The first large-screen phone from Nokia has a superb screen, great camera and - increasingly - an adequate ecosystem.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better screen than that on the Nokia Lumia 1520 smartphone. And if all the main operating systems were starting with no apps and zero momentum, I’m not sure I’ve seen a better operating system than the latest version of Windows Phone. Add to that Nokia’s famous build quality and the 1520 ought surely to be the top large-screen mobile on the market.
In many ways, it is: there’s a 1080p HD screen, a superb 20MP camera, with four microphones that means it picks up sound far better when you’re recording video. There’s a processor that makes the OS zip along without any perceptible lag. Rival models do all these things perfectly well, but it is hard to deny the excellence of the 1520 on paper, especially when in practice it comes with a camera that offers an intuitive interface and superb image quality, and with a battery life that lasts me more than the whole day. It even comes with Microsoft Office.
Where users may not like the 1520, however, is simply in the concept: a 6” screen is very big, and it’s not quite clear what the purpose of this sort of a Windows Phone device specifically is. It competes with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which aims with its stylus to replace your old-fashioned notepad. The 1520 has no such bells and whistles but if you’ve got big hands and want a giant screen, it’s more than all the device you could want. But then the HTC One Max provides a similar function for Android; the phablet category is gaining growing numbers of fans.
The appeal elsewhere is typical Nokia – a superb camera interface that now even offers the pro-standard raw format, an impressive night mode, and an app called Storyteller that uses geolocation for photographs to group them together into reasonable sets. It’s not that different from Samsung’s equivalent, but it’s a welcome addition to Windows Phone. Design-wise, Nokia’s Lumias look as lovely as ever with its plastic unibody, and increasingly what’s on screen is as good as the form factor. As with previous Lumias you can use it with gloves on too.
Increasingly, it’s also hard to justify the old criticism that Windows Phone is not what it needs to be in terms both of the number of apps available and the quality of them. That’s not to say that everything is rosy, but now that even software such as Instagram is on board, it’s harder to complain; the live tiles idea, in which the phone shows huge amounts of information at a glance, is particularly useful on a phone of this size. And more importantly, it remains the operating system that combines versatility with elegance: Apple’s iOS is very much controlled by Apple, largely for the better, while Android allows huge freedoms for manufacturers to introduce unhelpful complications.
With a remarkable camera, a superb screen and an improving OS, the 1520 is the best Windows Phone yet. It may well also be the device that kicks off the next phase of Windows Phone’s growth.
Manufacturer's specifications:
Dimensions: 162.8 x 85.4 x 8.7mm
Display size: 6 '' (1920 x 1080)
Maximum talk time (2G): 27.4 h
Maximum talk time (3G): 25.1 h
Maximum music playback time: 124 h
Wireless charging
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Quad-core 2.2 GHz
Nano SIM
User data storage: In device, Memory card, SkyDrive cloud storage
RAM: 2 GB
Mass memory: 32 GB
Expandable memory card type: MicroSD
Maximum memory card size: 64 GB
Free cloud storage: 7 GB
Attached Images