Nokia Lumia 1520

The mainstay of the Windows Phone interface has always been the colourful live tiles that call the start screen their home. If you’ve had a chance to play around with a Windows Phone device before, you’d know that it’s a straightforward UI which remains consistent across different devices regardless of brand, model or specs. Customisation options are few, but you do get dollops of colour, neat typography, and smooth animated dots that depict background processing. As far as the UI is concerned, the start screen and the app list are the two main components – making WP one of the easiest smartphone platforms to come to grips with. There’s practically no learning curve at all, and WP can easily be recommended to anyone buying their first smartphone. The start screen can be customised with tiles of your choice, in different sizes, and you can pin everything from your favourite apps to frequently-accessed contacts. You can also get hold of third-party apps using which you can pin other things such as shortcuts to settings and battery status on to the start screen. The app drawer is essentially an alphabetical list of all preloaded and installed apps, and you can search for one by using the search button on top or jump to a specific alphabet by tapping on the letters displayed between the apps. There’s no way to categorise apps into folders in the app drawer, though Nokia has recently addressed one of our long-standing gripes with Windows Phone by launching the App Folder, a utility that lets you place your favourite apps and settings into folders that can be pinned on the start screen.

WP’s always played well with popular networks like Facebook and Twitter ever since the beginning. Other apps such as WhatsApp, Evernote, Zite etc have also been around and Skype made its way to the platform later. More recently, a few critical gaps have been filled, thanks to the likes of Instagram and Vine landing on the OS. However, there are still a few things we miss, like official clients for Dropbox and Pocket for example. The biggest gap, and one that could be a deal killer, is the missing suite of Google apps. Suffice to say that you’ll find the going tough if you use Google’s services like Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Chrome sync etc extensively. Barring these, WP is evolving fast as a mobile platform and the app storefront covers all the basics you may need.

Nokia 808 PureView changed the smartphone camera game when it came out, and that legacy was carried forward by the Lumia 1020 when it offered the same 41-megapixel sensor combined with the power of the WP platform. The Lumia 1520 boasts the same PureView goodness, but with a scaled down 20-megapixel sensor. Apart from the sensor, the camera hardware also includes a dual-LED flash, a Zeiss lens, optical image stabilisation, and four microphones to capture optimal audio. Hardware aside, Nokia takes picture-taking to another level with the help of apps and camera add-ons (lenses in WP parlance) that tie in into the camera app. Quite a few of these are preloaded, including the Nokia Camera app that offers quite a few tweaks and lets you control white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed and brightness to help you get the right shot. You can even choose to save your shots in DNG RAW format so preferred by professionals and enthusiasts who like to fine-tune their captures later on the desktop. ‘Lenses’ such as Smart Camera that captures a sequence of images to let you take action / sequence shots or save the best one, Nokia Panorama for panoramas and the Nokia Cinemagraph that captures animated shots are quite handy too. Our favourite is Nokia Refocus, an app that basically lets you focus on the background or the foreground of an image after you’ve shot it. It works by capturing multiple shots at different focal lengths, and in our experience, works pretty well once you’ve figured out how to use it and the kind of shots it works best for. You just need to make sure you have a fair degree of depth in your frame, move up close to the subject in the foreground, and then hold the phone steady before shooting. Apart from capturing shots, Nokia also enhances the viewing and sharing experience with its Storyteller app that creates timelines of captured images according to date and location, and lets you add captions to them. HDR mode is missing in action though.

Windows Phone isn’t really a resource-hungry platform, based on our experience with older Lumias powered by dual-core processors. The Windows Phone 8 Update 3 also brought support for quad-core CPUs, and that’s exactly what the Lumia 1520 carries inside. With a quad-core Snapdragon 800 chip running at 2.2GHz powering the show, aided in its efforts by 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 GPU, the going is super-smooth and there’s nary a hiccup whether it’s routine apps you’re running or playing graphics-heavy games. Further, the 3,400mAh battery sealed inside is capable of keeping the phablet away from a power socket for a full working day even with heavy usage, and can even be stretched well into the second day if your usage isn’t so heavy. Combine all of that with the lovely, large screen, and you’re looking at a device that’s quite compelling in a lot of ways.