Nokia Lumia 1520 review

Unlike other high-end Lumias such as the 1020, the 1520 has an IPS rather than AMOLED screen. It’s a 6in model with a 1,920×1,080 resolution, and there are significant image quality differences between the Lumia 1520 and 1020’s displays. The 1020’s AMOLED panel has more saturated colours and blacker text than the 1520’s IPS model, but the 1020’s screen is much warmer, to the point of appearing slightly yellow when side by side with the 1520. The 1520’s panel has purer whites, but if anything is too cold, giving web pages backgrounds a slightly grey tint. It’s still a high-quality screen, though, and compares well to the best IPS panels we’ve seen, such as that on the Google Nexus 7 tablet.

The screen stands up well to the competition, but we found the colour balance slightly too cold

The 1520 is also fast. Its quad-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 processor is the fastest we’ve seen in a Windows Phone 8 handset, and the operating system simply flies. The phone completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in an incredibly fast 536ms, which makes it almost twice as quick as the Lumia 1020 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in this test, and the quickest phone we’ve seen in this benchmark bar the iPhone 5S with its 416ms score. The 1520 has the same processor as the Galaxy Note 3, but Windows Phone 8’s version of Internet Explorer is a particularly fast browser.

Web browsing is a dream on this handset, as the phone almost never hesitates as you zoom in and out and pan around web pages, even complicated graphics-heavy ones such as www.guardian.co.uk. The phone’s screen is also large enough, in terms of size and resolution, to read desktop web pages fairly comfortably when fully zoomed out, but, as expected, it’s still not quite as easy as reading pages on a 7in or 10in tablet. The only irritation is the way that the Back button behaves. When you’re in a web browsing session pressing the button will take you back through your previous pages, as expected, but if you ever go back to the main app screen and then reopen your browser, you will lose the previous pages you visited; the Back button will now only go back to the app tray. You can at least get around this by bringing up the recent pages menu.

We couldn’t run our normal 3DMark benchmark as it’s not available for Windows Phone, but we could run the GFXBench T-Rex test in Full HD. The Lumia 1520 completed this with an average frame rate of 25fps, which is essentially the same as the 26fps we saw from the Galaxy Note 3. Challenging 3D games such as Halo Spartan Assault run beautifully on the Lumia 1520.