As someone who takes a lot of photos with my phone, this interests me a lot. Though as someone who has previously used Windows Phone, I'm very skeptical about going back to it.
This is the first device that makes me wonder about Nokia's WP-exclusive decision. They didn't go with Android to avoid becoming "yet another" Android manufacturer, and I agree with that sentiment (look at how few are turning a profit). However, there are no Android devices that really excel at stuff like photography- I think that Nokia could have carved out an interesting niche in solidly built, feature-focused devices.
I've had the Lumia 928 for 3 weeks now. My three previous phones were iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s.
Part of me wishes that I would've gone Windows Phone sooner but the realistic part of me realizes that Windows Phone 7 was still nowhere near the quality of iOS.
Windows Phone 8 is a completely different matter though. It's superior to my old iPhones in almost every way. Live tiles, SkyDrive integration (much better than iCloud especially if you get the 25 GB free from Microsoft), much better maps application, tight OneNote integration, native Office support, excellent Remote Desktop support. The other thing that's important to note is that the web browsing is just as good and email is just as good. I actually do those two things more than any other function on my phone.
As a long time iOS guy who's been using Windows Phone (Nokia) for over a year, I can honestly say it has the best UI in terms of usability for the form-factor. You're right - the map smokes all others. The only issue I have is the non-webkit IE browser and lack of a few key apps.
IE 11 will include WebGL support [1], and due to Microsoft's 'core systems' sharing across big Windows and Windows Phone, this is likely to propogate down to the phone.
> Doesn't WebGL essentially use root access to your gpu?
Only in badly-designed, non-conformant user agents. :)
The WebGL security issues have, for at least a year, been FUD. The spec is essentially fixed, drivers have become a whole lot better, and browsers have become a whole lot stricter in their validation code. WebGL is not OpenGL nor OpenGL ES.
Examples: while the OpenGL ES spec is silent on buffer overflows, WebGL mandates user agents to signal errors; while OpenGL ES doesn't specify the state of freshly allocated textures, WebGL requires them to be blanked out; WebGL textures can never be from non-origin-clean canvases.
Except on Linux. As an anecdote, as recently as January, visiting any WebGL sites that used any shaders would reliably panic my kernel with NVidia hardware and the NVidia binary blob. I then switched to Intel hardware which is much more stable but also shows how much variance there is here.
For me to be comfortable with WebGL, we'll have to really train graphics card manufacturers to take security issues as seriously as web developers do. That isn't going to happen any time soon.
Huh, if you don't mind me asking, which video card? I've used linux+nvidia pretty exclusively for work and never seen anything near as bad on linux (I do run higher-end cards than the average PC, though).
FYI, Android devices will soon not use WebKit, as Chrome is changing to Blink. Whilst Blink is a fork of WebKit, I believe that the differences between mobile Safari and mobile IE will be as small as the differences between Safari and Chrome.
At the risk of starting a device war, I'd agree with everything you've said, except that Android does a lot of those important things better still. Maps in particular- Google Maps is utterly unparalleled.
But it's all down to the user- I have no requirement for Remote Desktop support, so that doesn't matter to me. I don't use OneNote or Office, and use Dropbox for file syncing.
Long time ago I had an old Windows phone, HTC Diamond and some other wierd pda/phone type thing that was awful. Since that I went "Android" - I've used HTC Hero, Desire, Xperia Arc and Xperia S. Now I'm using Lumia 920 I got from my workplace.
I used to think that Google Maps was great, but after using Nokia's HERE maps I have to say, HERE is better. Not sure if it's the hardware, but first of all it's A LOT faster than Google Maps ever was. Secondly, HERE maps work offline (altough I just heard Google is finally enabling this with their maps).
Without wanting to sound like fanboy, the 920 is a great phone: it just works. The UX is better than in android, mainly because different apps all follow same guidelines on how to implement UI navigation/actions.
On the android phones I had, most of the time it was "free for all" with the UX as different manufacturers and devs implemented their own ideas on how nav/actions should work.
Other things I can say about 920: battery time is great, wifi (and wifi sharing) work flawlessly, sound quality is great both ways and the _camera_ is best I ever used in a mobile phone. It just puts all other mobile phones to shame.
I'm looking forwards to 1020 and hope to get one when they are available.
Only bad thing I can say is the Windows store and apps. I miss quite a few apps I used on my android phones. It's a shame so many devs only focus on apple/android.
Offline maps has been available since at least 2 years. I think you had to long tap a point, choose Save offline from the menu, choose the dimensions of the square that pops up and the square becomes available offline.
Yes, but that downloaded map data is useless. You cannot search in it, find any routes in it or anything. You have to use the net and query Google. So it's more caching of the view than actual map data.
Not only that, but every now and then Google Maps want to check something over the Internet and just locks itself with an undismissable spinner and "Loading" message until you find a connection.
Well, it is seems like caching of the actual map data, but the application itself is not capable of performing the searches or figuring out routes. Since the device I am talking about was really not that powerful enough to perform that kind of computation, it could be intentional.
Nokia Maps is _amazing_ and has been since the Symbian days, even more so by the fact that you can download maps beforehand (whole countries) and use them offline. Utterly unparalleled might be a bit harsh.
I can vouch for this, Nokia Maps is just amazing. The ability to download maps offline is extremely convenient, not just when you are out of the country and don't have a data connection, but also when you are running low on battery.
However, I am still surprised how we got here, we went from having offline maps on all GPS devices in the beginning of last decade to online only maps by the end of it! Now we have to tout the ability of having offline maps as a feature?
Last time I tried Nokia Maps (on a WP7 device probably a year ago, admittedly) I tried searching for a nearby location by entering a partial address. It failed. I tried searching for a cross street without using name suffixes. It failed.
Point is, everyone has different needs from a Maps app. I don't drive, so don't need navigation. I just need to enter an address quickly and find out where it is, so offline downloads don't really do anything for me.
I don't drive either, so walking/public transit directions are INTEGRAL to my survival. I haven't played with a Windows Phone in almost two years, though.
Google Maps can download maps beforehand, but for some reason it won't let you plan a route without an internet connection. Probably because their route-finding algorithm would crush a phone or something :)
In the latest update, 7.0, there's quite a bit of conversation that this is no longer possible. It's recently come out that it can be done with a gimmick, typing 'okay maps' I believe, but it remains unintuitive as a primary task let alone worthwhile feature.
That is definitely a thing that you don't appreciate until you have to use it. We were on road over the long weekend and were lost with no network connection. Thanks to offline maps on my Lumia 920 I was able to find the nearest road offline and get back on road to our destination.
I don't ever post here but figured I'd add my two cents to this.
I got a Nokia Lumia 928 about 40 days ago (just passed time for insurance). This past weekend I went on a trip from Seattle to Yellowstone. We had four people in the car and in most of Idaho and most of Montana there was very sparse 3G or LTE connection. My phone was the only one capable of doing offline GPS navigation.
I've been quite surprised with how much I've enjoyed my Windows 8 phone and only become angry with the lack of games when I'm on the toilet.
I recently returned back to the UK from a 2 week long US road trip, covering 2000 miles. We downloaded the Nokia Drive data for the states we were visiting in advance onto my girlfriend's cheap Lumia 710, as we wouldn't have any data connection (not wanting to incur roaming charges). We were utterly dependent on the Nokia Drive app, and it performed exceptionally. Definitely recommended in place of a dedicated satnav.
I agree. In fact, I'm still using a Symbian phone, and the maps still work. (Offline maps are essentially the only smartphone-esque feature that I make use of on a regular basis, so I feel no need to upgrade.)
I was working at jimmy johns as a driver about four months ago. One of the drivers there had a Nokia phone, I had an android, and obviously delivering you often get addresses that are sometimes slightly incorrect etc. Google maps never failed me, the windows phone guy would get lost constantly. I don't know why, could be just bad driving, but one thing that the google maps seemed to be better at was determining the location of businesses and for traffic and TRAINS (since the town I was in had 2 different tracks).
In short, I'd have to agree that google maps is unparalleled (important to note that the iPhone people didn't even bother using their maps).
Maybe the iPhone people just knew where they were going?
I used to deliver pizza. If you had to stop and look up addresses you lost money to the drivers who didn't. It was to your advantage to learn your way around the delivery area.
+1 I haven't been able to get maps to work at all on my Nokia 920, I can't even figure what the map app is....everything is prefixed as Nokia something app with some weird names that don't work. Suffice it to say, I'm forced to use my old iPhone for anything that involves a map.
Windows phone would be much better if they offered a google map app for it.
Lets just to with an example...I wanted to find the nearest post office, typed it in, I got a result about 9 hours flight away from where I lived. Google maps was able to return something down the street.
The HERE Drive+ is designed specifically for in-car-use (to work as standalone satnav replacement), but they also have "HERE Maps", which will give you public transport and walking directions: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/here-maps/6c2863...
What is available for the cn market? My phone is locked to that even though I'm American myself.
I was use ping here maps, or HERE whatever, there are a lot of them and I'm not sure what each does. It didn't help me find something as simple as the post office when I needed to mail off tax forms last month, which google maps and apple maps had no problem with. Very disappointing.
I actually care more about having competition and choices than just openness. Open source softwares suffer from stagnation just like the closed ones when they are left with no competition. Which is why I am actively rooting for Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS. I am also hoping with more Mobile OSes, we will start seeing standards to interact and share data between them.
Windows Phone is more open than iOS in the sense that you have multiple OEMs making multiple types of phones targeting different markets unlike the iPhone. For example, the Lumia 521 is just $130 off contract in the US. Also the walled garden prevents the malware problem that Android has. So it can be considered as a happy medium between iOS and Android.
Yup, I managed to grab a new one at a Microsoft store for $86 (had a gift card and they had in store promos I abused). Most bang for the buck consumer product I have ever purchased.
"It's superior to my old iPhones in almost every way."
Unless you count battery life, GPU, probably CPU, form factor, build quality, the wildly superior app, media and accessory ecosystems. But other than that what have the Cupertianians done for us lately?
CPU and GPU for the end user isn't important. What is important is the perf of the UI, which WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware.
I'd also say Nokia is very closely behind Apple in build quality if not on par. And their form factors have been great as well.
iPhone/iOS definitely has a better ecosystem, but the apps on WP8 are getting better.
Sure bring whatever you want. The build quality of iphones is attested to in scores of independent reviews and it's not the same thing as drop test resistance.
For me: When a phone 'requires' a case to protect it from gentle use, even of putting it on the table so it will not get scratches is absurd. My iPhone 5 got scratched up before my case arrived, and I was so careful with it. I attribute this to 'build quality' also, it's not just how it feels.
I think Nokia phones are more "sturdy", exemplified by its cheap phones that just won't break. Apple is more meticulous I'd say. I have a Lumia 920. There are just tiny little seams and creaks that one wouldn't find on an iPhone.
"WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware."
I'm not sure why you've lumped iOS with famously jittery Android (at least historically, 4.2 seems to have solved lag) since iOS is usually cited as the standard for smooth interface as in this initial WP 7 review from Josh Topolsky: "probably the most accurate and nuanced touch response this side of iOS4."
The battery life metric I care about is: how long will the battery last after I've been using all kinds of weird apps for a year.
That's where iPhone seems to excel. On a fresh install of Android, using just one built in app, it seems fine. But eventually the phone fills up with stuff that seems to drain it. Not sure how Windows Phone fares on that front.
Absolutely that's a problem with Android. It's a natural consequence of having a platform where apps are free to access pretty much any hardware in the background with no review (that's a good thing if you're a developer though).
However, Android gives you tools to see which apps are using the most battery, and you can uninstall them if they're a problem.
Recently I noticed much worse battery life on my nexus 4, opened up the battery stats, and saw 30% of my battery usage was the consequence of a messaging app I don't use, deleted it, and got back to normal.
In this regard WP8 is very much like iOS and not even close to Android.
Apps are 'tombstoned' when they are not the visible app. So no matter how many apps you install, when they're not open, they won't use battery.
Battery, build quality and form factor are not better for the iPhone. Battery's about the same, build quality is similar, but iPhone loses points for being either easy to scratch (black 5) or easy to crack (4, 4S). Apple in general makes stylish but not robust phones.
iPhone loses on the form factor because it really has only one that is acceptable - the 5. I am typing this on a 4s and the screen is too small and the shape does not feel as good in the hand as the round polycarbonate Lumias.
CPU and GPU don't seem to be so different subjectively. Both are smooth.
The apps are vastly better on iOS, even the ones that are on both platforms e.g. one cannot insert rows in Excel for WP 7 or add annotations in Kindle.
Support seems better for Apple, as Lumia 800 and 900 customers did not get WP8, while the older iPhone 4 will get iOS 7!
The image stabilization and a proper optics set seem nice, but honestly 41MP sensor is practically useless itself. Even professional cameras with high quality sensors are not usually sensor resolution limited - i.e. increasing resolution wouldn't be much use since at the pixel level the image is already at a significant noise level/optics limited. For such a small sensor and f-number, I guess 41MP is not only useless, it's detrimental, because you're paying for nothing. Although it's possible it may improve quality a bit wrt lower resolutions due to downscale averaging.
... and by white paper you mean "marketing material"? I had Nokia PureView 808 and I agree that it is nice and helps making good photos when downscaled. Idea to use sensor in this way is really interesting but in the end that just covers one little thing from many that are important in photography. For the same (if not lower) price you can buy good compact (if it must be pocketable) or system photo camera (if size matters but can be slightly bigger) and enjoy all benefits of photography like high ISO numbers, big sensor (not in megapixels but by area that is more important than megapixels), possibility to change aperture (this one is big for me because of bokeh) and some other.
It is just a little bit bigger sensor in the end with one smart idea that is not contributing much.
The 928, Windows8 mobile and Nokia Maps are amazing. Best decision I made was waiting for Nokia to get its act together. Windows 8 phone could be the best mobile OS if they release some more APi's for musical production and get some better applications in the market.
I've got to echo these sentiments, I've got a 900 and am "upgrading" today to a 920. It's a killer phone, I've really enjoyed it, though I came from the BB Torch so...
I switch between iOS and Android, but the Lumia phones do seem attractive to me despite WP. They could have really differentiated in the android market, or at least forced Samsung to make some better hardware choices.
WP, especially WP8 got pretty got reviews. Why the hate ? Especially with Nokia phones where you get Nokia Maps for free. I don't know of any Android phone where you get an offline quality GPS for free.
I went from iOS Google Maps->Apple Maps->iOS Google Maps on my iPhones. The Google Maps worked really well.
The HERE Drive+ from Nokia Maps though is fantastic. One nice feature (of many)... it shows you the current speed limit on every road that you're on. It also shows you your current speed and it is dead-on accurate. It can even be set to give an alert if you exceed the speed limit by x MPH.
Hands down, the built-in Lumia 928 maps application is better than any maps application I ever used on any of my three iPhones.
Maps app or Driving Navigation app? Because they're extremely different use cases. My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.
>My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.
I'm amazed by that. In London the mapping is top notch, it has pedestrian paths and such which gmaps is missing. However for Soho where bars come and go in weeks, its often out of date for POIs. But as normally if I'm in a place that changes often, I'll have data, that isn't an issue (one can always fall back to gmaps data).
But outside of London Nokia maps are hands down the best I've found. This holds true in the countryside of England, France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam... I mean in the middle of nowhere Vietnam, I've good offline all the directions I need to my cycling. Amazing, gmaps didn't even have a road there, and bing, well lets not talk about bing maps. The only one that comes close is the Open Street Map project. But they lack POIs pretty much completely. On my motorbike in Thailand, I had not just Fuel places shown, but also coffee places. With no mobile phone signal...
Whilst I use windows phone as my primary device, I have some uses (SkyDemon) that require me to have an Android too, but I will say that the Nokia mapping is so bloody good, I bought a 720 (as in the UK they were £120 off contract!) for a friend as a travel phone, only for the mapping.
However, I don't use it when driving in the UK, because it doesn't have 'accident black spot warnings' or speed trap locations.
you can adjust the limit at which point it alerts you. You can set when the alert will go off area that have below 80km/h speed and those with speed over 80km/h. Mine is set to ping on 15km/h+ on the slower areas and 18km/h+over on the higher.
And that's the problem with Nokia and their phones. People are buying them for the hardware, despite the OS. They could sell so much more with Android.
I'd say they could even beat Samsung in sales eventually (again). But right now I can't even extrapolate how much time it would take them to ever do that, if even possible.
For a normal user, how much does the OS matter in 2013?
The OS playing ground is much more level today than it was in 2008.
I'll be upgrading my iPhone 4 soon, and frankly, I'll be considering everything OS out there. I'll actually be choosing based on hardware more than OS, because all the web services that I use are supported by every operating system.
I guess if you're really into apps, the ecosystem might matter, but I suspect a normal, non-geek really doesn't need access to hundreds of thousands of apps if their core needs are satisfied.
WP8 is getting a native Vine app, and with Instagram playing "me too" on video this may force them to develop a native WP app.
There is a feature equivalent WP app that uploads to Instagram that is an unofficial Instagram app, can't remember the name now though, but for users that want Instagram the reviews have been good. It's pretty much everything Instragram is sans name.
its called instance [1], and yeah, its pretty damn good.
third-party devs really are the lifeblood of the wp ecosystem and continue to amaze me with the quality of the apps many of them put-out. coupled with an increasing capable mobile web, its made the app gap virtually non-existent for me.
The public Instagram API is read-only and it looks like the Windows Phone apps that support uploading do so through something called Instagraph, which seems to be an unsupported method of getting photos onto Instagram.
The "Windows Phone lacks apps" meme is getting old very quickly. But then again there is a grain of truth there. Most applications that you use day in and day out are probably already there natively or as a very good clone. The part that might hurt you is when the next hot application comes along it is likely that a native or clone for Windows Phone may not exist right away and you might have to wait for a few weeks to get it. Android also has this problem to some extent. If you are always chasing the new hot apps on your iPhone then you might stick to iPhones a bit longer until app makers warm up to Windows ecosystem.
Try being locked to an obscure marketplace region like china, and it's much more painful. Facebook, Skype are all MIA, and you can't change your marketplace even if the software says you can (it just ignores your config options).
iPhones sold in china don't have this problem, so they are a safer buy.
I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too. Having a differentiation that you can't protect at all is not worth having many less apps to offer.
I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too.
They can, but they don't. And Nokia is indisputably the king of Windows Phone world, even though HTC have created some perfectly great devices. It's unlikely that Nokia could ever topple Samsung from the Android top spot.
How is WP compelling at all for other OEM's when Nokia has 80 percent of WP's market share? That's much worse than Samsung with 30 percent in the Android market. I wouldn't even consider it worth my time, especially when besides the extremely dominant market share of Nokia within WP market, it also means very few devices per total being sold. the numbers just aren't compelling at all for others. Plus, you have a lot harder time differentiating, too.
Nokia has such a big market share because nobody wants a WP, but still enough people want a Nokia. If many people will start wanting a WP, many others will want in - especially the low cost manufacturers, which can simply differentiate on price.
Samsung wasn't the first mover for Android (HTC was the one), while Samsung was among the first movers with WP - the other ones were HTC, Dell, and LG. Nokia wasn't among them.
So much for the first-mover advantage...
I am glad that there's more competition in the marketplace rather than just Apple and Android and that there are companies looking beyond earnings in their next quarter.
Apple could have probably made more money over the years by selling Macs with Windows and retiring their own OS.
Competition is good, for example see the flat look and concentration on typography that both Android and iOS borrowed from Windows Phone.
That's why I don't get all the deriding of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone. Android has plenty hardware OEMs behind it.
I've had my Nokia 928 for about 6 weeks now. Like poster 300bps above, my previous 3 phones were all iPhones (we're like .. phone twins or something)
Overall, I like both the device and the OS. So far any nits I have are minor -- Only one volume setting for all the apps, touch screen is overly sensitive, polymer case is too slippery.
So far, the WP app store has had the applications I care most about. And since you can write apps in C#, it's more approachable to write for.
True - I doubt that any of the hardware manufacturers for Android have the technology to top what Nokia did with Lumia 1020. Nokia is completely invested in camera unlike HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.,
Samsung makes Android cameraphones as far as I know and they do it right IMHO. 41Mp are nice, I don't say anything (I had PureView 808 until I dropped and destroyed it), but it is not the most important thing in photography.
The only Android manufacturer that seems to care at all about camera quality is Sony, and even they haven't really put their full emphasis on that lately.
It seems to me that they went backwards on the sensor size--which, I think, is probably the most important thing for cameras next to the lens. The Nokia 808 had a 1/1.2" sensor. I was hoping the next iteration of the Nokia would have a 1" sensor.
Aren't bigger sensors generally better quality when it comes to cameras? 41mp in a tiny sensor is lousy, those pixels need to be big enough to capture quality light.
I am a huge fan of android , but using wp since the past 3 months, I hope that people who comment badly about wp will use it once before complaining about it.
I used Windows Phone 7. The UI was fantastic. The platform innovation was poor. The Maps app (including the Nokia one) was poor- and utterly terrible at interpreting addresses. Any IM experience outside of the built-in (and not extendable) native options was awful.
I want to like WP, but in many ways it was a mercy when MS decided that my (few month-old) phone wasn't going to get any updates any more and persuaded me to head back to Android.
Why is this being downvoted? I use an HTC 8X as my main phone but the points mentioned in this comment are perfectly true. For comparison I also own a Galaxy Nexus and 4th-gen iPod touch.
Searching in both the stock and Nokia Map apps doesn't seem to do any intelligent keyword parsing/correction as even the web version of Bing Maps does, push notifications tend to be unreliable compared to iOS and Android, live tiles simply don't consitute a notification center, and abandoning Windows Phone 7 meant that some phones barely got a year of updates.
* Entering text beyond 5 lines is a nightmare, as lag increases wich each keypress
* No Skype unless I unlock it
* In that venue: locked phone, requires a substantial amount of money to develop on it
* Taking a picture has a 5% chance of hanging the whole camera, requiring a restart. Also: no timer for the camera
* No connection under Linux, as the USB upgrade was not backported to my version of WP, and it doesn't plug as a regular USB drive. I'm guessing support for my phone is gone, which should also be added to the list.
* Can't remove the USB card (explicitly forbidden in the manual). Uploading media requires the installation of Zune. Yep, you read that right, Zune
* No way of changing the default search engine
* Cannot edit playlists for music, which BTW must be created with Zune while plugged onto my PC
I'm glad you are glad with your WP, but implying that anyone who complains about it is doing it just for the sake of it is, IMHO, a bit misleading.
They ruined the design of the old Lumia for the benefit of a better camera. Who's really clamoring for that? And who's willing to pay $299.99 with 2 year contract for it?
Hmm, there was a time when function was occasionally considered over form..
The phone is hardly ruined, it's just a high end handset for people in a particular niche, one I happen to belong to (long gave up carrying real cameras, don't give two heaps about Android/pointless OS wars or "mobile apps" or any of that crap, adore the notion of a reasonably high end camera that requires zero effort to bring with me).
Design is often about trade-offs, and based on the parent comment, you seem to have entirely missed the point of this particular design.
I am clamoring for that. A smartphone that combines the best of the 808 pureview[1] sensor and the improvements of the Lumia 920 like image stabilization and better dynamic range[2]? Yes please. Also, I'm in Europe so don't need to worry about US contract woes.
It's not about the camera, it's about presenting Nokia as a producer of a premium phone, so that other versions of Nokia look better in comparison. No one cares about Windows Phone, but when Nokia makes headlines for 41-megapixels, the general populace that doesn't really get that they don't need 41-megapixels will nevertheless notice, and think 'wow, that is a lot, does my iPhone have that?'.
99.9% of people who will buy this phone will never have a need for 41 megapixels. But they'll buy it just the same.
I do believe Nokia has been very clear that the high megapixels is meant to be used as supersampling to reduce noise in normal sized pictures. They are after all targeting the enthusiast photographer who likes to (believe he) understands how camera's work.
Also, from an engineering point of view it's pretty neat: if the idea is to downsize the final picture to 5 mp, while using cropping on the pre-downsampled image to zoom, that means you can focus on having a high optical resolution in the centre of a fixed focal lens, and worry less about the edges. That has lots of advantages: a fixed focal lens is less complicated than a zoom lens, which has the side effect of making it easier to keep the lense flat,and getting a higher optical resolution in the centre is easier to do from an optics standpoint.
Nokia's really screwing up the messaging on this, as people are fixating on the megapixel count
HTC has been trying to push the message you suggest with the camera on the HTC One, and while the One is a great device and (I think) doing well for HTC, no one is really talking about their camera -- even though it is a superior camera to most other phones. Megapixels are like Clock Speed was a decade ago: there are more important stats to look at, but consumers just see the one number.
I'm not making any judgement, I'm just saying the point of 41 megapixels isn't to give consumers a huge picture, it's to give them a reason to buy the phone.
What HTC did do a good job of was branding their pixels as "Ultrapixels". I see that branding used on all the major tech blogs when mentioning the HTC One's camera.
Nokia's making the mistake of pushing a camera with specs that isn't easily understood by many people, and from the looks of it, that seems to include people who consider themselves photographers.
I tend to think that the 41 megapixel count will turn off many prospective buyers ("Why the hell do I need so many megapixels?").
41 megapixels can't be nice on a crappy sensor and lenses system. 41 megapixels would be interesting on a real camera unless someone wants to print oversampled stuff.
You don't need to print to see the improvements the oversampled images provide. You should see much cleaner images, especially in low light. These are noticeable even at Facebook level resolutions. Anyone who has used a real camera would know that.
There's completely no point in such sensor if lens are not providing equally high resolution image too. Unless you're into shooting Airy disks (though, I don't think the phone will provide raw sensor data).
That is, the whole 41MP thing is, mostly, PR bullshit.
Well, this camera's spiritual predecessor, the 808 seemed to shoot high megapixel images just fine. The Verge's 100% crops of the 34MP images look fine to me.
>99.9% of people who will buy this phone will never have a need for 41 megapixels. But they'll buy it just the same.
The tech does make normal pictures look better because of the oversampling. Not to mention optical image stabilization for reducing blur and shake in both image and video.
I don't text nearly as much as I used to. Most of my friends communicate using either Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and our recent, biggest replacement for texting, Snapchat.
The camera is without a doubt, the most important part of my phone. I use it at least a dozen times a day. I'd absolutely pay $300 for a phone with a good enough camera.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to do that AND switch to Windows Phone. But given an Android or iOS device with this exact hardware? I'd 100% grab one of these.
Without sounding like a fan boy, I would actually recommend you to go give WP a try. I am not going to say it's better than iOS for lacking quality apps but it's way better than my Nexus 4. Android to me is the poorest OS amidst the 3.
second that. If you are saying that after using Windows Phone then I respect it but I won't write off windows phone without giving it a shot. Take this from someone who has tried iPhone for a year before moving to Windows Phone.
It's both, actually. But that said, Nokia uses very good glass.
It's only once you get up to P&Ss and DSLRs that the glass can really hold back the sensors -- phone sensors are always struggling to make a compromise between package size and image quality, and usually package size wins.
>> The problem with phone cameras (mostly) ins't the sensor, it's the glass, or lack there-of.
Is that a problem with the camera or the user's expectations of what that camera can do?
You can only push the laws of physics (with respect to optics, especially) so far, and if you want a camera that can fit in the pocket of a pair of skinny jeans, compromises must be made.
There's still a lot of room to push the laws of physics, although I'm not sure glass is the answer. I think manufacturing tolerances will be the biggest limit for inexpensive handsets.
If I play (hah!) stupid, I look at the flange distance and lens size for an SLR of any sort and compare it to a mirrorless camera such as the M9 or even NEX-7, I can get much higher quality on the same or smaller sensor with smaller lenses, especially in the normal field of view. This is purely based on that big empty space in the SLR. The main thing we'll have to give up is an expectation of a shallow depth of field, but "f/8 and be there" is why camera phones are useful anyway.
I've been impressed with the sapphire lens on the iPhone 5, all things considered. It's not what I would call a good camera, but perhaps coupled with a high-density sensor with an alternative pixel structure[1] and microlenses, it would not be unreasonable to expect 2013 "full frame" image quality in a mobile device in 2-5 years.
I don't want to burn my fingers trying to capture 4k raw video on my phone. Heat dissipation will become an issue, as it is on HDSLRs and MILCs.
>> My point is this is the _worst_ kind of spec padding.
How so? This is actually the first officially announced smartphone (I also have a keen interest in the upcoming Sony i1, but it's not a reality yet) that I'd consider buying just for the camera.
Personally, I think Nokia has taken an interesting approach with the sensor, because the added resolution gives them leeway in overcoming the optics problem (from a focal length perspective, at least) in that the "digital zoom" will produce better results than any other phone.
The upcoming Sony i1 should please many people. It's rumored to have a 1/2.3" sensor - while smaller than the Nokia's sensor, it's still quite large for a phone.
My first impression is, does more mpegapixel instantly make the Nokia Lumia 1020 a better phone? If you truly want to take good photos, use a real camera, like a DSLR. Admittedly, 41-megapixel is quite a wow factor, but based on the hardware specs it seems it's more of a camera than a phone. The other questions is, do people want to every photo to be 20MB+?
It's also worth noting that this and the 38 MP Nokia 808 phone have a 1/1.2" sensor, larger than all but one fixed lens compact camera, including cellphones. The only compact with a larger sensor is the Sony RX100/RX100 II. Not quite DSLR quality, but higher quality than you'll get out of most compacts.
The high MP counts allows you do downsample/pixel bin for higher quality images and also allows room to crop, providing a digital zoom which doesn't suck.
If you are a big DxOMark fan, you'll find the RX100mk2 scores a 67, while the RX100 scores a 66, which is the same score as a Canon 7D's sensor.
And while you may argue that the 7D's sensor is old, Canon's been pumping variations of the 7D sensor into all of their recent APS cameras short of the freshly announced 70D.
First, my statement had to do with the 1/1.2" sensor that Nokia is using. Close in size to the RX100 and Nikon 1, but we can't assume that means the same level of image quality- there's a pretty big gap between the RX100 and Nikon 1 IQ scores, for instance.
To your point, I agree. I've seen comparable (and sometimes higher) IQ from my RX100 than I do from various MFT and APS-C DSLR/MILC cams with their kit lenses including the Canon T3i and T4i, GX1, a few NEXes, and Nikon D3000-D3200. The RX100 fares well against those cameras at the wide end of the zoom range when it comes to low light performance and thin DOF as well. Of course, you could spend more and get better lenses for those cameras and beat the RX100 in low light.
I do hope that the new sensor in the 70D provides an actual improvement in ISO score if not IQ and isn't just the older sensor with OSPDAF added.
I didn't mean to sound like I was rebutting your original point about the 1/1.2" sensor -- Sorry about that.
I was just adding to the point about 1" sensors actually being as good as an SLR sensor, which they are.
Of course the RX100's optics limit some of its performance, but Sony's 1" sensor and the M43 sensor they sell to Olympus punch well above their weight, equalling or besting some existing APS sensors on the market today.
What a lot of people forget is that doubling sensor size gets you only one stop in high ISO performance. For raw quality in decent light, 1" seems to be a sweet spot.
>> If you truly want to take good photos, use a real camera, like a DSLR
As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you.
The reality, however, is, that your best camera is actually the one you left at home.
>> 41-megapixel is quite a wow factor
This camera is a little more than just the megapixel count. It appears that they use something similar to pixel binning to use those 41 MPs to make better 5MP images.
The article does a really bad job of explaining what's going on here- the resulting photos won't be 41megapixels. It uses that huge amount as a means to "smooth out" the noise/oddities in the photo, and save it as a more reasonable 5MP or 8MP image.
Presumably the individual pixel size is smaller though? So where's the true advantage here vs having fewer larger pixels which would presumably have less noise anyway.
I read an article a while back when they were just testing this tech. It said the camera takes a picture at the full ~40MP res and then algorithmically chooses the best pixels and sizes down the image to a more reasonable 8MP. Apparently this has a huge benefit on low light shooting.
There are a few ways this is advantageous. Modern camera sensors have a bayer filter in front of them - a RGB grid basically. This allows each pixel to see only one color of light.
The resulting image is "demosaiced" with an algorithm, where by each pixel determines the two colors it's missing by borrowing from nearby pixels.
This can cause some artifacts. By squeezing more pixels into the same space, effectively each resulting pixels in the ~8MP image has actual RGB data, not just data borrowed from neighbors.
An incremental change to an existing product perhaps gets us excited for a few weeks then it dies down. The real question is would you want to use this phone because merely for its camera? A smart phone is more than just a nice camera and a touch screen. IT'S EVERYTHING. If the user interface and experience are still sluggish, even a 100Megapixel camera phone wouldn't do you any good.
I don't think this is supposed to replace DSLRs or Digital Rangefinders. But this will replace the point and shoots and possibly MILCs.
I truly love the quality from my DSLR but it's hulking compared to my MILC (a Sony NEX). For most things the NEX is good enough. If the quality can come close to that of MILCs, then I might just carry this kind of phone for most uses and take the DSLR only for staged shots and the like (non-P&S situations) and forget the MILCs and P&Ses.
You really need to read the article and research a bit more. It is not just about the megapixel number anymore. The resulting photos can be set to be as small as ones produced by a 5mpx camera. The wow factor is the ability decide what you want in the photo after taking it.
Anyone wanna comment on what one is supposed to do with a 41-megapixel picture taken under the optical limits of a camera crammed in just a few cubic millimeters?
We're talking resolutions way beyond what's needed for most prints, and laughable on any electronic display. Even a stunning near-futuristic 4K display is just 9MP; need to reach 8K to start being useful. Flip side, anything needing that level of resolution is going to demand some darned good (i.e.: big) glass in front of it.
I appreciate the view that "what could you possibly need X for?" often has good answers, but there are outer limits of human perception.
Only use I see is digital zoom (a la cropping), and that better prove stunning.
I really wish this would rattle Android market share (I know it won't), because I would never in a hundred years have guessed that the camera in my Nexus 4 is as terrible as it is. My Samsung Focus had a better camera =(
I always mock my GF for having an iPhone (she buys stuff for looks), but if we need to take a picture, hand me that baby because I chose Nexus 4 over the Lumia 928.
But why?? It's not possible make use of more than 10mp unless you're printing a billboard? And that is if you get whole 10mp of sharpness. The best DSLR/Hasselblad images are limited by the cameras optics. There are other vital properties of a camera, like dynamic range and color accuracy. Going to extreme in one spec is absolutely pointless without improving all other aspects of the system.
In my experience, 99% of people don't know the first thing about taking a good photograph. They will not be helped by a 41-megapixel or even 41-gigapixel camera.
Beyond a point, all the pixel density does is dramatically increase their storage requirements - on the camera, on the computer they sync with their camera, and on their backup device. 41 megapixels is well into the realm of negative marginal returns.
In a weird way, if you can capture enough of the light field over time (an insane amount of data by the way) you can "go back" and get whatever picture you want. Which has the potential of allowing complete novices to grab the raw data with some local sensor, and to out source the 'picture taking' to someone who can look at it and return the picture that they should have taken. I know, its crazy talk and off the wall, but my friends in computational circles say that its no more crazy to them than a 1TB hard drive possibility was to me back in 2000.
It does not take 41 megapixel pictures, only 5 megapixel pictures. It used a 41 megapixel sensor, then down-samples it. This results in a higher quality picture.
"Another neat trick: the Lumia 1020 actually creates two images every time you press the camera button in Nokia Pro Camera—a super high-res version for editing and archiving, and an oversampled 5-megapixel copy for easy sharing via email or social networks such as Twitter and Facebook."
Nokia are never gonna learn. Megapixels and Gigahertz don't matter any more. What matters is the experience. Jolla are doing this perfectly right. Focusing on the software to deliver an amazing and unique experience.
I really don't understand all you Symbian lovers / WP haters. Symbian was the shittiest mobile OS that I have ever used. I would use Windows Mobile before Symbian. I remember when all the Nokia lovers were raging about the N97, so I decided to pick one up for something like $700 because it seemed like a great phone (and it had great specs for the time). It was the worst phone experience I ever had. Even after doing all the updates and mods that everyone suggested, it was still extremely buggy and slow.
I've never used Symbian, but if it's worse than Windows Mobile 5, then it's got to be really bad.
If you didn't quit the camera app on WM5, it would stay running in the background and kill the battery without you knowing it. I also had lots of hangs that prevented me from answering calls.
No. If you engaged two neurons you will realise it took as long to turn the assembly from the giant jut out hump to the slight rise it is on the lumia.
I see this copy/paste a lot. And while MP doesn't mean better dynamic range, lower noise, faster shutter speeds, or higher ISO performance saying that it isn't "higher quality" is nonsense.
Higher megapixels literally mean more information about a scene stored by the sensor. Now that information might not be more accurate than a camera with lower MP, but even with that being the case it does better allow you to sub-divide the picture (crop it) and generate new scenes/images without noticeable pixelation.
I shoot with an SLR. I've read this "MP is meaningless" stuff a million and one times. But the people spouting it are almost wrong. Yes, there is FAR too much focus given on MP over more interesting things (e.g. dynamic range) but people take a basic truth too far.
After going from 10 MP to 16 MP, sorry, but it did make a difference. In particular the freedom it gave me in post.
Sure, the quantity of information increases, but more details about what's behind a slow, low-grade or even plastic lens does not necessarily lead to a better photograph, just one with higher resolution.
I don't doubt that a better sensor behind SLR-quality graph lets you produce better output in Photoshop. But sharper lenses with larger apertures and better autofocus systems means that when conditions aren't ideal, the same actions taken by a user result in a better photograph for no additional effort at all.
I suspect part of this is because cell phone manufacturers know exactly how to throw EEs at a problem to make better electronics. That's their core competency. But the democratization of cameras with high quality senors needs to be met by the democratization of high quality optics. Right now the demand for (good) optics is pretty small, so they can continue to be rare/expensive specialty items. If OEMs want them the way Apple wanted displays in 2006, there's a decent chance the market could make it happen.
The issue I have with super-high megapixel cameras isn't that number, it's the sensor density. At certain densities, light begins to behave different because of the shape of the sensor and it doesn't capture the image correctly anymore. This is part of the reason why a 16MP SLR and a 16MP point-and-shoot have vastly different image qualities. As for your SLR, 16MP, even around 20MP is still well within the "light behaves well" range. 16MP in the point and shoot range? 40MP in the camera phone sensor range? Now we're getting in a bad place.
But, the Nokia has a 1/1.2" sensor. That's huge -- almost 5.5x times the surface area of the iPhone 5's sensor. It's almost as large as the sensor in a Nikon 1 or Sony RX100 series camera.
Yes, the pixels are small at ~1.44 microns (I think most experts consider 6 microns to be the "ideal" size) so I would think the pixel density is actually lower than most cameraphones (the iPhone 5 is around ~1.39 microns).
> This is part of the reason why a 16MP SLR and a 16MP point-and-shoot have vastly different image qualities.
I'm sure the fact that the SLR's sensor is physically sixteen times larger has nothing to do with it...
As I said above, MP is just one way to measure a sensor's performance characteristics, and they have kind of ignored some others (dynamic range in particular).
I'm not sure I follow your argument about "light behaving differently as pixels get smaller." I'm not even sure if that argument has scientific merit.
>I'm sure the fact that the SLR's sensor is physically sixteen times larger has nothing to do with it...
He's agreeing with you. When consumer-level devices boost megapixels, they don't usually boost the sensor's physical size.
The explanation I've heard is that the denser you pack the sensor elements, the more interference they receive from each other. This is why digital images become grainy at higher ISO, and why the problem is worse with higher-megapixel cameras (when the sensor size isn't also increased). SLRs can go higher than P&S cameras while maintaining acceptable levels of noise because their pixel density is lower (even if there are more total pixels).
In this particular case, they did make the sensor larger, which is great. But this is part of why more megapixels does not mean better.
Maybe this would've had a chance with Android, but with WP8? It's a niche offering within a niche OS market. It's like offering Battlefield 4 for Linux only.
Does the phone OS really matter to the non-hardcore phone user any more?
I don't use much more than the core apps that are available on any of the major mobile OSes, and the differences in the UI between the big four (or more accurately big two and little two) aren't significant enough that I couldn't go from an iPhone to Blackberry to WP without many headaches at all.
The main headache (edit: a minor one at that) for me in switching platforms would be that I have to spend a bit of time retyping in all my passwords to the services that I use.
You asked the question: "Only, what would a game company care about Linux adoption?" Regardless of the content of your parent's context, you were specifically asking about why a game company cares about Linux. I provide information, you say it's irrelevant unless they're developing solely for Linux. How silly.
Let's just say that everyone is entitled to have a different opinion about what is sillier, ignoring the context of a question or deeming irrelevant an answer that is out of that context. Cheers!
The optical image stabilization is cool, with ball bearings replacing the coils on the Lumia 920. Sample video comparison against the S4(Edit: S3, my bad).
Even with this kind of device, it is still very doubtful if Nokia is going to get any kind of success with Windows Phone. Their market share drop has been nothing short of catastrophic everywhere but in the US, where they never had significant market share. Even their feature phones have stopped selling as well as they used to. It will be interesting to see if they can get back on track with current strategy or with any strategy at all.
This is a niche device, IMHO, which may be the way to go for Nokia (as long as the software can keep up).
It starts at $299, which is $100 more than the entry price of the iPhone 5 (even though it's the same price as the 32 GB iPhone, you can get an iPhone for cheaper if you wanted to).
It won't necessarily appeal to people for whom iPhone/GS4 quality photos are good enough (and who only share on Instagram anyway) but it definitely takes the place of a point and shoot. It seems much more appealing than the Galaxy Camera or Galaxy S4 Zoom.
This is the first device that makes me wonder about Nokia's WP-exclusive decision. They didn't go with Android to avoid becoming "yet another" Android manufacturer, and I agree with that sentiment (look at how few are turning a profit). However, there are no Android devices that really excel at stuff like photography- I think that Nokia could have carved out an interesting niche in solidly built, feature-focused devices.
But oh well.