Nokia Lumia 1520 review

 

Good

• Great high-definition screen
• Attractive, sturdy design
• Powerful processor
• Good battery life
• Decent camera

Bad

• Enormous size won't be to everyone's taste
• Windows Phone app store is still very poorly stocked

In this review

1. Should I buy the Nokia Lumia 1520?
2. Design and build quality
3. Display
4. Software and processor
5. Camera
6. Battery
7. Conclusion

Not happy with pumping out the best camera phone in the business in the form of the Lumia 1020, Nokia now wants to show it can still play a blinder on the specs front too. A recent update to Windows Phone brought support for Full HD displays and quad-core processors, allowing Nokia to finally stuff the most cutting-edge tech into its phones.
The Lumia 1520 is the first of Nokia's phones to take advantage of the update, packing a whopping 6-inch Full HD display, a 2.2GHz quad-core processor, 4G and a 20-megapixel camera -- making it the most technologically advanced phone Nokia has made to date.
Nokia will be announcing the price and release date of this super-phone on Monday, but it's expected to set you back around £500, SIM-free. Meanwhile, Carphone Warehouse has started preorders -- you can get it free from £38 per month on a two-year Vodafone contract.

Should I buy the Nokia Lumia 1520?

The Nokia Lumia 1520's bold, Full HD display makes the phone a great choice for movies on the move. Its processor is powerful, its battery puts up a good fight and the camera isn't at all bad either. Oh, and it looks nice. At 6 inches however, the 1520 is a giant beast of a mobile that really won't suit you if you're just looking for a good all-round phone.

The Lumia 1520 looks good, and has a huge 6-inch Full HD display.

If you're looking for a more pocketable Windows Phone mobile, check out the metal-edged Nokia Lumia 925 or the Lumia 1020 with its phenomenal camera. Bear in mind too that while Windows Phone looks good and is fun to use, it has a pitiful app store compared to Android.
If you're keen on big screens and want a host of apps to display on them, Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 is a solid choice. It too packs a Full HD display and a potent chip, but also comes with a stylus for handwriting your own notes.

Design and build quality

The Lumia 1520 is Nokia's biggest smart phone to date, measuring 163mm long, 85mm wide and 8.7mm thick. By using small bezels, Nokia hasn't wasted any space around the screen, but even so, the phone is an absolute goliath.
The 5-inch Samsung Galaxy S4 measures 136mm long and even that is too big for some. It's very difficult to use with one hand -- I found it almost impossible to stretch my thumb to the far corners when holding it as I would a phone. I'm not going to say it's "too big" as that is of course subjective and depends on what you're looking for in a device. What I will say, however, is that if you just want a regular phone, the 1520 almost certainly isn't going to suit. Instead, check out Nokia's Lumia 925.

This huge phone is Nokia's biggest yet.

It makes sense that the Note 3 is so huge as its included stylus lets you use the phone as a notebook, turning it into a valuable work tool. The Lumia 1520's skills instead lie more in displaying videos.
The 1520 shares most of the design cues with other phones in Nokia's Lumia range. Its body is made up of a single piece of polycarbonate, which, although plastic, has a very solid construction. It feels very sturdy to hold and there's no unpleasant flex or creaking in the chassis. It looks good too, with its bright colours and rounded edges, standing out from the usual black and grey shades found on other phones.
On the edges you'll find a nano-SIM tray (the extra-small SIM card you'll find on the iPhone 5), a 3.5mm headphone jack, power and volume buttons and a dedicated camera shutter button. There's a generous 32GB of storage, which you can expand with a microSD card.

Display

The 1520 is the first Windows Phone device to boast a Full HD display, thanks to a recent update to the software that supports higher resolutions. Spread over its 6-inch display, the display has a density of 367 pixels per inch, slightly beating the 334ppi of the Lumia 1020.
It results in a screen that's very sharp, with crisp edges on the large, colourful homescreen tiles and very clear text in Web pages. High definition photos and videos look great and the resolution is particularly useful if you're working with Excel spreadsheets in the Microsoft Office app.

The display is sharp and crisp with great colours.

It has great colours too, thanks to deep black levels, which provide rich contrast. The colours remain punchy, without looking oversaturated -- something the similarly-sized Galaxy Note 3 can suffer from at times. Mix in the good viewing angles and its low reflectivity (making it easier to view under bright lights), and the 1520's display is one of the best you'll find on a big phone.

Software and processor

The Lumia 1520 comes with the latest version of Windows Phone. The first thing you'll notice about the software is the extra column of icons on the homescreen. It allows for more apps and information from live tiles to be displayed at once, which makes sense on a phone this size.
Elsewhere, the interface is much the same as it is on any of Nokia's other Lumias. The homescreen tiles are clear and easy to read and a swipe to the left takes you into the app list to browse your collection, listed alphabetically. You can resize the homescreen icons and move them around to make sure that your most crucial tools are right where you need them, and the extra column lets you sit up to six app icons across one row.

The homescreen can show three columns of tiles, in order to make full use of that whopping screen.

One of my favourite aspects of Windows Phone is the People hub, which combines all your social network contacts into one place, allowing you to see all updates -- as well as post simultaneously to them all -- from the hub, without having to jump into different apps.
Windows Phone combines the simplicity, minimalist layout and ease of use of iOS with the customisability of Android. Sounds like an ideal solution, but it's not perfect. The main issue that plagues the software is the distinct lack of apps in the app store. While some good titles -- Spotify, Netflix, Skype -- are available, many big-name services are still missing.
If developers even do bother to write apps for Windows Phone, it tends to receive them much later than Android or iOS. Vine has only just made it to the store and Instagram has literally appeared in the last day. While the situation is improving, it's happening at a glacial pace. If you're keen on adding new services and tools to your phone or love checking out new games, Windows Phone really isn't going to suit you.

Nokia's maps and satellite navigation software are handy additions.

Nokia has bundled a bunch of its own apps to help plug the holes though. Its maps software is great, providing a wealth of local business information -- as well as letting you view nearby points of interest around you in an augmented reality view. Its Transit app shows live information about local public transport services and Here Drive gives turn-by-turn GPS satellite navigation, complete with downloadable maps for offline use.
A new addition is Nokia Storyteller, which lets you view your photos organised into groups (based on time and location taken), letting you annotate the pictures and easily view them on a map. For reminiscing about your holiday, Storyteller could be a very useful tool.

The Storyteller app is hardly groundbreaking, but it's an attractive way of viewing sets of photos.

The Lumia 1520 packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, clocked at a mighty 2.2GHz. The latest Windows Phone update brought with it support for quad-core processors, but I'm not exactly sure this level of power is necessary just yet. With such a lack of apps, there's very little that can challenge the processor right now -- it's like buying a Ferrari but only ever taking it to the shops and back.

Asphalt 8 is probably the most demanding app you can find for Windows Phones right now. Thankfully, the 1520 handled it without trouble.

It does at least make swiping around the interface very swift. There's zero delay in opening apps and menus and the camera starts up quickly too. I found the camera on the Lumia 1020 a little sluggish, but the 1520 has no such problem. High-definition video playback is handled well and racing game Asphalt 8 played very smoothly, with high frame rates.

Camera

The back of the phone is home to a 20-megapixel camera. That's a lower resolution than the ludicrous 41 megapixels of the photography-focused Lumia 1020, and the sensor size is physically smaller, meaning it can't take in as much light. The 1020 is a superb camera phone -- probably the best around -- so should still be on your shopping list if photography is your chief concern.

Nokia Lumia 1520 camera test (click image to enlarge).

It still packs loads of megapixels though, along with high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, so I was hoping for great image quality and I wasn't disappointed. On my test shot, the 1520 achieved a very nice exposure of the autumn light over St Paul's Cathedral. I found several of my images had some blue colour cast -- the white balance seemed to err on the colder side -- but that's easily countered by changing the white balance settings.
Quality is very high too. Even at full screen, there's plenty of detail to be seen on the fine brickwork on the opposite buildings. The high resolution of the phone allows you to digitally zoom in to the scene without losing quality -- something that is a particular skill of the super-high resolution Lumia 1020.
Nokia has a bunch of apps for camera use too. As well as the standard, no-nonsense camera app, you'll find Nokia Pro Cam, which gives you manual control over settings like white balance and shutter speed. Separate apps for Panorama and animated photos exist too. While there's plenty to keep a shutterbug happy, it's a little frustrating to have to keep switching into different apps each time. An all-encompassing photography app would be good to see in the future.

Battery

Nokia has filled the 1520's enormous body with a whopping great 3,400mAh battery, promising up to 25 hours of talktime on 3G. That's a very impressive figure, but keep in mind that that will be under optimal conditions so your own times will vary, depending on how you use it.
In my own tests I found the battery to be pretty good though. With medium-intensity use (a bit of gaming, sending and receiving some emails, streaming a bit of Netflix), I found it still had plenty of juice at the end of the working day after being taken off charge first thing in the morning.
If you use it cautiously -- keep the brightness down and avoid demanding tasks like gaming -- then you shouldn't struggle to get through the whole day and even have some power remaining the next morning. With regular, less careful use, you'll probably need to give it a charge overnight to ensure you don't run out of power before lunch the next day.

This is an enormous and potentially cumbersome phone, but its screen, camera and quality make it a good option despite that.

Conclusion

The Nokia Lumia 1520 is colourful, well made, has a brilliant screen, good battery life and a good camera, all of which make a solid phone all round. It is enormous and cumbersome though, which means it won't suit everyone's taste, and its Windows Phone operating system still suffers from a poorly stocked app store.