The Nokia Lumia 1520 is a phone that takes all the best bits of the Finnish brand and stuffs them into a dramatically oversized package.
The handset, which brings the first round of supercharged Windows Phone handsets to the market, is really rather large. Think HTC One Max rather than Galaxy Note 3 and you’ll get the picture.
The Lumia 1520 is the first Windows Phone with 1080p resolution, and it’s rocking the biggest screen yet – a 6-inch offering in a large, polycarbonate body.
It’s also the first Nokia to come with a nanoSIM tray, meaning a number of sad upgraders who realise that once again they’ll have to order a new SIM card.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, given this is the biggest phone Nokia has ever created, but does mean that future models will be given a little more design room to play with.
It’s also using a Snapdragon 800 quad-core CPU, supplemented with 2GB of RAM, to really make things speed along under the finger.
In our testing, the speed really was there, and it’s hard to explain how important the upgrade to the 800 processor really is. We wouldn’t advocate an upgrade to a quad-core CPU for the sake of it, but in this case it’s a significant improvement over the Lumia 1020.
Everything opened that little bit quicker, the overall speed of browsing (which has always been reliable, rather than nippy, on Windows Phone) was improved and generally you could tell that things were working a bit more smoothly when using the phone.
For instance, using the Pureview 20MP camera was a lot faster in general use, and web pages opened with much more urgency than they had before.
Even TechRadar managed to flick up on the six inch display with more aplomb, and while the zooming ability of the phone was still hampered by the need to use Internet Explorer we still found it to be a real step forward when it came to using the phone for the fun tasks we’d want a larger display to allow.
What else impressed us? Well, the addition of the microSD slot means you can supplement the 32GB of onboard storage with 64GB of expandable goodness… Google and friends might be trying to rip these from our handsets, but we’re really happy to see hot swapping on offer.
The Nokia Lumia 1520 will be on sale very soon for those in the US, although other territories will have to wait a little longer… Europe is covered but we’ve got a scary feeling that we’ll be into 2014 before it goes on our shelves.
The Pureview camera is obviously a big step up for Nokia again – it’s not the 41MP option found in the Lumia 1020, but it does pop in at 20MP, and loses the extra heft the cameraphone flagship brought.
It also dispenses with the Xenon flash, but that, combined with the Snapdragon 800 processor moves the Lumia 1520 into a more useable option… we got so fed up with the processing speed of the 1020, despite the results often being brilliant.
Another great ability of the Lumia 1520 is the ability to output RAW files, although it can’t manipulate them on the device itself. However, it’s another boon for the Finnish firm, as it means professional photographers, or those that like to really edit properly, will be able to get the maximum from the photos.
Optical image stabilisation, something we thought we’d be seeing on a lot more phones by now, is thankfully here again, proving the photo-ability of the device nicely – plus the 5MP shareable shot is something we’re always glad to see for social networking.
Here, Nokia’s mapping team, has combined with the photo guys to create Storyteller, an app that places your pics and other such juicy photonuggets on a map, enabling you to create a location-based tale that you can easily get to by pinching inwards on the snap to jump straight into the map view.
This was handled easily by the Snapdragon processor, and we were impressed with the overall design of the app. We’re not fans of the way Here maps looks generally, but this little addition does go some way towards improving it.
The final thing we’d like to talk up is the battery: Nokia has slapped a 3400mAh power pack in there to keep things ticking along. Combined with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU this should equate to some really long standby time.
More importantly, this means that when you’re taking loads of photos at max resolution you’ll be able to use the phone for more than a minute before it dies in your hands.
The price is a little more palatable though for this slice of technological power from Nokia, with the $749 price tag (around £460 / AUS$775) meaning it will rival the likes of Samsung’s Note 3 and HTC’s One Max in the pricing wars, while beating them both in some ways on specs.
That’s not a phrase we thought we’d be saying about Nokia any time soon.
Early verdict
What’s Nokia done here? Made something that we can’t criticise from the spec sheet alone? The answer has to be yes: the CPU, screen, design and expansion offerings are all the things we’ve been gagging to see for months, if not years.
The extra apps are standard fare from the firm: bringing user upgrades in a way that delivers actual performance… we’re actually quite intrigued by Storyteller as an app, although it can be a little cumbersome to use.
We’ll be fleshing out this hands on in the next hour or two, so pop back later today to see more of an in-depth look at Nokia’s flagship… but if you’re the odd sort who makes an instant decision and won’t budge from it, we can honestly say this might be the first Nokia phone in ages that we can recommend without worry.
That’s if you can get past the craziness of more Windows Phone tiles on your home screen, that is…
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