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Jul 11

Nokia Lumia 1020 vs Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom: war of the camera phones

Today we’ve had our first look at the Nokia Lumia 1020 – a device with a 41-megapixel back-facing camera more than ready to take on the already revealed Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom. Where not too many years ago it was considered amazing to see a camera present in a cellphone, here in 2013 we’ve got not just cellphones, but smartphones, bringing on camera constructs far more powerful than most standard pocket-friendly point-and-shoots! Now both Nokia and Samsung have machines with as much focus on the smartphone as on the photography power they possess – so what’s the difference?

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Camera

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom works with a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor with an f/3.1-f/6.3 24-240mm 10x zoom lens. This produces results that we’ve just begun to test in our first Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom hands-on with photo examples posted this week. It’s appearing here to be an extremely well-balanced shooter with the ability to take fine photos on its back as well as its front (where a 2 megapixel shooter sits).

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Meanwhile the Nokia Lumia 1020 works with a 41-megapixel sensor branded PureView by the company working with an f/2.2 ZEISS lens. The Nokia device works with an up-to 6x digital zoom setup, but claims said zoom will result in no loss of quality due to the machine’s ability to collect so much more image information in the first place.

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You’ll have to check out our SlashGear 101: Nokia Lumia 1020 Oversampling and the 5MP “Sweet Spot” until we can get some photo experience with the machine out in the wild. We’re expecting results at least as fine as those produced with the original Nokia 41MP machine, the Nokia 808 PureView.

Size

The physical shape of each of these machines puts the line between camera and phone at a new level of blurry, each in their own way. While the Nokia machine literally has the back-facing lens set in landscape, letting you know that the back side is not a portrait-facing sort of situation, the Samsung device has a similar aim – the Samsung logo may be set in portrait, but the rest of the back is clearly a standard camera and lens looking aesthetic.

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The fronts of both machines, too, are set to look like smartphones on their own. The Samsung Galaxy S4′s final size comes in at 125.5 x 63.5 x 15.4 mm while the Nokia Lumia 1020 is thinner – yet taller and wider 130.4 x 71.4 x 10.4 mm in total. NOTE: You’re seeing the Samsung machine here next to the Nokia 808 PureView here, the 808 resting atop the comparably thin Nokia Lumia 1020.

Internal Storage

You’ll need a lot of space for all the photos and video you’re going to be capturing. For the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom you’ve got a rather modest 8GB of space built-in, but you’ve got a microSD card slot capable of working with up to 32GB cards. Meanwhile the Nokia Lumia 1020 works with 32GB of internal storage right out of the box, but has no microSD card slot. It’s a tradeoff or a bonus either way – depending on your perspective!

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Operating System

The key factor in deciding between these two machines for you may very well come down to the operating system that backs them up. The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom works with the newest version of Android, Jelly Bean 4.2.2, while the Nokia machine has Windows Phone 8. Both machines have a rather healthy amount of backup from their respective manufacturers as both machines are heavily invested in the operating systems they roll with, and both work with extremely unique systems under the hood.

While we’ve gotten our first taste of what the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom is working with thanks to our first hands-on on the review bench (as linked above) and through our original Galaxy S4 Zoom hands-on, it’ll be a bit before we get as involved with the 1020 as we want to be before we make any judgements on the Nokia machine. For now you’ll have to take a peek at our first Nokia Lumia 1020 hands-on to see what you make of it!

Nokia Lumia 1020 vs Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom: war of the camera phones is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jul 11

Nokia’s Stephen Elop Battles Apple and Google With Megapixels

Posted in: Today's Chili

These are the days in Helsinki when the sun never seems to set. So maybe it’s not so surprising that Stephen Elop, the CEO of the beleaguered Finnish phone giant Nokia, rejects the conventional wisdom that his company is as …

Jul 11

Nokia Lumia 1020 hands-on with camera grip and wireless charging case

Posted in: Today's Chili

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

Nokia Lumia 1020 hands-on with camera grip and wireless charging case is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jul 11

Nokia Lumia 1020 PureView hands-on

Posted in: Today's Chili

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Lumia 1020 PureView hands-on is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jul 11

How Nokia’s Radical New Zoom Tech Works

Posted in: Today's Chili

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.

Nokia Lumia 1020 bringing PureView beyond AT&T [UPDATE]

Posted in: Today's Chili

Thought the machine will be coming to the USA with AT&T first, but suggestions from the company itself have aimed the machine out with a wider field of vision, as it were. As the original Nokia Lumia 920 was all but exclusive when it was released in the USA (until advanced versions like the 928 and now the 925 as well, were introduced, it would seem that the word “exclusive” has some hidden meaning to it.

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During the “Zoom, Reinvented” event in New York City this week, Nokia’s own Stephen Elop revealed that the Nokia Lumia 1020 would be coming to AT&T “first” in the United States. This could very well simply mean that it’ll be appearing out in the wild off-contract internationally soon after the AT&T release, or it could mean that Verizon and T-Mobile want a taste of this machine as well.

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Of course such a release would have to take place quite a few months down the road as both carriers very recently got their own extremely similar device to work with. With AT&T, the device will be ringing in at a rather hefty $299.99 on-contract. While international pricing has not yet been revealed, global releases will include China, Europe, and Latin America inside this quarter.

UPDATE: inside the THIRD quarter, so says Nokia, for China and Western Europe specifically. Also there will, indeed, be variants to watch for beyond the three colors.

“It will arrive in China and Western Europe in the third quarter of 2013. Nokia plans to ship an exclusive variant of the device with Telefonica in selected European and Latin American markets.” – Ian Delaney for Nokia

There’s a choice between yellow, black, and white iterations of this device too, and the machine comes with at least one dedicated accessory: the camera grip. This grip will be available for $79.99 and will be available for purchase aside the phone itself. Have a peek at our full detail article for the Nokia Lumia 1020 and let us know what you think – have at it!

Nokia Lumia 1020 bringing PureView beyond AT&T [UPDATE] is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jul 11

Windows Phone Just Got Instagram (Sort Of) and Vine (Really)

Posted in: Today's Chili

Windows Phone Just Got Instagram (Sort Of) and Vine (Really)

So hidden in Nokia’s announcement of some new apps for its Lumia line was a little announcement about Hipstamatic. It’s making a lens app for Nokia, and it can share your photos to other social networks. Including Instagram. So, essentially, Windows Phone just got its first real Instagram app.

Nokia Lumia 1020 PureView imaging detailed

Posted in: Today's Chili

This week the folks at Nokia have gone through not only the basic vision for the Nokia Lumia 1020, but it’s 41 megapixel PureView photography abilities as well. What we’re getting to see here is the machine’s aim to not just take one massive photo each time it shoots, but an array of photos. You’ll be seeing high-energy high-density sharp and bright photos no matter the size you capture: 38 megapixel or 34-megapixel images in 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, large and small.

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This device works with a 41-megapixel backside illuminated sensor the likes of which advance that of the technology found in the original Nokia 808 PureView (a device which also uses a 41-megapixel sensor. This sensor is indeed – as you may have guessed, the largest image sensor in any consumer smartphone at the moment, and the machine comes in black, white, and yellow, as well – have a peek at full details on the device here: Nokia Lumia 1020 PureView official.

Then know this: as you take each photo at its massive 38 or 34-megapixel size, you’ll also be capturing a 5-megapixel photo. This photo will be captured and processed with Nokia’s own Oversampling techniques. This Oversampling process is said by Nokia to be processing 1 billion pixels per second when shooting video, as well.

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This machine works with image stabilization the likes of which appeared in the Nokia Lumia 920, 925, 928, and the whole process will be working with “blur free, super high detailed photos day or night.” That’s Nokia’s Elop speaking, and he also promises “2nd generation image stabilization” for this machine while he’s at it – the Nokia Lumia 1020 also works with a new generatiopn in OIS, with a lovely series of ball bearings around this device’s housing.

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With six lenses made by ZEISS – you might known it all better as Carl Zeiss, mind you, but the name is ZEISS forevermore. With this setup you’ll be getting digital zoom the likes of which we’ve not seen before.

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Zoom in on a shot, take the shot, look at the shot, and zoom out again (even if you’ve taken the shot zoomed in) – the extra image data still persists. This setup also allows “Rich Recording” – aka loud audio recording for when you’re at a massively ear-destroying concert – as well as long exposure modes (for light painting, of course).

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This is all done with the machines’ new Pro camera app which we’ll get into deeper soon – stay tuned!

Nokia Pro Camera Zooming:

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Jul 11

Nokia Lumia 1020 PureView official: 41MP Windows Phone 8

Posted in: Today's Chili

Nokia has officially announced the Nokia Lumia 1020, the company’s latest Windows Phone 8 handset and the first to use a 41-megapixel PureView camera system. Building on the pixel-oversampling technology of the original Nokia 808 PureView, the Lumia 1020 squeezes the camera into a smaller – though still chunky – form-factor, complete with a Xenon flash and new Pro Camera app with more control over manual settings. It’s headed to AT&T later this month, for $300 on-contract.

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On the phone side, there’s a 4.5-inch AMOLED HD+ 1280 x 768 display topped with Gorilla Glass 3 and packing a sunlight readability mode for easier outdoor use. Like the Lumia 925 and 920, it also supports gloved use, thanks to a high-sensitivity touchscreen.

inside, there’s a dualcore 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. Connectivity includes LTE, HSPA+, and GSM/EDGE, along with WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and NFC. The 2,000 mAh battery is non-user-accessible, and there’s no integrated wireless charging; instead, Nokia will offer snap-on wireless charging covers, similar to how it did with the Lumia 925, which can be used to add the ability to the high-resolution smartphone.

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It’s the camera we’re most excited about, unsurprisingly, and it’s there where Nokia has put in the most effort. The 41-megapixel sensor uses the same PureView system as the 808 did, clustering data from multiple proximate pixels together and producing normally-sized images with more accurate colors and brightness, and less noise.

There’s also optical image stabilization and a backside-illuminated sensor, Zeiss optics, and a new Pro Camera app which gives greater than usual manual control over settings like exposure, ISO, and more. Above the display there’s a 1.2-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens.

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However, unlike on the 808, the Lumia 1020 is able to simultaneously snap both a low- and a full-resolution image. That gives an instantly-sharable 5-megapixel picture at a cellular-data-reasonable resolution, as well as a full image at around 40-megapixels. With the latter, the Lumia 1020 can offer a lossless digital zoom after the still is taken: effectively, a crop is taken out of the full-resolution shot, with no need to artificially enlarge. Up to a 3x lossless digital zoom is supported.

As for video, the Lumia 1020 is capable of recording 720p HD footage while also offering 6x digital lossless zooming; the Windows Phone can also record 1080p Full HD video, though with less of a zooming range. There’s stereo audio recording, too, with Nokia promising better bass capture than rival phones thanks to its Rich Recording system.

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Nokia hasn’t forgotten accessories, either, with the $79 Nokia Camera Grip PD-95G. That has an integrated 1,020 mAh battery, extending the Lumia 1020′s runtime – estimated at 13.3hrs of talktime, 16 days standby, 6.8hrs of video playback, or 63hrs of music – and a two-stage camera key. It also adds a tripod mount for more professional use. Without the case, the Lumia 1020 is 130.4 x 71.4 x 10.4 mm and 158g.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 will go on sale on July 26, priced at $299.99, as an AT&T exclusive in the US. Preorders – for the black, white, and yellow versions – will be offered from July 16.