Nokia Lumia 1520 Review and Specification

If you're in denial about 'phablets' then take a look at the Lumia 1520. With a 6in screen the handset has one inch on most flagship smartphone and is only the same amount smaller than tablets like the Nexus 7 and Tesco Hudl.

Phablets may be a good choice for those wanting a smartphone and a tablet, but without the funds to buy both. However, the Lumia 1520 is priced at a whopping £873 on Nokia's website. Luckily it's available for around £550 elsewhere but that's still £50 more than buying a Nexus 7 and Nexus 5.

Design

The Lumia 1520’s 6in screen is nearly big enough to have its own gravitational pull. In fact, it’s a little too big for our tastes (and our none-too-puny fingers), but if you’re in the 6in+ phablet market you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into – a smartphone that you’ll need two hands to operate nine times out of ten, in exchange for a more pleasant viewing experience.

Sun-blotting size aside, the 1520’s IPS LCD screen is, in a word, delicious.

It’s the first screen running Windows Phone to sport a 1920x1080 full HD resolution (something the Android competitors have had for a couple of years), and our retinas lapped up each and every pixel.

Colours are bright and punchy, and despite the departure from the normal AMOLED screens used in previous Lumia devices, blacks remain deep, dark and true, on a par with the  blacks offered by the LG G2’s outstanding LCD display.

It also performs well in bright sunlight, thanks to its ability to recalibrate based on ambient light conditions, and can handle use with gloves pretty well – ideal for crisp, bright winter days. Viewing angles are excellent, and the colourful Windows 8 live tiles seem to pop off the screen, such is its clarity.

Naturally, then, web browsing and videos look stunning, and any other smartphone (bar the ridiculously large 6.4in Sony Xperia Z Ultra) will seem tiny in comparison.

Hardware and performance

Windows Phones have been lagging behind its rivals in terms of hardware. Well it's made a major leap forward with the latest version which supports quad-core processors and screen resolutions higher than 768 x 1280.

The Lumia 1520 is the first Windows Phone to use a Full HD resolution (1080 x 1920). It's an IPS screen with exceptional viewing angles and the ClearBlack technology gives the top-notch contrast which we've grown used to with Nokia's screens. It also performs better than most outdoors.

While things on the screen look pretty good, the pixel density is a fair amount lower than other Full HD smartphones because of its size. The Lumia 1520 has a pixel density of 367ppi compared to a more typical 440ppi.

While the screen is impressive, it's very difficult to use one-handed. My fairly large hands can only reach about a third of the display. You need to use the Lumia 1520 with both hands the vast majority of the time to get anything done.

The Lumia 1520 has, under the bonnet, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor; the same 2.2GHz quad-core powerhouse which you'll find in many of the top Android smartphones. Alongside this is 2GB of RAM.

We can't use all of usual benchmarking apps on Windows Phone but that means we can concentrate on giving you our user experience, which is more important. SunSpider which we can test came back with a blisteringly fast time of 546ms.

Windows Phone wasn't particularly laggy before, but it's definitely not now. The areas which used to slow down, namely opening large apps and multi-tasking, are much smoother with the Snapdragon chip and the latest version of the OS which we'll come to later.

There's 32GB of internal storage, of which just over 26GB is available to the user for filling with apps, photos music and videos. As usual, there's 7GB of free Microsoft SkyDrive cloud storage and the Lumia 1520 has a microSD card slot which accepts up to 64GB cards. That totals a pretty decent 97GB.

As you would expect from a high-end smartphone, the Lumia 1520 has some of the latest connectivity. It's got 11ac dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, A-GPS, 4G LTE support and wireless charging. The only thing really missing is an infrared transmitter.

Camera

The Lumia 1520's camera is a step down from the 41-megapixel monster on the Lumia 1020, but still well ahead of the competition, offering a 20-megapixel sensor, and borrowing some software tricks from its higher-resolution brother.

Nokia uses "supersampling", where each pixel is the summation of its neighbours; that generates 5MP images from the 20MP sensor. The result is a photo that is free from artefacts, for the most part, and thanks to the built-in optical image stabilisation, clear and sharp.

In low-light conditions, the camera produces shots that are brighter than most of the competition, and handles colours a lot better when the flash is used than the likes of the Nexus 5, which also has optical image stabilisation.

Overall, the camera with dedicated two-stage shutter button (press a bit to focus, press more to take the shot) is highly competitive with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Sony Xperia Z Ultra and even the iPhone 5S.

Nokia’s Pro Camera app is noteworthy: it combines some of Nokia’s other imaging apps into one, do-all camera application. It provides both a simple but intelligent point-and-shoot experience, as well as every option a camera phone photographer is likely to want, all clustered under an intuitive ring interface.

Nokia’s Refocus app, which allows you to focus your photo after the fact using software and a multi-capture approach, is also fun, as long as you keep the phone steady when taking the shot.

It achieves something similar to the Lytro light field camera, but instead of capturing a light field – the intensity, wavelength or colour and direction of all the light entering a camera lens rather than just light intensity and colour – it works by capturing multiple focus points in quick succession to blend into one picture which you can tap to refocus or have everything in focus at the same time.

Nokia Lumia 1520 Specification

• DimensionS: 162.8 x 85.4 x 8.7 mm
• Weight: 209g 
• Screen: 6in 1080 x 1920 pixels, (367 ppi) IPS LCD 
• Card slot: microSD, up to 64 GB
• Internal memory: 32 GB
• NFC: Yes
• Camera: 20 MP, 1/2.5'' sensor size, PureView technology
• Secondary: 1.2 MP, 720p@30fps
• Video: 1080p@30fps, video light, stereo sound rec.
• OS: Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Black
• CPU: Qualcomm MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 quad-core 2.2 GHz
• RAM: 2GB
• Battery: Non-removable Li-Ion 3400 mAh