I’ve just been testing this phone
It’s the one with the amazing 40MP camera (like my Nokia/Symbian 808) and while it has been officially killed by Microsoft (bizzarely IMHO) it remains relevant because
The 1020 / WP8.1 works fine, using the supplied IE browser, on EuroGA and also works fine on the EuroGA router. I didn’t not test the latter all the way to filing a flight plan though.
The other browser which has something approaching reasonable functionality is Opera. The WP one is Opera Mini but it doesn’t really work. It’s even worse than the Opera Mobile which I have on the 808! But it’s “single column mode” works perfectly on “simple inline” websites like peter2000.co.uk, which IE (WP) renders in a stupid width.
Many of the WP apps simply do not work (also the WP8.1 update broke a lot of WP8.0 apps, often in major ways) and it seems pretty obvious that when developers saw that WP was not selling well, they dumped new development for it, and probably most of them dumped bug fixing of 8.0 apps. Developers do that quite aggressively… e.g. when the Iphone came along they dumped Symbian and went to IOS, big-time. But non-working apps are not a big issue because most phone apps are so functionally crippled (even when they do work) that one often has to download (or buy!) several just to do one job.
FWIW, a sample DNG (raw) image from the 1020 is here (42MB). You will need a very recent image viewer to open this (which is IMHO stupid).
One of the perhaps less obvious advantages of Apple’s iOS is that (a) most OS updates don’t “break” existing apps and (b) they have made the process relatively simple, so that the majority of people update to the latest version very quickly.
The number of pixels has very little to do with image quality. I don’t know this camera but I have a lot experience with digital cameras, and in general the more pixels the smaller compact cameras got the lower was there image quality. The Pixelmania is a pure marketing hype thing in my eyes.
In this case the 1020 camera seems to be pretty good, see this test:
http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/20233_Camera_head_to_head_Nokia_Lumi.php
The # of pixels does limit the image quality ultimately – it has to.
He seems to be using the 5MP jpeg output from the 1020. He should be using the DNG raw image (see the file link I posted) and then (if he wants to) generate a high quality jpeg from that. A top-notch jpeg from the 808 or the 1020 is 10MB-15MB in size. The 5MP jpeg is about 1.5MB.
If one is comparing ~5MP v. ~5MP/6MP and both phones are current-technology then the only time you will see a difference is in poor light, etc and sure enough that’s what he is getting.
It’s just a pity that there doesn’t appear to be a camera app for the 1020 which can generate a 10-15MB jpeg from the 40MP raw image. (There is one for the 808). The only way to do it is by extracting the 40MP (~30MB) raw file over USB and then converting it on a PC, and one needs a fairly current DNG converter (I found a free one eventually which can go DNG to TIF while preserving EXIF data – the other feature-packed ones like Reaconverter are c. $50 – and then you can batch convert TIF to JPG using any number of tools like ACDSEE). Actually there is a WP app (for a quid – Rawer) which does it on the phone and can generate a ~10MB JPG but it doesn’t preserve the EXIF which is a hassle for photo albums, and it doesn’t do batch mode. You could waste half your life with “technology”…
The bottom line is that the biggest JPG you can get directly out of the 1020 and which contains the EXIF data is only 5MP. The next one up is the ~30MB DNG which almost no normal person knows how to open. I don’t know why Microsoft were so stupid. They must have huge committees deciding how to dumb things down.
Microsoft’s money is bound to push the WP operating system forward
How much would you bet on that ?
They just released Office360 on iOS…
They just released Office360 on iOS…
What does that prove (other than that they want to stay in business)?
Microsoft is not a monolithic company, it’s a federation of kingdoms, whose interests do not always align, and reportedly there’s a lot of infighting between the kingdoms…
