Nokia Lumia 1020 review: it's a phone, it's a camera - what a camera

Nokia's claims of a 41-megapixel camera are true: they're all in there, in this unusual-looking phone. But what about the apps to use those pictures?

Nokia's new smartphone, the Lumia 1020. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

[Editor's note: some of the pictures in this article are large - around 2MB each - and may take some time to load, depending on the speed of your connection.]

My first cameraphone was a Sony Ericsson T68i, which added the camera in the form of a bolt-on attachment to the handset itself . I used that almost exactly 11 years ago, taking it on a birthday-present-to-myself trip to India. I still have the handset somewhere; sadly, none of the photos has survived.

At the time the camera element seemed both miraculous and pointless. I couldn't see why anyone would want to take pictures with a phone, given how poor they were, but I remember applauding the sheer demented genius of joining two apparently very different bits of hardware to create a Frankenstein's monster of consumer technology.

Fast forward 11 years, to what is now the state-of-the art cameraphone – the Nokia Lumia 1020. In the age of instant, always-on social media, adding a camera to a phone now makes perfect sense: people take and share photographs every minute of every day thanks to the vast improvement in the camera technology and much better mobile connectivity.

Nokia first unveiled the technology that now graces the 1020 in its 808 Pureview in July last year. At the time it was hailed as spectacular, but a dead end, as it was part of the Finnish company's final Symbian phone.

The good news is that it's still spectacular, even more so now as it's on the latest handset in the Windows Phone Lumia range. It's not perfect, but it's a cameraphone that, while it doesn't make my trusty Nikon D80 redundant, does make me think twice about lugging it along to events.

Apps and all

The subject of apps, or lack thereof, comes up every time the Windows Phone platform is reviewed, and some big names are indeed still missing: there's no Instagram (although there are a number of good third-party alternatives and Hipstamatic's Oggl Pro recently launched). Urban taxi-users will miss Hailo and Kabbee. However, Dropbox is now on the platform, while Vine, Flipboard and Path are "coming soon".

I add a small handful of apps - Google Search, Adobe Reader, Kindle, PrimeTube and Addison Lee - to a Windows Phone handset, but then I'm not a big user of apps, not least because so much functionality is baked in to the OS. WP comes with Office, plus 7GB of Skydrive space; and the People hub integrates Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn: all three also provide official apps, but there's little need to fire them up. The most problematic absences are Google's apps: the ongoing spat between Google and Microsoft over YouTube continues to rumble, while Gmail users will shortly have to use three protocols (IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV) to connect a WP device to their stuff as Google is withdrawing access via Exchange Active Sync. If you're a big Google user, while you can connect, it's trickier than on other platforms – and some might well find that a reason to choose another platform.

Camera: the technology bit

First, here's the technology bit (and here's a PDF from Nokia to explain it). The heart of the camera is a 41-megapixel (MP) sensor which uses 1.1-micron back-side-illuminated pixels. What that means is a bigger area to capture light: it's the same idea as a medium-format camera, which seeks to improve the quality of images by having a bigger light-collecting device than its smaller counterpart, the SLR (single lens reflex) camera.

The comparison ends there, though. More and bigger pixels do usually equate to coarser grain and "noisier" (less precise) images, the processing software means that this camera oversamples – in other words, it takes information from all the pixels to produce one 5MP image that is really good.

That 5MP image is the one that's available for sharing, and you can post it from the app direct to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or SkyDrive, or add it to an email or picture message. You can also send your picture to OneNote, which is part of the Office suite all Windows Phones bundle.