You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Starting today, Nokia is beginning to roll out its own update to Lumia devices working with Windows Phone 8, one that brings about a wide range of improvements to key elements inside the phones lucky enough to get it. With Amber, Nokia devices will be gaining boosts in software that build upon Microsoft’s own most […]
Those unofficial Amber ROMs you (briefly) considered toying with 10 days ago? History. Nokia has just announced that the honest-to-goodness, ready-for-consumption Amber code has been approved, and Lumia owners the world over will begin seeing it hit their Windows Phone 8 handset in the coming days / weeks. The software update is a fairly major one, delivering a wide range of new and improved features and apps, like Nokia Glance Screen with the standby clock and an even better imaging experience that mirrors the one found on the 1020. Users will be graced with a new FM radio player and improvements to Xbox music and the Internet Explorer browser, as well as improved image processing and the Nokia Smart Camera app (which debuted on the Lumia 925).
The Glance Screen acts a bit like the glanceable extras added to the Moto X, but sadly, it won’t be available on the Lumia 520 and Lumia 625, which have a smaller display memory. Longstanding Nokia loyalists will surely appreciate the addition of “Flip to silence” and “double-tap to unlock,” and those who rely heavily on Here maps will find future updates easier to install. The rollout starts now first for the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 in selected countries as well as the Lumia 521, Lumia 810, and Lumia 928 in the US, while owners of the Lumia 520, Lumia 620, Lumia 720, Lumia 820 or Lumia 920 will likely have to wait until the end of September.
Update: There’s one more important tidbit: if you’re using a Lumia 920, 925 or 928, you also get the Nokia Pro Camera app.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia
Source: Nokia Conversations, Nokia
The Nokia Lumia 625 was announced late last month, with an expected arrival date of sometime in September. However, it looks like the Finnish company is moving that date up just a bit, and they have now announced that the budget phone will be coming to UK carriers starting on August 28. The device will […]
The folks over at Nokia were kind enough to put one of their Lumia 1020 Windows smartphones in my hands for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve put together some of my thoughts on the device to share with you here.
As you’ve probably seen in the commercials, the Lumia 1020 touts a camera with an incredible 41 megapixel sensor, which makes it the highest resolution camera phone on the market by a great deal. The phone is no slouch in other departments either, running the latest build of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and offering full HD video capture as well. It also offers stereo microphones for high quality audio recording. It works on major 4G data networks, including LTE and WCDMA standards, along with 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and NFC support.
The phone itself looks sleek and modern, coming in a white, yellow or black polycarbonate shell, with a bright 4.5″ AMOLED touchscreen at 1280×768 resolution. This results in a pixel density of 334 ppi. The colors and rich blacks on the display really look awesome, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Measurements for the Lumia 1020 are 71.4mm (w) x 130.4mm (h) x 10.4 (mm) thick. That added thickness is due to the camera’s lens and xenon flash assembly which protrudes from its back. The main body of the phone is actually a couple of millimeters slimmer. In fact, it’s virtually the same thickness as my iPhone 5.
Having that camera lens assembly on the back of the device – plus a dedicated shutter button – really does make a statement that Nokia wants this phone to replace your camera, and in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. Not only does the camera capture incredible amounts of detail, but it offers manual controls heretofore not found on smartphones or point-and-shoots.
The 41 megapixel sensor is Nokia’s solution to the zoom lens problem. Since it’s thus far been impossible to cram the optics of a high-powered zoom lens into a smartphone, Nokia opted for the highest resolution sensor they could find, combined with the largest lens the could cram into a phone’s form factor. This combination results in the ability to zoom into your images AFTER you take them, instead of trying to frame them up at the time you shoot. In my experience with the Lumia 1020, this is very effective – especially in daylight shots. Take a look at the image below for a zoomed out view along with a zoomed in portion:
Pretty incredible, no? Sure, there’s a bit of grain in the closest up portions of images, but it’s still impressive that you can get that sort of detail from a smartphone camera. Despite its 41 megapixel sensor, one thing I found odd is that the highest resolution 16×9 image the camera stores are actually 34 megapixels (7712 x 4352 resolution), along with a 5 megapixel (3072 X 1728) version for sharing. If you switch into the 4×3 aspect ratio, you can shoot 38 megapixel images. Either way, it’s way more pixels than your current phone has.
As I mentioned, the camera offers manual controls, which include white balance, focus, ISO (100 to 4000), shutter speed (1/16000th to 4 seconds) and aperture (from -3.0 to +3.0 ). All of these controls are accessible within the Nokia Pro Cam app, the default app that’s tied to the shutter button. Accessing manual controls requires a simple touch and drag action from the icon on the right of the screen. This reveals slider controls which provide immediate visual feedback of everything but shutter speed (which makes complete sense.) You can also go into the settings menu to enable a grid overlay to help with your composition, in rule of thirds, golden ratio, crosshairs or square variants.
I’m not an expert on camera optics, but I’m pretty sure they have to do these things digitally. Regardless, these fine-grained controls allow for images you definitely can’t produce with post-production image software. For instance, being able to capture long-exposure night shots or true depth of field focus effects.
One other nicety is that Nokia includes a library of short tutorials for budding photographers, which provide interactive examples of what each of the controls does, along with pointers on various photographic techniques. The lessons aren’t deep, but they’re a great thing to have if you don’t know your aperture from your ISO.
In order to put the camera through some of it’s paces, I captured a few images at this weekend’s Wizard World Comic Con in Rosemont, Illinois. Here are some sample shots.
Be sure to click on the images to see the full hi-res originals:
There’s no question from those examples that the images are detailed, and capture colors impeccably – especially with good lighting. There’s a sort of pastel effect if you zoom in all the way, but I’m still impressed – especially compared to every other smartphone I’ve ever used. Nighttime shots do suffer from added grain, but I don’t think they can do much about that unless they could put a bigger lens on this thing. Here’s a closeup shot I grabbed in near darkness, with no flash and the ISO jacked up to 4000. Not bad. Try this with another phone. Click image for hi-res original:
The camera also works with Nokia’s Smart Cam app which allows you to capture multiple images in rapid succession so you can pick the best image, create composite motion shots or even remove moving subjects from the scene. There are also a variety of “lenses” you can download from the Windows Phone Marketplace for adding effects to your images.
One thing that is a bit irksome is that there’s not an easy way to share the full hi-resolution images from the phone. Microsoft Skydrive, email and social networks all seem to get a low-resolution 5MP version instead, so the primary way to pull full-res images off of the phone is to connect it to your computer. If you happen to be an AT&T user (which was the carrier for my review sample), there is a way to save hi-res images with their AT&T Locker service – which offers 50GB of free storage.
Individual hi-res image files can be quite large (9 to 15MB each), so you’ll definitely want to be conservative about when you upload hi-res images if you’re on a mobile data plan anyhow. As a Mac user, I also couldn’t get the Lumia to transfer directly to iPhoto either. You have to download an extra app to transfer images for some strange reason. I also found it difficult to locate images imported into iPhoto. The best thing was to create a Smart Album for images from the Lumia 1020. That worked like a charm.. Ah, the Microsoft vs. Apple battle rears its ugly head once more.
Still, once the photos are transferred, they’re quite impressive. Video quality is very good as well, with the main camera capable of shooting full 1080p action at 30fps (or at 24 or 25fps). Like most smartphone video cameras, it does quite well in daylight conditions, but definitely exhibits noise in the dark. Unfortunately while shooting video, the manual controls are limited to flash, white balance and focus, so you can’t increase ISO to see if that can help. Here’s couple of quick samples I captured, one with ample lighting, the other without.
As for the phone itself, there’s not too much to complain about. It’s plenty fast for tasks ranging from email to browsing the web, to playing games – and the Windows Phone 8 interface quickly grows on you. The only real issue with the OS at all is the relatively small number of available apps compared to iOS and Android. I won’t really go into the Windows OS itself, as it’s pretty much stock, with the addition of a few useful Nokia apps, such as HERE Maps and Drive for mapping and navigation as well as Nokia Music.
Phone call quality was satisfactory, but nothing to write home about (or maybe that’s just the AT&T network). I also found battery life to be less than thrilling. With typical usage (and standby time sitting in my pocket,) I was down to about 25% battery life after 10 hours. In the same conditions and time, my iPhone 5 still had 42%. That said, I spent much of my time in areas with poor coverage or too many people (i.e. a convention center), so I’m sure that some extra battery was burned while it was searching for a connection.
That all said, as a camera, this thing rocks. No, it’s not going to replace a high-end DSLR, but Nokia has definitely raised the bar for smartphone cameras, and all but killed what’s left of the point-and-shoot market with this thing. If you want a good Windows phone, you’ll be totally fine with a Nokia 920 or 928. But if you’re looking for a smartphone that is first and foremost capable of taking impressive photos, you won’t be disappointed in the Lumia 1020.
The folks over at Nokia were kind enough to put one of their Lumia 1020 Windows smartphones in my hands for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve put together some of my thoughts on the device to share with you here.
As you’ve probably seen in the commercials, the Lumia 1020 touts a camera with an incredible 41 megapixel sensor, which makes it the highest resolution camera phone on the market by a great deal. The phone is no slouch in other departments either, running the latest build of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and offering full HD video capture as well. It also offers stereo microphones for high quality audio recording. It works on major 4G data networks, including LTE and WCDMA standards, along with 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and NFC support.
The phone itself looks sleek and modern, coming in a white, yellow or black polycarbonate shell, with a bright 4.5″ AMOLED touchscreen at 1280×768 resolution. This results in a pixel density of 334 ppi. The colors and rich blacks on the display really look awesome, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Measurements for the Lumia 1020 are 71.4mm (w) x 130.4mm (h) x 10.4 (mm) thick. That added thickness is due to the camera’s lens and xenon flash assembly which protrudes from its back. The main body of the phone is actually a couple of millimeters slimmer. In fact, it’s virtually the same thickness as my iPhone 5.
Having that camera lens assembly on the back of the device – plus a dedicated shutter button – really does make a statement that Nokia wants this phone to replace your camera, and in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. Not only does the camera capture incredible amounts of detail, but it offers manual controls heretofore not found on smartphones or point-and-shoots.
The 41 megapixel sensor is Nokia’s solution to the zoom lens problem. Since it’s thus far been impossible to cram the optics of a high-powered zoom lens into a smartphone, Nokia opted for the highest resolution sensor they could find, combined with the largest lens the could cram into a phone’s form factor. This combination results in the ability to zoom into your images AFTER you take them, instead of trying to frame them up at the time you shoot. In my experience with the Lumia 1020, this is very effective – especially in daylight shots. Take a look at the image below for a zoomed out view along with a zoomed in portion:
Pretty incredible, no? Sure, there’s a bit of grain in the closest up portions of images, but it’s still impressive that you can get that sort of detail from a smartphone camera. Despite its 41 megapixel sensor, one thing I found odd is that the highest resolution 16×9 image the camera stores are actually 34 megapixels (7712 x 4352 resolution), along with a 5 megapixel (3072 X 1728) version for sharing. If you switch into the 4×3 aspect ratio, you can shoot 38 megapixel images. Either way, it’s way more pixels than your current phone has.
As I mentioned, the camera offers manual controls, which include white balance, focus, ISO (100 to 4000), shutter speed (1/16000th to 4 seconds) and aperture (from -3.0 to +3.0 ). All of these controls are accessible within the Nokia Pro Cam app, the default app that’s tied to the shutter button. Accessing manual controls requires a simple touch and drag action from the icon on the right of the screen. This reveals slider controls which provide immediate visual feedback of everything but shutter speed (which makes complete sense.) You can also go into the settings menu to enable a grid overlay to help with your composition, in rule of thirds, golden ratio, crosshairs or square variants.
I’m not an expert on camera optics, but I’m pretty sure they have to do these things digitally. Regardless, these fine-grained controls allow for images you definitely can’t produce with post-production image software. For instance, being able to capture long-exposure night shots or true depth of field focus effects.
One other nicety is that Nokia includes a library of short tutorials for budding photographers, which provide interactive examples of what each of the controls does, along with pointers on various photographic techniques. The lessons aren’t deep, but they’re a great thing to have if you don’t know your aperture from your ISO.
In order to put the camera through some of it’s paces, I captured a few images at this weekend’s Wizard World Comic Con in Rosemont, Illinois. Here are some sample shots.
Be sure to click on the images to see the full hi-res originals:
There’s no question from those examples that the images are detailed, and capture colors impeccably – especially with good lighting. There’s a sort of pastel effect if you zoom in all the way, but I’m still impressed – especially compared to every other smartphone I’ve ever used. Nighttime shots do suffer from added grain, but I don’t think they can do much about that unless they could put a bigger lens on this thing. Here’s a closeup shot I grabbed in near darkness, with no flash and the ISO jacked up to 4000. Not bad. Try this with another phone. Click image for hi-res original:
The camera also works with Nokia’s Smart Cam app which allows you to capture multiple images in rapid succession so you can pick the best image, create composite motion shots or even remove moving subjects from the scene. There are also a variety of “lenses” you can download from the Windows Phone Marketplace for adding effects to your images.
One thing that is a bit irksome is that there’s not an easy way to share the full hi-resolution images from the phone. Microsoft Skydrive, email and social networks all seem to get a low-resolution 5MP version instead, so the primary way to pull full-res images off of the phone is to connect it to your computer. If you happen to be an AT&T user (which was the carrier for my review sample), there is a way to save hi-res images with their AT&T Locker service – which offers 50GB of free storage.
Individual hi-res image files can be quite large (9 to 15MB each), so you’ll definitely want to be conservative about when you upload hi-res images if you’re on a mobile data plan anyhow. As a Mac user, I also couldn’t get the Lumia to transfer directly to iPhoto either. You have to download an extra app to transfer images for some strange reason. I also found it difficult to locate images imported into iPhoto. The best thing was to create a Smart Album for images from the Lumia 1020. That worked like a charm.. Ah, the Microsoft vs. Apple battle rears its ugly head once more.
Still, once the photos are transferred, they’re quite impressive. Video quality is very good as well, with the main camera capable of shooting full 1080p action at 30fps (or at 24 or 25fps). Like most smartphone video cameras, it does quite well in daylight conditions, but definitely exhibits noise in the dark. Unfortunately while shooting video, the manual controls are limited to flash, white balance and focus, so you can’t increase ISO to see if that can help. Here’s couple of quick samples I captured, one with ample lighting, the other without.
As for the phone itself, there’s not too much to complain about. It’s plenty fast for tasks ranging from email to browsing the web, to playing games – and the Windows Phone 8 interface quickly grows on you. The only real issue with the OS at all is the relatively small number of available apps compared to iOS and Android. I won’t really go into the Windows OS itself, as it’s pretty much stock, with the addition of a few useful Nokia apps, such as HERE Maps and Drive for mapping and navigation as well as Nokia Music.
Phone call quality was satisfactory, but nothing to write home about (or maybe that’s just the AT&T network). I also found battery life to be less than thrilling. With typical usage (and standby time sitting in my pocket,) I was down to about 25% battery life after 10 hours. In the same conditions and time, my iPhone 5 still had 42%. That said, I spent much of my time in areas with poor coverage or too many people (i.e. a convention center), so I’m sure that some extra battery was burned while it was searching for a connection.
That all said, as a camera, this thing rocks. No, it’s not going to replace a high-end DSLR, but Nokia has definitely raised the bar for smartphone cameras, and all but killed what’s left of the point-and-shoot market with this thing. If you want a good Windows phone, you’ll be totally fine with a Nokia 920 or 928. But if you’re looking for a smartphone that is first and foremost capable of taking impressive photos, you won’t be disappointed in the Lumia 1020.
Thought Samsung has long since moved on from the second-generation Galaxy and tech news in general forgets about essentially any phone (even the Lumia 520) almost without fail once they’ve been out for a short period of time, there’s a battle going on at T-Mobile between these two machines. Both the Nokia Lumia 521 (as […]
Nokia may see a surge of Windows Phone apps on the horizon, but it’s not waiting for that deluge before it offers further app advice to new Lumia owners. Its new App Social Beta improves on App Highlights by crowdsourcing suggestions. Users create and follow app lists whose popularity determines which titles rise to the top; there’s also a news feed for those who only want to see recommendations from friends and favorite curators. There’s no guarantee that Nokia will help you find that perfect Instagram substitute, but App Social Beta’s immediate availability in 14 countries may keep the search time to a minimum.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia
Source: Windows Phone Store
If you’re brave enough to head into the little-traveled universe of hacking on Windows Phone devices, you’re in luck this week – Amber ROMs have leaked for both the Nokia Lumia 820 and Lumia 920. These updates include all of the high-powered goodies spoken about earlier this year when the Nokia Lumia 925 was released. […]
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
In that human-behavior lab known as the New York City subway, a vacationing family recently sought to get in a group self-portrait on their last day in the Big Apple. But the rocking train kept thwarting the capture of their jostled bodies. To frame the picture, they tried trading the quality of their smartphone’s rear camera for the one above the phone’s display so they could better preview the picture, but still had trouble composing the shot. Finally, a local passenger riding with them stepped in and offered to take their photo, which he did to their expressions of gratitude.
The incident served as an illustration of the often precarious situations in which we use our smartphone cameras. Had their phone been Nokia’s Lumia 1020 and the stranger not intervened, the 41 megapixels of light-capturing prowess might have gone for naught as the family would’ve had to rely on the phone’s middling front-facing camera.
Filed under: Cellphones, Microsoft
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