single block, slab design with a display on the front, and everything is milled from that single block, so the buttons the volume rocker, the milled speakers on the bottom. Everything is part of that single block design. It's also a very big phone like bigger than the Moto X in every way, bigger and wider than the Galaxy s4 thicker than a galaxy s4 heavier than the galaxy s4. But of course, we already expected that out of a Nokia, Windows Phone, but holding in the hand it actually feels pretty great. It has a well-balanced heft to it, and its mass has 158 grams.

So you really feel like you're holding a solid device in your hand when you're using it, which is nice and, of course, you're about to notice when you're using it that when you turn it around to the back, that is where you'll find the massive hump or the imaging hardware resides. So that's your 41 megapixel Preview sensor, the Carl Zeiss glass and the xenon flash and the focus is his light all top-notch optics, but we'll get to that in just a second. The main disruptor here is that the camera hump is so big that it affects the rest of using the phone. Sometimes I wasn't quite sure where to put my fingers on the back of the phone while using it and, more importantly, it never sits flat on any table. So, if you're someone who likes to text while their phone is lying on a desk or something, you can count out that sort of activity on this Lucia inside it's also very similar to other Nokia Windows phones, it's rocking a 1.5 gigahertz dual-core Snapdragon s4 chip, a two-year byte of RAM and 32 gigabytes of internal storage and a 2,000 William hour. But we all know that Windows phones, don't really need insane specs to handle everything they do really well and from my everyday usage, I've found this to be true with this phone too.

This one performs really well for a heavy user. Like me, it handles everyday tasks, really smoothly opens and closes apps quickly, scrolling as nice, as ever of course, on Windows, Phone and multitasking is a breeze thanks to those two gigs of RAM. Now one thing I noticed about web browsing in Internet Explorer here was that it's definitely smooth but at the expense of a lot of checker boarding and blank spaces when zooming in and out or scrolling quickly kind of reminds me of the older phones that did that, like the LG Voyager, where once you zoom in on text, you have to wait for it to re-render. Anyway, you can pull off some gaming on this phone too. Now, obviously, this is Windows Phone.

So there aren't exactly a ton of games to choose from, but with the few games, I was able to try it work smoothly and quickly without a hitch and I got great frame rates, of course, and that's the way it should be right. So, so far so good next onto the display so see there aren't that many high-end resolution Windows Phone 8 devices, and this one is no exception. Really, it's a 4.5 inch 1280 by 768 display a lot of people are thinking, wait a second Wow a device, that's bigger and thicker and wider than the Galaxy s4 has a smaller display than the Moto X yeah. When you take a closer look at it, you'll realize just how much bezel we're working with here on this device and then there's a resolution which gives it a pixel density of 334 pixels per inch, which is not bad. But now there is something else worth noting about the Windows phone UI, specifically some apps like, for example, the calendar, have one pixel wide elements of it, which allows you to literally see the entire width of the pixel and when you start to look at it closely, you'll immediately start seeing individual pixels and that's something.

I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that the highest end Windows Phone device you can buy right now. You can see pixels on the display. It's disappointing, considering I've seen much, much better displays in much less expensive devices. Everything else about the display, though, is really not that bad. It has great color reproduction, first, good viewing angles too, and since it's an AMOLED display, the contrast ratio is great and whenever you have a black background or the black elements of the display, those pixels are not being lit at all, which makes them look pure black and also makes for great battery life.

They don't have to light those pixels and this phone lasted a full day which is great on battery, but enough about the rest of the phone. I know what you're here for that camera. This has a 41 megapixel camera on the back. So is any good. Well, the short answer is yes, it's the best camera on any smartphone right now, like any phone period.

So there's that, but it's also one of those cameras that just really makes you want to get out and take pictures of everything, because you know the pictures just going to turn out well, every single time now there are a number of things to address about the picture-taking experience before the image quality, because everyone seems to want to focus on the image quality. First, this is a pretty wide angle lens on the back on purpose. Second, this is a real xenon flash, so it uses a focus, assist light and then actually fires a flash like a real digital camera instead of the typical smartphone LED light. Third, this phone comes with a specialized Nokia pro cam app. So, yes, you could use the stock Windows Phone camera app, but that doesn't make much sense.

It doesn't take advantage of it. So the pro cam app is included here to take advantage of all those pixels. Next, the camera UI here is a really smart one. You can leave it in full auto if you want, and it pretty much always takes great pictures in full, auto, or you can use the controls to change up the settings one by one. So you can manually adjust exposure compensation, the shutter speed, the ISO, the focus or the white balance, and, of course you can turn flash on and off.

So basically, all these controls are up at the touch of a finger up at the top they're very out of the way. So you can still see your image. So let's say you're outdoors, and you want to have a really fast shutter speed to freeze action. You can basically take the shutter speed off auto and pick the shutter speed that you want, make it nice and fast, and it basically goes into shutter priority mode. Everything else stays automatic and you can see the ISO automatically adjusting as you move around it'll turn red to let you know when you've gotten a bit too high, but basically you want to avoid that and again, like I said this, do you find or is super smart it'll automatically adjust all the other things about the image to make it work with that shutter speed, and you can snap your picture and freeze the image and one more thing.

This lens has real optical image stabilization, so you can get a sharper image during longer shutter times or one video recording. All that is stabilized. Last thing you need to know is that in the time between shots, there's a huge delay here and unfortunately, there's also no burst mode, and there is no built-in HDR processing, so it may feel a little slow. But without any further ado, I took a ton of pictures while using the Lucia, as my daily driver. So here are some of the most impressive pictures.

I took with it over the past two weeks check these out all right. So the main takeaway here from the images that I took, was that the biggest strength here were the sharpness thanks to all those pixels and the optical image stabilization and the biggest weakness I think was color. I took a lot of these pictures in full, auto with autotune. The color accuracy was really hit or miss, and sometimes it was way wrong, not even, even close, and it was even more apparent in the video I took. So you can see this video right here from the Train, where the colors are basically shifted and not at all very lifelike.

Now this Nokia pro cam app also has a few more tricks up its sleeve. First for the photos, it takes a 38 megapixel, full resolution shot and also, at the same time, saves a 5 megapixel over sampled image, which was much smaller and file size, and that's what you can use to share to Twitter, Instagram, etc. Wherever windows fun will let you share, and it actually felt like a lot of these five megapixel over sampled shots were a bit sharper than the full res ones. Another trick it has up its sleeve is to crop and reframe your shots after the fact- and this is what Nokia is advertising everywhere. So sense is a 38 megapixel shot and a wide-angle lens.

You can basically crop and reframe the shot exactly the way you want it and resave it and keep tons of detail. This gives you a lot more flexibility when taking pictures of landmarks and landscapes, groups of people, animals, moving objects, etc. It's really great very useful, so it is indeed a great camera experience. Of course again, it is almost always going to take amazing pictures on the first try and full auto mode. My big problem.

What I would say is that it's a 41 megapixel sensor with a 720p viewfinder, so there are tons of line, skipping and Moray stuff, and sometimes pictures really don't look that great when you're taking it on the phone, but then go and check it on the computer, and it looks amazing. So, at the end of the day, you have to be the one to decide if you want the best camera and a phone so badly, that you're willing to switch to Windows, Phone and all of its quirks, which there are a lot of and as a person who uses a lot of Google services. This is a tough sell because, of course, Microsoft and Google are not exactly friends at this point and there's plenty missing from Windows Phone that I would love to have, and you got to decide if you're willing to switch to Windows Phone and go all-out just to get this incredible camera or, if you're, just going to wait and stick to the already really great cameras and a lot of the other phones with different operating systems. If I was already a Windows Phone person, I would be all over this phone. This is the phone to get.

If you want Windows Phone, there's pretty much. No other choice right now, they're all already pretty big phones, so you might as well just go with the slightly larger one and get a 41 megapixel sensor that delivers incredible optical image quality either way. There is pretty much nothing else to say this is a great device if you guys are liking, especially the color choices. There's a gray, a white, a black and a yellow and I, of course went with yellow because that seems pretty sweet. But otherwise that's been it.

Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video feel free to give a thumbs up below and there's also a subscribe button below. If you want to get more of the videos I upload like this, thank you for watching, and I'll talk to you guys very soon and then yeah this. You.

Source : Marques Brownlee