A budget phablet, what a curious thing: Reg puts claws to the Lumia 1320 My bit of London is phablet city... or phondleslab city, if you prefer. But it isn't the media luvvies* or the bankers or the barristers who live here who carry the phablets, it's the people who work for them. The 4G-LTE-supported smartphone-cum-tablets are wielded by the nannies and cleaners, for whom it might be their only …
The photos are good, but the biggest problem I have with my phone is the total inability to see the preview screen when outdoors and therefore to frame the shot.
Sure, you can stand there with the phone in one hand and use the other as a sun-shield, hoping you can press the photo button with your thumb whilst neither shaking the camera nor dropping it. Better would be a low tech solution: simply for the camera makers to drill a hole right through the phone's case: front to back that a photographer could peer through, just like "old fashioned" viewfinders. However the ultimate, which I'm still waiting for, would be a screen that combined the non-reflectivity of a black hole with the eyeball-searing brilliance of british sunshine (yeah, I'm kidding) so that you could actually see the image you were about the commit to posterity before you took it - and if the screen then provided DSLR-like data regarding what the sensor was seeing, being able to see that would be nice, too.
So while we still have screens that are too dim and too shiny to see in daylight, I can't see the need to upgrade. However many megapixels a new camera (that makes phone calls, too) can boast about.
The 1020 addresses a couple of these issues. Firstly, if you get the camera adaptation case thing, holding it with one hand and pressing the excellent shutter button is trivially easy, so using your other hand to shade the screen is entirely doable. Secondly, adjusting the framing and angle and exposure and so on after taking the photo is extremely easy and effective. But yes, a viewfinder would be nice.
The screen's actually really good. I suspect the problem in bright sunlight is not the screen per se but the fact that our irises contract. Not much any manufacturer's going to do about that.
I had a Nexus 4 with a 4.7" screen and used it for ~6 weeks. It fit in my pocket just fine but after 6 weeks I still wasn't used to the bulk--not so much the weight, but the fact that I had a big flat thing in my pocket. It also fit poorly in my car's center console for the times I was using it as a GPS.
Went back to the iPhone.
For women with handbags, I can see the appeal of larger screens.
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I had to google Silloth. Rugby League country, I guess, so fair enough. But this Essex business will not do. I've no doubt you, Andrew could, er, pull this off in Hampstead but from Haverhill down to Redbridge it would get you a good hiding. In fact I remember being challenged on a Harlow street in the early 2000s with 'Is that a manbag, mate?', laptops not yet having reached them (opposable thumbs, also).
Funnily enough, today at work we had both the Sony Xperia Ultra (6.4") screen and a Samsung Galaxy Mega (6.3") come in, both of these are £100+ on the 1320 price though, the Sony screen is huge and is amazing for watching trailers on and viewing web pages is fantastic but, even the deep pockets of my Dickies work trousers are not deep enough for the Sony, phones screens are obviously getting bigger with every release, but I think we have reached the point of crazy by now.
... and it's pretty damned good.
My only quibbles with it are:
1. The flip-cover case I bought for it is rubbish (and actually makes it overheat at times)
2. The 8GB built-in storage is too little. Luckily, it works just fine with a 64GB µSD card.
3. Point 2 makes installing the preview version of Windows Phone 8.1 a must. (Good thing that's free and easy to do. It includes support for installing apps on the SD card.)
The screen is excellent. Although two-hundred-and-something PPI doesn't sound like much, it's easy to forget that this is similar to what an iPad Air offers. I certainly haven't had any issues with it, though as the main reason for my giving away my old iPhone 4 and getting this is the decreasing quality of my eyesight, my opinion on this aspect probably isn't worth much. It looks plenty sharp enough to me, and it's even visible in bright sunlight too.
If I'd had the money—Italian operators don't like subsidising unless you're willing to commit to a usurious contract over a ridiculously long period—I'd have gone with the 1520 for the increased storage and future proofing, but I don't. That said, I've not regretted the purchase.
Good idea for many reasons, mainly ease of use for the fat fingered or those with failing eyesight.
The next step would be to pair it with a bluetooth headset, with optional vibrate, so it could be kept in a pocket. Then add a small display to indicate who was calling. And it would need good battery life.
If these wrist-accessory things for phones have the ability to tell the time, notify of calls/messages, and have a microphone/speaker, I'm getting to the point of having one. I hate headsets (my hearing is bad enough without losing a significant portion of my capacity to an ugly lump of plastic), and quite like the idea of talking into my wrist like a secret-service operative. OK, the speaker might be a problem, but why should holding my watch to my ear be any less weird than holding a phone?
So is this maybe the answer to that question many have been puzzling over for the last 18 months?
Why on earth would anyone want a smart-watch?
Get one of these, leave it in a bag and use the watch to see incoming texts, tweets, take calls etc. (traditional phone stuff). Only take it out of the bag when you want to watch videos, take pictures, play games and so on (the entertainment bit that the large screen is useful for).
Of course, this would mean smart-watches becoming a hell of a lot better than they are now in terms of interacting with them.
I ordered a red 1520 from Hong Kong, and gasped when I extracted it from the package.
But I've grown to love it. It's just about 'small' enough to carry around in my jacket, has a fabulous screen that I can read, massive soft keyboard, superb offline turn-by-turn navigation, long (for a non-Symbian phone) battery life, an excellent camera and a slick UI that makes iOS look like a frumpy old maid and Android look as cluttered and messy as... a very cluttered and messy thing.
And has anyone tried Nokia Screen Beamer? It stops all my techie friends in their tracks when I demonstrate it. But of course, nobody knows about it. What the hell has Nokia's publicity department been doing for the last 15 years?
I just wish that like my N8, the 1520 had USB on the Go, an FM transmitter and more BT profiles.
I saw one of these in the local EE store the other day. (Visiting the store is a good reason why I'll never go near one again, but that's another story). Never heard of it before, so a rather nice surprise. I thought I might get one on a cheap contract to use as an in-car media / gps device, I need to look around for a good size holder.
If it doesn't fit into a trouser pocket, I wouldn't be able to take it with me. And the less popular OS means a smaller choice of apps.
But having a low price and offering a big screen and good battery life and so on are good things. The low price will get people to invest in a belt-loop scabbard for it, the low price will get enough people to buy it so that there might be more apps.
So, while the time for panic is not yet, one should still fear Microsoft a little.
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