Nokia Lumia 1020: is it enough to save Windows Phone and Nokia?
Reports of Nokia's rebirth are much exaggerated, says Joe Minihane.
It’s been impossible to escape stories about Nokia’s new Lumia 1020
in the past couple of weeks. Espoo did a desperately poor job in keeping
leaks to a minimum.
It’s been said before that its Finnish offices are like a sieve, but
the last few days it seems to have been more like a punctured shipping
container.
From colour schemes, camera details, design and app info, everything
to know about the Lumia 1020 was already in the public domain before
Stephen Elop’s press conference last night.
That’s not to say that the Lumia 1020 isn’t a seriously impressive piece of hardware.
The phone itself is solid, but the camera shows that Nokia is still capable of leading the market in at least one area. T
he detail of its shots, the excellent Pro Camera app for making
images look every bit as good as those taken with compact cameras and
the ability to reel off five megapixel images simultaneously with
41-megapixel snaps puts it well ahead of the competition.
Look at this way: Nokia, and Microsoft, finally have a phone, which does something that its smartphone rivals can’t match.
Last year’s PureView 808 showed what Nokia could do with imaging, but
being on Symbian it was never going to stand up to Samsung and Apple’s
more finely tuned efforts.
But despite all that, a nagging doubt persists. Megapixels still mean
something to the average punter, even if they don’t actually mean that
much to those in the know.
They can help sell phones, especially to those addicted to the likes of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Nokia knows this, hence opening up its camera SDK to get developers
working with its new camera phone software. However, we’re still
talking about a phone which uses a critically lauded, but unpopular OS.
No matter how Microsoft tries to dress it up, Windows Phone is failing.
Android slays all before it, while iOS corners a loyal band of followers with a developer base that’s impossible to beat.
Nokia can market the Lumia 1020 as hard as it likes, but the simple
truth is it will struggle to do the numbers compared to Samsung’s Galaxy
S4 and Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 5S.
The tech is there, but years of mismanagement mean the Nokia brand is light years from where it was a decade ago.
Microsoft’s decision to boost support for Windows Phone 8 to 36 months will help, but probably only power users will care.
In short, this is one of the most exciting devices of 2013. It pushes
innovation and will make rivals work hard to try and compete with
Nokia.
But there’s no way that this, or any other device, is the panacea
Nokia so desperately craves. The road is long and Nokia has much of it
left to walk.
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