My Nokia Blog

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• Lumia 1520 camera performance review
• ArsTechnica responds to The Guardian – Fork off, “Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android”
• Lumiappdates: Nokia Story Teller Beta, access point, 6tag, 6snap
• Guardian’s Charles Arthur recommends that Nadella scap WP, go with forked Android
• Nokia and HTC Settle Legal Disputes; Promise to Play Nice

Lumia 1520 camera performance review Posted: 08 Feb 2014 06:08 PM PST I‘ve always used a Nokia as my camera, I’ve never owned a stand alone camera, and over the years, Nokia kept giving me reasons not to buy one. I have come to say that I’m a Nokia-taught amateur photographer instead of self taught and that’s all due to the unique experiences each photography minded Nokia I’ve owned offered me. I never had the cash or the heart to buy a Lumia 1020 because I already had the 808, so when the Lumia 1520 came with its full HD screen, high internal specs and inbuilt wireless charging, I couldn’t say no, I had to sell three phones to cover its cost. So do I regret it? Does the camera live up to its Pureview name? lets find out. Camera specs: 20MP sensor with OIS (2nd generation) Carl Zeiss optics.  Fixed aperture of 2.4f . 1/2.5” sensor size. Maximum shutter time of 4 seconds and a minimum of 1/16000 second. Maximum ISO of 4000 and a minimum of 100. Manual focus with flash focus assist. 30fps/1080p videos. Amazing directional audio recording quality with a four mics setup. dual capture of high res pics and with Pureview down sampled 5mp images. Advantages & shortcomings: Lumia 1520′s sensor size isn’t big for its pixel count, some noise is to be expected, luckily its not as troubling as the Lumia 1020 situation. Carl Zeiss optics continue to be other OEMs Achilles heel, Nokia lucked out with the exclusivity deal.  2nd generation OIS can act up sometimes and give some stuttering although only for a little while, OIS also continuously moves the camera, so perfectly framing your pictures at night might be a bit of a challenge. 2nd generation OIS gives perfect video stabilization performance where you can fully zoom on a subject and still get a perfectly stable scene. The aperture on the Lumia 1520 is small 2.4f which seriously affects its handheld  low light performance.  (Lumia 720 has a big 1.9f, Lumia 920 has a respectful 2.0f, Lumia 1020 has a moderate (2.2f) Mostly due to the small aperture Lumia 1520 focusing skills aren’t close to the Lumia 92X series, focus assist will be needed for indoor shots. The smaller aperture also means better city scenes photography as lamp posts will not hurt the picture as much, it also makes for a prettier long shutter pictures both at night and even daylight. Photosamples: It was early in the morning the sky was filled with clouds with the sun struggling to shine in, an HDR shot meant I could show both how cool the sky looked and the red bike. HDR Photo Camera remain one of my best purchase choices, it deserved every penny, and its responsible for the HDR shot above. Refocus can be used creatively to take impossible shots, Using the option: “all in focus” makes photographing challenging textures  a rewarding experience. Its shots like the above that makes me excited about what Lytro technologies might bring to smartphones in the future. Close up shots on the Lumia 1520 are lovely, also color reproduction is truer to life. If a camera had a signature it would be its Bokeh effect, Look at the far away branches, it’s a creamy almost oil paint Bokeh that transcends the quality of close up shots to another level.   I wanted to capture a silhouette* but that sunshine ray was a surprising bonus. * A silhouette is a picture where the subjects in it are made of a solid single colored shapes usually black.   I’m willing to bet the architect who made this is into wall rock climbing. :) You may not know it but using a big screen makes framing photos a lot easier, the built in grids in Nokia Camera is a welcome addition. Greenery scenes are true to life, full of details and all around fun. I know the above park is nothing special but  I used to play in this park twenty years ago as a kid and as such it represents so much more for me.   Nokia Camera smart sequence can produce some good pictures. I’m hopeful that Nokia will out grow the 5mp limit and use a higher mp count, specially since they look awful on a 1080p screen once you zoom even a little bit. At night the Lumia 1520 didn’t manage to impress me all that much, as the Lumia 920 produced way brighter scenes. I was all but ready to quit on the night photo shoot, I was cold and without a single good shoot out of 10! I saw this helmet in a store’s window, I switched to 4:3 aspect ratio to capture it. I just love the colors in this shot! I lowered the brightness just a bit to add a little bit of a dramatic effect. I always maintained the theory that my Lumia 920 takes better picture in 4:3 aspect ratio, it made sense to me that OIS would work better in a square like situation where it can control wobbling from all directions while it would be a lot harder for it to compensate vertical wobbles in a 16:9 picture. ( I would love it if anyone could back this theory up or disprove it.)     This master piece hotel was a nice subject to shoot, perhaps I’ll revisit it soon for some close up shots. Photography needs lots of planing ahead, I really should have came at 3 am to photograph this hotel it would’ve looked a lot better. Lumia 1520 handles artificial lighting a lot better than its siblings due to its lower aperture. Potato skins with a lovely dipping sauce. Cuteview I must note its hard to take good pictures of people in the Lumia 1520 indoors without flash assist and the actual flash! Summing it all up: Overall the Nokia Lumia 1520 is one of the best Photography phones out there, its big screen and exclusive Nokia apps like StoryTeller beta will give it an edge no other camera phone could match, the huge battery is still bigger than the Lumia 1020 battery + Camera grip Cover battery, the excellent mics and strong speakers will make for a good family experiences, the raw file option and the microSD slot will satisfy editing geeks, So when it comes to photography  I would recommend the 1520 over the Lumia 1020 any time.   Thanks for reading, If you’re looking for a full review of the Lumia 1520 check our own @AliQudsi Review of it, also check Jay’s unboxing of the red Lumia 1520 too.

ArsTechnica responds to The Guardian – Fork off, “Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android” Posted: 08 Feb 2014 08:03 AM PST Peter Bright from ArsTechnica responds to Charles Arthur’s suggestion on The Guardian that Microsoft should fork Android. Why? It’s unworkable. He says you can have compatibility or control but not both.  Google has worked to make Android unworkable. For those who might bring in Amazon, Peter discusses those shortcomings too. In the grand scheme of things, forking Android may turn out to be even bigger work for MS and Nokia. Not only is it not this kind of an open platform, but Google is actively working to make it functionally less open with each new release. The result is that a forker has to make a choice: they can give Google control and get the all the upsides of the platform, or they can snatch control from Google and get almost none of them. Android isn’t designed to be forked. With GMS, Google has deliberately designed Android to resist forking. Suggestions that Microsoft scrap its own operating system in favor of such a fork simply betray a lack of understanding of the way Google has built the Android platform. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/ Cheers Marc for the tip

Lumiappdates: Nokia Story Teller Beta, access point, 6tag, 6snap Posted: 08 Feb 2014 07:55 AM PST Not much in the way of a changelog but the following have been updated: Nokia Story Teller Beta, access point (operator settings updates, robustness improvements) 6tag (bug fixes) 6snap (2.7, change in brush size, keep in memory your groups even after a log off/sign in)

Guardian’s Charles Arthur recommends that Nadella scap WP, go with forked Android Posted: 08 Feb 2014 06:02 AM PST The Guardian’s Technology Editor is giving Satya Nadella some advice. Scrap WP and instead, go with a forked Android. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/07/satya-nadella-mobile-windows-phone-android Charles finds that despite WP’s growth, it’s still much too slow and insignificant. The advice is akin to Nokia dumping Symbian. Dump WP, and then save on the development costs. Whilst forking Android wouldn’t be a trivial issue, it may be easier than the WP pursuit. Nadella said they’d be a mobile and cloud first company. They’d ruthlessly remove any obstacles to innovation. Microsoft would focus on things Microsoft is good at and can uniquely bring. Windows never really took off in mobile. So it wasn’t something MS was good at. Perhaps that means WP could be culled? Then again, Windows is MS’s bread and butter. RT is getting closer and closer to being ready for mobile. Windows Phone was a wonderful project, but it was too late; the benefits of integration across handset, tablet and desktop simply haven't appeared. The vast majority of people who use a desktop PC don't use a Windows smartphone, and there's no chance of that changing any time soon – or ever, actually. AOSP offers Microsoft the chance to remake its mobile strategy so that it exploits all the strengths of its most bitter rival – it's free, widely available – and grab mobile developer interest. An all-out war between Microsoft and Google using the Android platform would be absolutely fascinating; both would be pressed on their strengths and weaknesses. For Microsoft, presently a distant third in this race, it could be the answer it needs. I guess, Xbox was also late to the party right? What if MS had given up then? On top of the external challenges WP and Nokia have faced, one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is Microsoft itself. Like, seriously, who takes this long to do the simplest things? Those are some bad lessons MS took from Nokia. In related news, Steve Wozniak wants Apple to make Android phones. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/07/woz-interview I guess the only way Microsoft boardroom would consider Android is to truly ‘fork it up’ by being successful in their own right. Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem right? :p Cheers spacemodel for the tip!

Nokia and HTC Settle Legal Disputes; Promise to Play Nice Posted: 08 Feb 2014 04:17 AM PST The Nokia vs. HTC saga has been going on for quite a while now, with Nokia going after HTC’s One, One Mini and One Max for patent infringement on some essential technologies in the devices. Most notably HTC lost a major case in Germany which would have cause them a lot of headache; however yesterday Nokia and HTC announced that they have entered into a patent and technology collaboration agreement; which involves HTC paying Nokia for usage of their LTE radio technology. The agreement also states that Nokia and HTC will work together in the future to explore future technology collaboration opportunities, what this means exactly isn’t very clear; but perhaps Nokia are looking for a new devices and services division to put their R&D work into? (one can only hope). The full details of the agreement are confidential, but we can expect that Nokia made a pretty penny off this deal (and will probably continue to); read the full press release at the link below. Nokia

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