Lumia 1020: Next Windows phone from Nokia could pack 41-megapixel punch
On Thursday, Nokia will likely unveil the high-powered Lumia 1020 smartphone, which is likely to ship with a 41-megapixel camera.
File photo of Nokia Lumia smartphones in a shop in Warsaw, January 11, 2013.
Reuters
On Thursday morning, at a press event in New York, Nokia is expected to unveil a new Windows Phone-powered smartphone.
For a long time, Nokia and Microsoft were staying mum on the precise identity of the device, but a few days ahead of the official reveal, we've already received a few hints, from leaked photos and videos to the Flickr feed of Joe Belfiore, a Microsoft Windows Phone manager. As The Verge notes, Belfiore recently posted a range of sample shots from Windows Phone devices to Flickr, including two images marked "Nokia Lumia 1020."
So yes, that's probably the name of the forthcoming Nokia/Microsoft collaboration. The smartphone, which has been tested under the codename EOS, is likely to be a top-shelf affair: plenty of RAM, a snappy processor, the Windows Phone 8 operating system, a sleek chassis and a whopping 41-megapixel camera, of the same type that debuted on the Symbian-powered PureView 808 last year.
Of course, as the Monitor's Chris Gaylord wrote way back in 2009, more megapixels does not necessarily mean better pictures. And yet the 41-megapixel shooter developed by Nokia, which is capable of taking pictures with resolutions as large as 7152 x 5368 pixels, has received high marks from critics. Reviewing the camera in the PureView 808, Catherine Monfils of the Register called the device "a new photographic benchmark."
"I wasn’t sure what to expect from the 808 PureView camera, as like many, I'd initially been drawn to the headline grabbing hype surrounding its astonishing pixel count, which rather eclipsed the technology behind this concept," Monfils wrote. "Yet, true to its word, Nokia has produced a phone capable of incredibly detailed, sharp, nuanced and balanced pictures. As soon as I saw the results I was really and truly impressed."
For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.