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.
Essentially, a phablet has got to really fit your lifestyle for it to
be worth buying one. No one at PC Advisor is particularly fond of the
idea. See also: The 15 best phones you can buy in 2013
Nokia Lumia 1520: Design and build
The 1520 is big and when we say big, we mean huge. If you think the
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is a large smarphone then this thing eclipses it.
The HTC One Max is slightly taller but the Lumia 1520 is much wider. It is difficult to hold due to this fact.
Nokia has kept the thickness down to just 8.7mm (not including the
bulge for the rear camera) but the 1520 weighs more than 200g which is
beastly. The sheer size of the Lumia 1520 is really its main drawback,
so as we said before, you've got to really want and be comfortable using
a pone this big. The Galaxy Note 3 has a screen only marginally smaller but is a much more manageable device.
Even if you're comfortable using the phone with two hands (and in
public), it's uncomfortable in trouser pockets – we're talking men's,
let alone women's. It's also unlikely to fit into any phone holders you
have, such as in the car.
Despite the amount of real estate on offer here Nokia has decided to use a nano-SIM card slot which is unusual.
Keeping in trend with many Lumia smartphones, the build quality of
the 1520 is excellent. Its one-piece uni-body shell feels nice in the
hand with its soft matt finish (some colours of the 1520 have a glossy
finish). The Lumia 925 remains the only Nokia to use a metal chassis.
The Gorilla Glass 2 front sits almost flush with the plastic body and
the 1520 feels like a premium product, and it should when you look at
the price tag.
Nokia Lumia 1520: 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.
Nokia Lumia 1520: Cameras
Nokia holds the title for best smartphone camera with the Lumia 1020,
and the 1520 is no slouch either. Its 20Mp PureView main camera takes
excellent photographs. The phone's camera is especially good in
low-light providing a surprising image which would normally just be a
black mess.
We're grateful to Nokia for providing the two-stage camera button
which makes capturing photos or video a lot easier. There's also a
dual-LED flash, optical image stabilisation and the ability to record
video at Full HD 1080p. The front facing webcam is limited to 720p video
and produces a good, if fairly average image.
Although the camera is very good, the user experience is overly
complicated. Like the Lumia 1020, the 1520 comes with the Nokia Pro Cam
app with gives a lot of control over your photography, including ISO,
exposure and even focus. It's not the default camera app though, and
it's confusing having different 'lenses' which are really different
apps.
The regular camera app shoots at 5Mp while the Pro Cam app gives full
access to all those megapixels, shooting at 5Mp plus a high-res 16Mp
version.
Here are our samples from the Lumia 1520.
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