New Delhi, July 12: Nokia has officially unveiled a new smartphone, the Lumia 1020, a Windows Phone with a 41-megapixel camera. Tech bloggers say the camera quality is the highest in the market. The phone will be exclusive to AT&T in the United States, available from July 26 for $299.99 with a two-year contract. Preorders begin July 16.
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop called it a "flagship device" at an event in New York City on Thursday. The phone's camera is capable of capturing 41MP images in either 3:2 or 16:9 aspect ratio. It also simultaneously creates a 5MP version of the image meant for sharing.
Besides 41 megapixels, Nokia has brought two significant improvements to the Lumia 1020 that weren't present in the 808 PureView: a backside-illuminated sensor and optical image stabilization.
Here, Nokia pairs an ultralarge camera sensor with the company's PureView image-processing software. The phone's camera also has an optical image stabilization similar to the Lumia 920. This helps in stabilizing the entire image-capturing mechanism. A Xenon flash, which is technically superior to the common LED flash, helps the camera capture sharp images at night with good color accuracy.
Nokia's tagline for the smartphone is "Zoom. Reinvented." However, the 1020 doesn't have an optical zoom. Since the sensor is so pixel-dense, when you zoom before taking a photo the Lumia 1020 will only use a portion of the sensor to take the photo — effectively zooming you in without degrading the quality. Like the 808 PureView, you'll get up to 3x zoom with the Lumia 1020.
The most important feature of the smartphone is the sensor size: 2/3-inch. That's smaller than the 808's 1/1.2-inch sensor, but still larger than what's found in traditional smartphones (1/3.2-inch) and it's the same size as the sensor in the rather good Fujifilm X10. The larger sensor capture more light meaning better pictures.
At the same time, Nopkia also tossed in a "Pro Camera" app that looks pretty promising. The UI of the app is made up of a series of semicircle sliders that looks similar to the Samsung Galaxy Camera's interface.
Significantly, forty-one megapixels means lots of pixels, more than most people can and will really use, but the 1020's higher megapixel count translates into a 5-megapixel image with lossless zooming for higher-quality cropped photos.
The Lumia 1020 is slightly thinner and lighter than the Lumia 920. The screen on this 4G LTE smartphone has the same familiar 4.5-inch AMOLED PureMotion HD+ display with a 1,280x768-pixel HD display and a 16:9 aspect ratio. On the top there is Nokia's Clear Black filter to cut down on outdoor glare. As with the new guard of Lumia phones, this 1020 has an ultrasensitive touch screen that you can operate with your fingernail or gloved hand.
The 1020 runs on a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, and has 32GB of internal memory, supplemented by 7GB of SkyDrive cloud storage, courtesy of Microsoft.
Although the Lumia 1020 will not come with wireless charging built in, you can buy an aftermarket charging cover.
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