Nokia Lumia 1020 Review

Nokia took the 41 megapixel idea from the Symbian 808 PureView, shrank the sensor to 1/1.5 inch, added optical stabilisation on ball bearings and a real xenon flash, and put it in a Windows Phone. Every shot is saved twice: a 5 megapixel image oversampled from the whole sensor, the cleanest phone photo of 2013 by a distance, and a 34 or 38 megapixel original you can reframe later, which is what lossless zoom meant.

Nokia Pro Camera gave you shutter speed to four seconds, ISO, white balance and manual focus on dials nobody else offered. The cost was time: two to three seconds between shots while the phone chewed the file, and a hump on the back that kept it rocking on the table. The rest is a Lumia 920 in a nicer suit. The Snapdragon S4 Plus at 1.5 GHz with 2 GB of RAM was already a generation behind the Snapdragon 800 phones of that summer; the 2000 mAh cell lasted a day only if you stopped taking pictures; the 4.5 inch 1280 by 768 ClearBlack AMOLED was lovely and sub-1080p when every rival had moved on.

Windows Phone 8 was fluid and starved: no Instagram at launch, no proper YouTube, a shrinking list of the apps that mattered. It got 8.1 and the Denim firmware, then Microsoft left it off the Windows 10 Mobile list, and that was that. AT&T sold it from July 26, 2013 at 299.99 dollars on a two-year contract, 659.99 without, and the contract price is the one recorded above.