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!
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.
IFTTT has been around for a couple of years now as an internet service that lets users customize connections between different appsanddevices. The name stands for If This Then That, which encapsulates the idea behind it — users can create automation Recipes that combine a Trigger (the “This”) that’ll result in an Action (the “That”). A popular example is to to have all your Instagram photos (the Trigger) automatically saved to your Dropbox folder (the Action). Services like Instagram and Dropbox are known as “Channels,” and there are different Triggers and Actions associated with each. While it’s a pretty neat concept, the only way to access IFTTT has been via the browser, and even then, Channels are limited to mostly web services.
IFTTT hopes to end all that today with its first-ever mobile app headed for iOS, aptly called IFTTT for iPhone. Not only does it provide a much more streamlined interface for Recipe creation — only five taps required — it also signifies an all-important next step in IFTTT’s evolution: the ability to hook into a device’s native Channels, namely Photos, Contacts and Reminders. Just like with the web services mentioned earlier, you can use them to create Recipes that take advantage of the phone’s capabilities. For example, you can have it so that all the photos you take with the front-facing camera will be sent to Flickr with the “selfie” tag, or you can automatically send new contacts an introductory “Nice to meet you” email. Join us after the break for more of the app’s features along with our hands-on impressions and some thoughts from IFTTT’s CEO and co-founder, Linden Tibbets.
This week SlashGear has had the opportunity to have an up-close-and-personal look at the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, taking photos and a bit of video as we did so. What you’ll see here is the machine’s ability to capture high-quality media in several different situations both light and dark, indoors and out. We’ll also be getting to a full-on comparison run-down of this machine with the abilities of the Samsung Galaxy Camera as well – but for now, the smaller and newer of the two.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom takes the body of what’s essentially the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini and applies one big fat camera to its back. That’s not to say that this machine is fat – not by a long shot. It’s a bit thinner than the Samsung Galaxy Camera and feels like a whole different ball game in practice.
This device boasts a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display on its back with a lovely piece of Gorilla Glass 3 to keep it all safe. While the touchscreen interface can control the majority of the bits and pieces you’ll be working with on this machine, you’ve also got a physical home button, back and menu buttons below the display (or to the right, depending on the orientation of the device when you’re holding it.)
Up front of this machine you’ve also got a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor with optical image stabilization working with 24-240mm 10x optical zoom, this paired with a F3.1-F6.3 lens with a Samsung Zoom Ring. We’ll get into the abilities of this ring as we move along into the full review – for now you’ll be glad to know that this ring’s abilities are not just limited to zooming in and out.
As it was with the Samsung Galaxy Camera, so too do you get a physical camera shutter button here. This device is made on one hand to be a phone – and it certainly looks the part from one side – and on the other a camera.
While you’ll get another healthy set of hands-on photos of this machine via Chris Davies from earlier this year in London, we’re kicking out the photo examples here and now. We’ll begin with a lovely macro photo of some wood.
The above image is 1 of 3 images linked to their original file. Click and see!
As with the majority of the photos taken in this article, the above is snapped with the Galaxy S4 Zoom’s back-facing camera. As the above was taken with Macro mode, below you’ll see a shot taken from afar using the device’s Landscape mode.
While we’re in the graveyard, it makes sense to get outdoorsy with several shots both close and far away with a near “magic hour” timing. These photos were taken mostly with the camera’s smart auto mode, selecting the modes based on the suggestions of the software.
Next you’ll see two shots, one from afar, one up close. Closer, that is. These shots are taken from the same location in a department store, one of them with the lens working with no zoom whatsoever, the other at 100% zoom – 10x zoom, that is.
The above image is 2 of 3 images linked to their original file. Click and see!
You’ll see a photo taken with the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom’s flash on full blast next, taken of a wheel of a cart with a bit of dirt on it.
Finally you’ll see a collection of odd shots – both up close and afar, with the photos showing the Galaxy S4 Zoom taken in mirrors. The photo of my face (me, Chris Burns, that is), was taken with this machine’s front-facing camera. It’s surprisingly good, don’t be alarmed.
Let us know what other subject matter and situations you’d like us to dive in on and we’ll deliver! This is only the first step in a full review process for this machine that’ll take the previous king Samsung Galaxy Camera to the cleaners!
The above image is 3 of 3 images linked to their original file. Click and see!
Photographers still go wide-eyed when you tell them the Sony Cyber-shot RX1R has a full-frame sensor. The party-trick of 2012′s RX1 is just as impressive in its new sibling; approached by a curious “enthusiast” while we were out in London this week testing out the updated version, we saw once again how disbelief quickly gave way to amazement and then lust when we explained the camera’s 24-megapixel prowess (swiftly followed by horror at the $2,800 price tag). This time around, you’re actually getting less with the RX1R: the anti-aliasing filter from the CMOS has been removed, for what Sony claims is an increase of detail. Read on for our first-impressions and some sample shots.
If you’re familiar with the original Cyber-shot RX1, you’ll hunt in vain for any noticeable differences between it and this new RX1R. Bar the addition of the red subscript “R” there’s literally nothing, externally, to tell them apart. Both are an easily handled 113.3 x 65.4 x 69.6 mm and around 453g, feeling more than sturdy in the hand thanks to solid metal construction. Even the lens cap feels premium, milled from metal rather than the lightweight plastic cover most lenses come with.
Nor has Sony tampered with the core specifications. So, you still get the 35mm F2.0 lens with an ISO range of 100 to 25,600, support for 14cm macro shots, up to 1080p60 AVCHD video recording, and support for various accessories including both optical and electronic viewfinders on the RX1R’s hot shoe. The interface is the same too, navigated via a control wheel next to the 3-inch, 1.2m-dot TFT LCD display (which is non-touch) that also functions as a 4-way joystick with center-select.
There’s also room for a dial to quickly snap through things like shutter speed, depending on which mode you have the top dial set to. Exposure gets its own dedicated dial on the top, too, while aperture and minimum focus are controlled by dials around the barrel of the fixed Zeiss Sonnar T* lens. That’s good for F2.0 to 22, and is near-silent in operation.
Sony RX1R hands-on:
Of course, what makes the Cyber-shot RX1R different is what it lacks: an optical low-pass filter. That’s the layer which is used to reduce moiré – the rainbow-style meshing you get occasionally when fine grid patterns in the subject clash at just the wrong angle with the CMOS’ own grid – by introducing a very slight blurring. The end result is less chance of moiré but at the cost of a slight reduction in sharpness.
Some photographers will do anything to avoid that loss in sharpness, and so cameras without anti-aliasing filters have become popular – albeit niche – in recent years. Sony promises the “sharpest detail ever” in fact, as long as you can stomach the potential for extra moiré.
In practice, you have to be suitably obsessed to notice any difference over the RX1: both versions produce fantastic images. Even Sony admits that those who will get the benefit from the RX1R are those who work only from the RAW images the camera spits out; otherwise, you’re unlikely to spot the changes. Some of that is down to software processing: in-camera JPEGs, for instance, take advantage of new algorithms Sony has loaded to offset the missing optical low-pass filter. Go hunting for it, and you can find it, but otherwise it’s effectively a non-issue.
There’s no denying that the Sony Cyber-shot RX1R is expensive. With an RRP of $2,800 – just like its RX1 sibling, which remains on sale alongside it – you’re paying proper DSLR prices for what’s in effect a fixed-lens compact. That’s a very special, compact, though, and if you prize portability over the flexibility of a DSLR, the RX1R has bags of appeal. The combination of a slight increase in detail probably means the RX1R will be the favorite of the two versions, but we’d not turn our nose up at either.
All of the sample shots in the following gallery are unedited, bar having been resized.
There’s a sense that, for all the usual launch hyperbole, Sony didn’t quite realize what a hit it would have with the original Cyber-shot RX100; that’s not a mistake it’s making second time around. The new Cyber-shot RX100 II builds on the same winning formula as before – fit a compact-scale body with a relatively large, 1-inch sensor for DSLR-style images in something eminently more portable – but improves the sensor and throws in more convenience features like an adjustable LCD, WiFi, and NFC. We took the Cyber-shot RX100 II to the streets of London to see what it could do, and whether this is the camera to make you leave your DSLR at home.
Outwardly, there’s not a huge amount to show for the Mark II changes. The RX100 II remains small camera for the sensor size; at 101.6 x 58.1 x 35.9 mm and 254g it’s not the smallest compact around, but then the smallest compact doesn’t accommodate a 20.2-megapixel backside-illuminated 1-inch Exmor R CMOS with optical image stabilization and a 3.6x optical zoom.
It’s that big sensor that Sony is so proud of: around 2.7x the size of what you’d find in a regular compact camera, and though still smaller than a DSLR’s CMOS, it’s now 40-percent more sensitive in low-light conditions, the company says. Focusing is faster too, Sony promises, and noise reduced. In movie recording mode, it’ll now shoot 1080p24 in addition to 1080p30/60, all with stereo audio.
The physical alterations work well. The 3-inch, 1.2m-dot LCD display is now tiltable, making what was already an easily handled camera more flexible for over-the-head and waist-level shooting. Inside, WiFi has been added, along with NFC for easy pairing with an NFC-equipped phone; that allows you to upload photos directly from the RX100 II itself, or even control it remotely. A new Multi-Interface hot shoe opens the door for better accessories, such as an EVF, and Sony has also thrown in a Multi-Terminal socket for a wired remote and even a magnetic filter-adapter mount.
Sony RX100 II hands-on:
The result is a camera dominated by its lens barrel, though still comfortable to hold one-handed. We occasionally found the knurled mode dial slightly too easy to inadvertently move, but we appreciated the movie record key, which is embedded in the thumb-grip and easy to press. The RX100 II’s little flash only cranks up when needed – there’s no physical button – though we avoided using it in our test shots, since the camera’s low-light performance is so good unaided.
Fitting all the manual controls prosumers demand into a body this small means everything is tightly packed, and we wouldn’t have argued had Sony thrown a touchscreen into the mixture as well. We can certainly see beginners and amateurs getting overwhelmed by the surfeit of icons on-screen at any one time. When you actually get to shooting, though, it’s easy to forget the complexity: quickly strumming through shutter speed or aperture settings with the easily-rotated thumb wheel and letting the fast autofocus – which handled itself with aplomb, even at the extremes of the RX100 II’s zoom – work its magic.
The only slowdown we encountered was when trying the RX100 II’s onboard effects. For instance, as below, there’s an HDR-hybrid type effect which focuses on the main subject and then gives the rest of the frame a somewhat ghostly blur. It looks good, with the right scene, but it introduces a couple of seconds processing time after each shot.
In general, though, we were incredibly impressed by what the new Cyber-shot could produce. We weren’t in a position to do controlled side-by-side comparisons with the first-gen RX100, but we struggled to confuse the auto-focus and low-light performance was impressive.
Moving subjects proved no problem for the RX100 II, and colors proved bright but accurate. In short, Sony has kept what made the original popular, and given it a blast of extra flexibility, particularly listening to what its more demanding users have been asking for. At $750 RRP it’s not cheap for a compact – Sony intends to put the Mark II on sale alongside, rather than replacing, the first model – but it’s nonetheless impressive for a compact that certainly holds its own against Micro Four Thirds rivals.
All of the sample shots in the following gallery are unedited, bar having been resized.
EE‘s DoubleSpeed LTE launch was the big news of yesterday’s event, promising roughly twice the 4G speed across twelve UK cities with no extra charge. It’s the carrier’s latest pre-emptive attempt to corner the high-speed mobile market before its rivals wade in with LTE of their own, so with theoretical peaks of as much 150Mbps, it only seemed fair to put the new DoubleSpeed service to the test. As we found, though, it’s not quite so straightforward.
EE’s promise is based upon some technical shuffling that pairs together extra chunks of spectrum. To be precise, rather than allotting 2 x 10 MHz as it was before, EE now uses 2 x 20 MHz in the 1,800 MHz spectrum band.
The end result, EE says, should be an everyday speed increase to 24-30 Mbps downloads, roughly double what existing users have been seeing so far. Initially, it’s live in twelve cities (rather than the ten initially promised): Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham, and Sheffield.
We powered up an HTC One on EE and ran through some speed tests in various locations just outside of central London, with 4G indicated and between one and four bars of signal strength showing. Initial impressions were excellent: in a location where previously we’d seen around 13 Mbps down and up to 17 Mbps up, that jumped to over 42 Mbps down and over 22 Mbps up.
Moving round, though, we found things to be more changeable. 42 Mbps – higher, to be fair, than EE suggests – was the fastest we saw, while the fastest upload was just over 29 Mbps. More common, though, was a download in the low- to mid-20s and uploads around 20 to 22 Mbps.
What makes it somewhat frustrating, however, is the difficulty in actually pinning down DoubleSpeed service. Since there’s no change to the indicator – you don’t get “4G+” in the display or anything – it’s hard to know what you can expect. Meanwhile, the actual speeds we saw often proved unconnected to the strength of the connection on the signal meter: our fastest benchmarks actually came when we had just one bar showing.
Nonetheless, it’s an impressive turn of speed overall (when you’re in the right place) and the fact that EE won’t be charging extra for it is welcome. The DoubleSpeed 4G goes live today; if you’re in one of the served areas, run a speedtest and let us know how you get on in the comments below. We’ll be adding to our results with more as we test the network in other locations.
You may have already read our Sony Xperia Z Ultra hands-on last week, but since then we’ve also been able to spend a tiny bit more time with a pre-production unit (with firmware build 14.1.B.1.277). Instead of going over again how hilariously large this 6.4-inch, pen-friendly phone is, this time we’ll focus on some early benchmark results, camera performance and Sony’s very own UX features.
As you’ll see after the break, many of the benchmark scores aren’t too far off from what we saw on the MDP phone with the same Snapdragon 800 SoC, and the final units should be optimized with higher numbers. While we didn’t manage to get CF-Bench and Quadrant running on the phone, the higher-than-before 3DMark score did cheer us up, meaning either Sony or Qualcomm’s managed to fine tune the latter’s new Adreno 330 GPU.
Looking to capture professional-quality video on the cheap? You’ve probably considered a DSLR, but for many users, an interchangeable-lens camera might not be the best pick. Camcorders and higher-end video rigs typically offer far more powerful autofocus capabilities, and while Digital SLR footage can look great, if you’re not tweaking the lens manually, things might not go as smoothly as you’d hope. Canon’s setting out to change that, with its brilliant new EOS 70D. On the surface, this 20.2-megapixel camera doesn’t venture far from its 60D roots, but internally, it’s an entirely different ballgame.
At the core of the 70D’s modifications is what Canon’s calling Dual Pixel CMOS AF. Essentially, the sensor includes twice the number of pixels in a (very successful) attempt to improve focusing. There are 40.3 million photodiodes on the sensor, and when they’re all working together, “it’s like 20 million people tracking the focus with both eyes,” as Canon explains. The result is camcorder-like focusing for both stills and video, when you’re shooting in live view mode. During our test with a pre-production sample, the device performed phenomenally, adjusting focus instantaneously when snapping stills, and quickly but gradually when recording video. Join us after the break for a closer look.
We’ve crossed paths with Firefox OS before, but today marks the first time we’ve played with handsets running the final build of Mozilla’s mobile software. The Alcatel OneTouch Fire and ZTE Open you see above are the same hardware we saw at MWC earlier this year — in fact, the latter just launched in Spain on Telefónica for €69 ($90) contract-free including €30 ($39) of airtime for prepaid customers. We took both phones for a brief spin and immediately noticed a slight improvement in performance. Unfortunately, there’s still a significant amount of lag in the UI, especially when scrolling through web pages and navigating the app tray. Websites also take a while to load, even when connecting over Wi-Fi. Then again, what do you expect for €69? Check out the gallery below and hit the break to watch our hands-on video.
Note: the ZTE Open we handled was destined for Movistar (a Telefónica brand) and is launching today for €69 (not €63 as mentioned in our video).
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