And here she is, in all of her glory. We’ve been hearing plenty about the Lumia 1020 in the lead up to this event, and now, after a proper on-stage unveiling, we’ve finally got our hands on one. Granted, it’s not the eye-popping yellow version Elop showed off on-stage (we got to play with the white and black versions), but it’ll do nicely. As expected, the hardware’s a beauty on this thing. There’s that slick unibody design we’ve come to expect from recent Lumia devices, and in spite of amped up optics, the company hasn’t really done too much to sacrifice weight and profile. On the front is an eye-catching 4.5-inch AMOLED PureMotion HD+ display 1,280 x 768 pixel display, which nicely compliments Windows 8’s bright UI. Nokia’s also promised that the Gorilla Glass 3 display works well with gloves and is still readable in sunlight, but we’ll have to get back to you on both of those.
Remember that thing we said about the slim profile? We’ll there’s one important, but understandable caveat to that. The lens juts out a bit on the back of the thing, so if you try to lay it on that side, it won’t sit flatly — but as Elop said, the back is the new front, so maybe rest it on that shiny display, we guess… About a third of the back side is monopolized by that big lens. Along the top, you’ll see a large flash along with three buttons — one for volume (for that amped up speaker Nokia’s built in), one for power and one, naturally, for the camera. That, after all, is kind of the point here.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 has arrived, and with it comes a set of accessories that, in one case, is a big boost for the machine for battery life and grip. The other case is indeed a case as well, a wireless charging case that works the same as the wireless charging case for the Nokia Lumia 925, with contact points that make the machine able to charge with QI wireless charging devices galore.
The charging case is made of the same plastic as the rest of the Lumia 1020 and comes in black, white, and yellow to match the phone perfectly. These cases add minimal bulk to the device itself, and appear rather fashionable when mixed. We recommend pairing the black with the yellow and the yellow with the black, as it were.
You’ll find the camera grip case to be a bit more engaging, of course. This case makes the machine a bit more bulky, but with good intent. Here you’ve got an added measure of plastic on the right so that your human hand is able to fit around and hold the Lumia 1020 like a normal point-and-shoot camera. This space isn’t wasted on just that grip, of course, also adding an extra 1030mAh of battery space to the machine, plugging in through the 1020′s microUSB port.
This accessory only appears to be popping up in white in the wild, thus far, but you can expect more than one color in the near future (black and yellow at least, of course). It’s also apparent that this accessory fits the 1020 specifically, but we wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it also clipped on well with previous similarly-sized smartphones such as the 920, 925, and 928. We shall see!
It has been confirmed today that Flipboard and Path are going to be released soon for Windows Phone 8. There will also be an exclusive Hipstamatic app released alongside the Lumia 1020.
Amazon and Miramax have entered in to a licensing agreement. Hundreds of Miramax films will now be available for Amazon Prime Instant Video subscribers.
We knew good and well it was coming, and now we’ve both a date and a launch partner to hone in on: that’s “tomorrow” and “T-Mobile Poland,” respectively. After going big (as opposed to home) at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, Mozilla has just announced that the Firefox OS-powered Alcatel One Touch Fire will ship tomorrow in Poland for 1 zloty (practically free, for those curious) in combination with “a very attractive tariff.” Market launches in additional European countries will follow in the fall, with German handsets to be marketed via Deutsche Telekom’s second brand congstar. DT’s subsidiaries in Hungary (Magyar Telekom) and Greece (COSMOTE) will also initiate sales of the handset this fall, but pricing in those regions has yet to be revealed. As for word on a US release via Sprint? Still waiting, sadly.
If there ever was an oxymoron, a gaming notebook would fit the mould in my books. After all, if you want a lean, mean, gaming machine, a souped up desktop would work to your advantage a whole lot more than a notebook which has its innards pimped out to resemble the performance of a gaming desktop. I know, there has been some notable standouts in the world of gaming notebooks in the past, but lugging those bad boys around can be hazardous to your health, especially when you do not want to dislocate your shoulder after a long day on the showfloor with a monster of a gaming notebook in your backpack. Enter Digital Storm’s VELOCE gaming notebook that intends to shatter conventional views about it.
For starters, the VELOCE gaming notebook is a 13.3” slim machine which definitely has looks that betrays its performance. Most folks might think of the VELOCE to be an ordinary working machine, but despite its 4.6 pound chassis (battery included) that measures a mere 1.26” thin, it packs more than enough graphical and gaming firepower underneath the hood to take you and a bunch of other naysayers aback.
The VELOCE holds the distinction of being the first Haswell powered slim gaming notebook that comes with a Full HD resolution display that will certainly not come up short when it wants to show off stunning visuals. Depending on the hardware configuration of your choice, the VELOCE gaming notebook would retail from $1,535 upwards, and runs on an Intel Core i7 4800MQ processor, NVIDIA’s GTX 765M graphics card, carries 8GB RAM, and a full high-resolution HD screen (1920×1080) 13.3″ display as mentioned earlier. There is also enough room to stash a couple of drives (mSATA & 2.5”) in a RAID configuration, while connectivity options include a dedicated internal network port, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, HDMI 1.4, VGA video out ports and Bluetooth. Are your hands itching to wrap around the VELOCE gaming notebook? It will be available from July 17th onwards.
Can 41-megapixels save Nokia? The Nokia Lumia 1020 doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, thanks to the number of leaks we’ve already seen, but that doesn’t make it any less of an engineering achievement. Windows Phone 8 we know, but PureView on the platform is new, and a strong differentiator from anything we’ve seen on iPhone or Android before. Read on for our hands-on first impressions.
From the front, it’s the same Nokia we’re used to. Windows Phone 8′s squared-off UI and bold colors looks great on the 4.5-inch 1280 x 768 AMOLED display, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a a Lumia 920 instead. Above the display there’s a front-facing camera with a wide-angle lens, for fitting in more people during each shot.
It’s when you turn the Lumia 1020 around that things get interesting. Nokia has been pushing its phones’ photographic abilities for some time – including a few Windows Phones with PureView branding, like the Lumia 920 and 925 – but this is the biggest sensor ever to show up on a modern smartphone and it makes its presence known.
In the hand, it’s recognizably a Lumia but carrying some extra heft. The PureView sensor – all 41-megapixels of it – isn’t small, and that bulk, not to mention the lenses that go with it, takes its toll on the familiar unibody design. It’s worth noting the improvement over the original Nokia 808 PureView, though: an extra year or so of development has shaved vital millimeters off the camera assembly, and while you’ll notice the Lumia 1020 in your pocket, carrying it day to day would certainly not be an impossibility.
The new Pro Camera app is a considerable improvement over the standard Windows Phone software, since it brings many manual features to the fore. There’s a regular settings page, with control over the dual-shot resolution, what sort of grid you see in the preview screen – such as a square, the “golden ratio”, or rule-of-thirds – and aspect ratio, but there’s also a set of radial sliders that are overlaid onto the preview screen itself.
With them, you can quickly change exposure (including extra-long exposures for light-trace shots), white balance, ISO, shutter speed, and other key settings without having to leave jump between screens. We’ve seen similar on the Samsung Galaxy Camera, but where Samsung’s dials are opaque, and cover the screen, Nokia’s are transparent and so don’t stop you from actually framing an image. Best of all, adjusting the dials shows you in real-time exactly what the impact will be on the final shot.
The clever stuff is how the megapixels are used, however. The Lumia 1020 captures a 5-megapixel oversampled image – combining the data from seven nearby pixels for more accuracy – and a roughly 38-megapixel image for more flexibility in post-processing. That means you can zoom into images you’ve already taken, with the Lumia 1020 using the original image so that the enlargement is lossless. It’s the same in video, with up to 6x lossless zooming possible even during high-definition video recording.
We’ll have to wait until we can spend some serious time with the Lumia 1020 before we can judge the camera properly. Still, just from a brief play with it, it’s clear that Nokia is offering something unique among today’s smartphones. The ability to zoom massively into photos and still get crisp images is incredible, and something that rivals like Samsung are having to fit huge optical zooms – on handsets like the Galaxy S4 Zoom – to achieve similar.
As for whether it makes up for the extra bulk, we’re already leaning toward saying yes. The downside is the price: at $299.99 on a new, two year AT&T agreement it’s expensive (though, as it has 32GB of storage, it’s actually the same price as a comparable iPhone 5, though we doubt most shoppers will see it that way) and, given Windows Phone and, indeed, Nokia, are still very much challengers, that doesn’t seem the best pricing strategy to drum up sales.
We’ll have more on the Nokia Lumia 1020 and the PureView system very soon.
Nokia’s new Lumia 1020 comes with a host of features you might not be used to on a humble smartphone. And one of the most intriguing is the Lumia’s radical new approach to zoom. Here’s how it works.
You’ve undoubtedly been warned about how easy it is to have your identity stolen online over. And over. And over again. But we just never learn. Clearly, it’s going to take a little something more to hit the message home. Something like, oh, stealing an actual person’s identity, terrifying him, and creating what might be the creepiest ad in modern memory.
I always find Star Trek’s utopia future pretty dumb. The human race is never going to be perfect and live in harmony. Because… This thing. This gun from the future is all kinds of bad-ass. It looks like Smith and Wesson made love to TRON and left this bright glowing and deadly baby on our doorstep.
This is a fully-functioning coilgun that launches metal bolts with the power of electricity. The coilgun technology you see here was all jammed inside and around a G36 airsoft gun.
It has a night vision infrared camera and viewfinder, lasers, and a magazine that holds batteries instead of bullets. And if you saw those three lasers at the end of the rifles barrels pointing your way, you’d better duck.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
