Nokia Lumia 1020 packs 41-megapixel camera whopper

I am glad that there's more competition in the marketplace rather than just Apple and Android and that there are companies looking beyond earnings in their next quarter.

Apple could have probably made more money over the years by selling Macs with Windows and retiring their own OS.

Competition is good, for example see the flat look and concentration on typography that both Android and iOS borrowed from Windows Phone.

That's why I don't get all the deriding of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone. Android has plenty hardware OEMs behind it.

>> despite the OS

For a normal user, how much does the OS matter in 2013?

The OS playing ground is much more level today than it was in 2008.

I'll be upgrading my iPhone 4 soon, and frankly, I'll be considering everything OS out there. I'll actually be choosing based on hardware more than OS, because all the web services that I use are supported by every operating system.

I guess if you're really into apps, the ecosystem might matter, but I suspect a normal, non-geek really doesn't need access to hundreds of thousands of apps if their core needs are satisfied.

I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too. Having a differentiation that you can't protect at all is not worth having many less apps to offer.

I went from iOS Google Maps->Apple Maps->iOS Google Maps on my iPhones. The Google Maps worked really well.

The HERE Drive+ from Nokia Maps though is fantastic. One nice feature (of many)... it shows you the current speed limit on every road that you're on. It also shows you your current speed and it is dead-on accurate. It can even be set to give an alert if you exceed the speed limit by x MPH.

Hands down, the built-in Lumia 928 maps application is better than any maps application I ever used on any of my three iPhones.

Nokia Maps is _amazing_ and has been since the Symbian days, even more so by the fact that you can download maps beforehand (whole countries) and use them offline. Utterly unparalleled might be a bit harsh.

However, the software elegance is the primary differentiating factor.

So none of you guys cares about openness, uh? Too bad, if more people, we wouldn't have the problem of closed platforms to begin with.

+1 I haven't been able to get maps to work at all on my Nokia 920, I can't even figure what the map app is....everything is prefixed as Nokia something app with some weird names that don't work. Suffice it to say, I'm forced to use my old iPhone for anything that involves a map.

Windows phone would be much better if they offered a google map app for it.

Lets just to with an example...I wanted to find the nearest post office, typed it in, I got a result about 9 hours flight away from where I lived. Google maps was able to return something down the street.

Long time ago I had an old Windows phone, HTC Diamond and some other wierd pda/phone type thing that was awful. Since that I went "Android" - I've used HTC Hero, Desire, Xperia Arc and Xperia S. Now I'm using Lumia 920 I got from my workplace.

I used to think that Google Maps was great, but after using Nokia's HERE maps I have to say, HERE is better. Not sure if it's the hardware, but first of all it's A LOT faster than Google Maps ever was. Secondly, HERE maps work offline (altough I just heard Google is finally enabling this with their maps).

Without wanting to sound like fanboy, the 920 is a great phone: it just works. The UX is better than in android, mainly because different apps all follow same guidelines on how to implement UI navigation/actions.

On the android phones I had, most of the time it was "free for all" with the UX as different manufacturers and devs implemented their own ideas on how nav/actions should work.

Other things I can say about 920: battery time is great, wifi (and wifi sharing) work flawlessly, sound quality is great both ways and the _camera_ is best I ever used in a mobile phone. It just puts all other mobile phones to shame.

I'm looking forwards to 1020 and hope to get one when they are available.

Only bad thing I can say is the Windows store and apps. I miss quite a few apps I used on my android phones. It's a shame so many devs only focus on apple/android.

I was working at jimmy johns as a driver about four months ago. One of the drivers there had a Nokia phone, I had an android, and obviously delivering you often get addresses that are sometimes slightly incorrect etc. Google maps never failed me, the windows phone guy would get lost constantly. I don't know why, could be just bad driving, but one thing that the google maps seemed to be better at was determining the location of businesses and for traffic and TRAINS (since the town I was in had 2 different tracks).

In short, I'd have to agree that google maps is unparalleled (important to note that the iPhone people didn't even bother using their maps).

I use RemoteDesktop from Topperware. The mouse and keyboard UI work very well for me.

IE 11 will include WebGL support [1], and due to Microsoft's 'core systems' sharing across big Windows and Windows Phone, this is likely to propogate down to the phone.

However the lack of webkit will remain :(

[1] http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/06/ie11

FYI, Android devices will soon not use WebKit, as Chrome is changing to Blink. Whilst Blink is a fork of WebKit, I believe that the differences between mobile Safari and mobile IE will be as small as the differences between Safari and Chrome.

As an iPhone user, I can chime in with my opinion.

It looks like the iPhone and 920 battery life are both pretty abysmal http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/phones-3/best-phone-batt...

CPU and GPU for the end user isn't important. What is important is the perf of the UI, which WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware.

I'd also say Nokia is very closely behind Apple in build quality if not on par. And their form factors have been great as well.

iPhone/iOS definitely has a better ecosystem, but the apps on WP8 are getting better.

Battery, build quality and form factor are not better for the iPhone. Battery's about the same, build quality is similar, but iPhone loses points for being either easy to scratch (black 5) or easy to crack (4, 4S). Apple in general makes stylish but not robust phones. iPhone loses on the form factor because it really has only one that is acceptable - the 5. I am typing this on a 4s and the screen is too small and the shape does not feel as good in the hand as the round polycarbonate Lumias.

CPU and GPU don't seem to be so different subjectively. Both are smooth.

The apps are vastly better on iOS, even the ones that are on both platforms e.g. one cannot insert rows in Excel for WP 7 or add annotations in Kindle. Support seems better for Apple, as Lumia 800 and 900 customers did not get WP8, while the older iPhone 4 will get iOS 7!

You know you can change the touch screen sensitivity?

True - I doubt that any of the hardware manufacturers for Android have the technology to top what Nokia did with Lumia 1020. Nokia is completely invested in camera unlike HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.,

... and by white paper you mean "marketing material"? I had Nokia PureView 808 and I agree that it is nice and helps making good photos when downscaled. Idea to use sensor in this way is really interesting but in the end that just covers one little thing from many that are important in photography. For the same (if not lower) price you can buy good compact (if it must be pocketable) or system photo camera (if size matters but can be slightly bigger) and enjoy all benefits of photography like high ISO numbers, big sensor (not in megapixels but by area that is more important than megapixels), possibility to change aperture (this one is big for me because of bokeh) and some other.

It is just a little bit bigger sensor in the end with one smart idea that is not contributing much.

You're correct

In case anyone's looking for a phone with a camera that saves RAW, the Nokia N900 does.

http://fcam.garage.maemo.org/fcamera.html

>> The problem with phone cameras (mostly) ins't the sensor, it's the glass, or lack there-of.

Is that a problem with the camera or the user's expectations of what that camera can do?

You can only push the laws of physics (with respect to optics, especially) so far, and if you want a camera that can fit in the pocket of a pair of skinny jeans, compromises must be made.

I won't argue that camera phone lenses are high quality, but you can really only push a 1/3" or 1/4" sensor so far.

It's both, actually. But that said, Nokia uses very good glass.

It's only once you get up to P&Ss and DSLRs that the glass can really hold back the sensors -- phone sensors are always struggling to make a compromise between package size and image quality, and usually package size wins.

Over 5 inches big, though. Sigh.

I think he might be on to something. Instagram/Tweeting pictures of random stuff is quite big.

I don't text nearly as much as I used to. Most of my friends communicate using either Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and our recent, biggest replacement for texting, Snapchat.

I paid this for the 920, huge disappointment.

True. Worst part is that in the long run combined with the right contract, that's still a cheaper option.

Phones tied to contracts are scams.

41 megapixels can't be nice on a crappy sensor and lenses system. 41 megapixels would be interesting on a real camera unless someone wants to print oversampled stuff.

  Nokia's really screwing up the messaging on this, as people are fixating on the megapixel count

HTC has been trying to push the message you suggest with the camera on the HTC One, and while the One is a great device and (I think) doing well for HTC, no one is really talking about their camera -- even though it is a superior camera to most other phones. Megapixels are like Clock Speed was a decade ago: there are more important stats to look at, but consumers just see the one number.

I'm not making any judgement, I'm just saying the point of 41 megapixels isn't to give consumers a huge picture, it's to give them a reason to buy the phone.

I do believe Nokia has been very clear that the high megapixels is meant to be used as supersampling to reduce noise in normal sized pictures. They are after all targeting the enthusiast photographer who likes to (believe he) understands how camera's work.

Also, from an engineering point of view it's pretty neat: if the idea is to downsize the final picture to 5 mp, while using cropping on the pre-downsampled image to zoom, that means you can focus on having a high optical resolution in the centre of a fixed focal lens, and worry less about the edges. That has lots of advantages: a fixed focal lens is less complicated than a zoom lens, which has the side effect of making it easier to keep the lense flat,and getting a higher optical resolution in the centre is easier to do from an optics standpoint.

second that. If you are saying that after using Windows Phone then I respect it but I won't write off windows phone without giving it a shot. Take this from someone who has tried iPhone for a year before moving to Windows Phone.

I've actually given it a shot. It's a fine OS, no debate there, but the app market is key for me.

I read an article a while back when they were just testing this tech. It said the camera takes a picture at the full ~40MP res and then algorithmically chooses the best pixels and sizes down the image to a more reasonable 8MP. Apparently this has a huge benefit on low light shooting.

Pixels are also used for lossless zoom. You can crop a 5 MPix image from the full image with about similar quality as straight from iPhone's sensor.

There are a few ways this is advantageous. Modern camera sensors have a bayer filter in front of them - a RGB grid basically. This allows each pixel to see only one color of light.

The resulting image is "demosaiced" with an algorithm, where by each pixel determines the two colors it's missing by borrowing from nearby pixels.

This can cause some artifacts. By squeezing more pixels into the same space, effectively each resulting pixels in the ~8MP image has actual RGB data, not just data borrowed from neighbors.

The Nokia's pixels by my calcs are ~1.44 microns which is a little larger than an iPhone 5's pixels (~1.4 microns).

The Nokia sensor has around 5.5x the surface area of the iPhone 5 but only 5.125x the resolution.

So basically the Nokia's advantage is having both a high quantity of pixels and having larger pixels.

I think Sony is rumored to use a RX100 lens or sensor in their upcoming Sony Honami (of 20 MP).

First, my statement had to do with the 1/1.2" sensor that Nokia is using. Close in size to the RX100 and Nikon 1, but we can't assume that means the same level of image quality- there's a pretty big gap between the RX100 and Nikon 1 IQ scores, for instance.

To your point, I agree. I've seen comparable (and sometimes higher) IQ from my RX100 than I do from various MFT and APS-C DSLR/MILC cams with their kit lenses including the Canon T3i and T4i, GX1, a few NEXes, and Nikon D3000-D3200. The RX100 fares well against those cameras at the wide end of the zoom range when it comes to low light performance and thin DOF as well. Of course, you could spend more and get better lenses for those cameras and beat the RX100 in low light.

I do hope that the new sensor in the 70D provides an actual improvement in ISO score if not IQ and isn't just the older sensor with OSPDAF added.

But, the Nokia has a 1/1.2" sensor. That's huge -- almost 5.5x times the surface area of the iPhone 5's sensor. It's almost as large as the sensor in a Nikon 1 or Sony RX100 series camera.

Yes, the pixels are small at ~1.44 microns (I think most experts consider 6 microns to be the "ideal" size) so I would think the pixel density is actually lower than most cameraphones (the iPhone 5 is around ~1.39 microns).

> This is part of the reason why a 16MP SLR and a 16MP point-and-shoot have vastly different image qualities.

I'm sure the fact that the SLR's sensor is physically sixteen times larger has nothing to do with it...

As I said above, MP is just one way to measure a sensor's performance characteristics, and they have kind of ignored some others (dynamic range in particular).

I'm not sure I follow your argument about "light behaving differently as pixels get smaller." I'm not even sure if that argument has scientific merit.

Surely this phone does not store raw images.

Ask Valve...