Nokia’s recent entrant in Lumia family the Lumia 1020 is a total feature packed smartphone using Windows Phone 8 and and 41 MPx camera that can outrun your mighty DSLR’s even.
The dimensions in which Nokia has managed to pack in such a powerful hardware and Ultra High- res camera is totally impressive. For that they had to do away with the wireless charging shell with an optional accessory available to add the functionality. A 4.5-inch screen, 130 mm height 71 mm wide and weighs 158 grams with a bump to carry the 41-megapixel PureView camera, which feels like a kickstand when laid flat.
Specs that smartphone features include Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core 1.5 GHz processor, 1280×768, 334 ppi, 4.5 inch display, 2000 mAh battery, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage and added 7 GB of free cloud storage on Microsoft SkyDrive
This year we have pretty good number of smartphones flaunting Good cameras with added functionality to compete with Standalone Cameras, be it Blackberry with Ultrapixel or HTC or Samsung.
Nokia is clearly far ahead in this thanks to 41 MPx Pureview Camera with a Xenon flash, optical image stabilization capabilities and Carl Zeiss six lens optics in Lumia 1020. A lot of Camera functionalities have been added in the Phone because it runs on robust WP 8 platform. With two camera modes: Nokia Pro Cam and Nokia Smart Cam.
Nokia Pro Cam:
Gives feel of a fully-fledged digital camera things like aperture, exposure time and white balance, and manual focus could be made manaually or automatically set.
With PhotoBeamer you could share pics to any screen be it another smartphone, tablet or laptop, PCs and televisions. Photos are stored on Nokia’s servers for this temporarily.
Cinemagraph allows movie and still photography mixtures while capturing.
The camera can pick some great shots in low lights with “oversampling” with rich color, and also powers the HD video recording on the Lumia 1020.
Nokia Smart Cam:
This facility finds use in clicking Best shot with in-photo editing, combining multiple shots into one picture, Strobe effect which can remove movement from still photos or choose a Best face from series of shots.
Added to them is the augmented reality capabilities within the camera app through Microsoft’s Bing “Vision” feature HERE Maps product.
Nokia has also released a separate SDK to take full advantage of Camera feature of Pureview sensor, which finds use in partner apps like Path and Hippstamatic, But still some serious developer adoption for Windows Phone apps and platform are needed for sales to kick off and for proper response in public for WP 8.
As far as distribution of such an advanced and feature packed Lumia 1020 is concerned, currently phone is available for a two-year contract with AT&T for $299 making it a little sour choice for buyers, being locked on to one carrier with such steep price. The credibility of Windows Phone 8 ecosystem and App support on it is a big cause of worry for potential buyers because phone is awesome camera packed in a normal smartphone, so could be waste of money if you don’t have much use of camera feature.