Nokia Lumia 1020 review: The Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia 1020 has a 41MP camera in its bulky and boxy frame. The camera feature of the unit used to be highest in the world but the Oppo Find 7, which can officially take 50MP photos, has officially dethroned it.

The catch with the Oppo Find 7 though, as Engadget notes, is that its sensor is actually 13MP Sony IMX214 CMOS, thus the ability to snap 50MP is a camera trick. But the tech site says that the results are still very much impressive.

So does this mean the Nokia Lumia 1020 is effectively dethroned as the king of camera sensors? Technically, it remains to have the highest in the business. But the Oppo Find 7’s new feature poses a challenge to what the Nokia Lumia 1020 can deliver camera-wise.

See our full review of the Nokia Lumia 1020 below.

The design. The blocky chassis of Lumia 1020 comes with three different colours –white, black and bright yellow. Colour matched headphones are available for those who prefers the yellow colored unit. The main edge of this device is that it is made from scratch-resistant polycarbonate material with its usual soft-touch and is grippable –the main features of Nokia for its Lumia range.

While Lumia 1020’s text can be perfectly read in our view, the PenTile sub-pixel matrix used by Nokia, trademark owned by Samsung, on its AMOLED displays is deemed as having less sharp definition than that of an RGB-stripe design.

Among the buttons featured on Nokia’s design are its power, volume and dedicated camera buttons which are located on the right edge however leaving the left edge button-cleared. And alongside the microSIM housing on the top is the headset jack; the bottom portion has a Mico-USB slot.

The phone comes with a universal tripod connector, a power level indicator and a second (1,020mAh) battery. Camera Grip accessory, made from the same polycarbonate material, is available in colours that would compliment with the handset is priced at £47.99 (inc. VAT). The main function of the Camera Grip is to keep a steady hand while shooting although it is shown to have considerably increased the handset size.

The Features. While Lumia 1020 shares the same fairly modest dual core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC of Lumia 920 and 820, the latter have 1GB RAM but the former has been boosted to 2GB.

Since there isn’t MicroSD card slot to use in storing media files (which includes those 1020’s fancy high-resolution camera pictures), a 32GB internal storage along with the GB free SkyDrive storage is available.

While the 2,000mAh battery struggled to get going for 24 hours, when the Xenon flash of the camera was used, the headset is considered top-end with its full set of connectivity options that include NFC, dual-band Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n), Bluetooth (3.0) as well as pentaband LTE (100Mbps down, 50Mbps up).

Nokia did a great job in adding value into its Windows Phone handsets although Microsoft doesn’t allow its hardware partners skin its Windows Phone OS or have its appearance changed.

Nokia Lumia 1020 was able to take advantage of augmenting the basic camera capabilities of Windows Phone handsets through software utilization. It comes by way of free apps like Here Drive+ and Here Maps for Google Maps-style geolocation for point to point navigation as well as the superb Nokia Music.

The Camera. With Bing Vision (a barcode and QR code scanner), Panorama (panorama shooting mode), Nokia Smart Cam (which take burst-mode shots which makes it possible for you to produce composite images) and Nokia Cinemagraph (adds small animated elements to photos). Lumia 2010’s selling point is it’s camera’s 41 megapixel sensor, which actually goes the same with last year’s 808 PureView, that include image stabilization and 3x digital zoon, shitter speeds between 1/16,000 of a second to 4 seconds and ISO settings between 100 and 4000.

Shooting modes include the Camera mode for automatic settings and Nokia Pro Camera that features manual camera settings control. There however is a certain level of inconvenience in switching between two modes as it will require you to have the lenses area visited –can be done by tapping the camera’s button on viewfinder screen.

There will be two sets of images automatically captured whenever taking a photo. A 34 megapixel image that will only be accessible the moment you are to connect the handset to a computer (which can be moved to your hard drive for a copy or so) while the other one is the 5 megapixel that can be dropped into your SkyDrive allowance, share by email or view on handset. Deleting the photo that you are viewing will delete the other since both are linked on the handset.

There however is a need to consider at least 15cm distance from the subject since the camera, although copes well with varying light conditions, isn’t great at very close up shots.

One more thing about Lumia 1020 is that it’ll take a couple of seconds to have the image processed which means missing second or some other shots of an exciting scene.

It is best to note that the storage capacity of Nokia Lumia 1020 is fixed at 32GB although popping in and out of memory cards of your standalone camera is possible.

While Nokia Lumia 1020 can’t be good to be considered as standalone digital camera’s substitute, it is undeniably impressive when it comes to shooting decent photos. It has an appeal however heavy use will seriously deplete the battery which makes most of the users prefer the 920.