Nokia Lumia 1520 review

The Lumia 1520 has what Nokia terms a PureView camera, but this name has been used with such a range of hardware as to become largely meaningless. In the 1520 it means you get a 20-megapixel sensor, compared to the 41 megapixels in the Lumia 1020. You also get Nokia’s fancy Pro Cam app. This is a well-designed camera program which makes it easy to adjust settings and preview the results, as well as crop images non-destructively after you’ve taken them; the sensor is big enough that you can zoom into a certain part of an image and crop it without losing any detail, then send the resulting smaller picture by email or upload it to social networks, and revert to the original image afterwards.

Photos are as good as those from almost any smartphone we’ve seen

Overall image quality is very good. The Lumia 1520 produces daylight pictures with accurate colours and, unlike many smartphone cameras we see, didn’t overexpose the sky in our test shots. It’s generally a fine camera, but when zooming in slightly to the brickwork in our test shots we noticed the 1520’s images were significantly less sharp than the 1020’s, and the reduced resolution evidently cuts down on the amount you can zoom in before you start losing significant amounts of detail.

But the 1520’s pictures (top) have some blurred details compared to the 1020’s (bottom)

Unlike the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which ups the phablet game with its stylus and pen-friendly software tweaks, the Lumia 1520 is a simpler device; a Windows Phone 8 handset with a very big, high-resolution screen. It’s a combination that works, though; the Lumia 1520 is fast, beautifully made and has a good screen, so if you fancy a phone/tablet hybrid with Windows Phone 8’s advantages of super-fast performance and arguably the best-looking interface out there, it’s the handset to buy. However, if you’re not set on a particular operating system, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 remains a more versatile handset with a larger selection of apps in the Google Play Store.