Finnish smartphone manufacturer Nokia has finally confirmed the UK release of their much hyped 41-megapixel Nokia Lumia 1020, but I can’t help but wonder – what is the point?
Nokia boss Stephen Elop and some fanboys experts claim that the technological feat of shoe-horning a 41-megapixel into a slim-ish smartphone hails a new age in mobile photography and will “change how you shoot and how you create forever”, but our judgement is strictly reserved.
The Lumia 1020 features the smooth-running but poorly supported Windows Phone 8 operating system, with a 4.5in AMOLED (768×1280) Gorilla Glass 3 display, 2GB RAM, a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and 32GB internal memory + 7GB free SkyDrive cloud storage. So it sits reasonably well alongside the current competition, at least in the power stakes, and with a camera capable of capturing images at 7712 x 5360 pixels or 38Mp and 5Mp images simultaneously – it’s an exciting prospect on paper.
But there are a couple of small issues that the Lumia 1020 is going to have to struggle with and overcome if it wants to be more than just a gimmick. Here’s four hurdles that could fatally trip this potential smartphone revolution.
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No One Cares
Nokia have been at the forefront of upping the megapixels on smartphones for almost a decade, becoming the world’s leading digital camera brand in 2005. But over time, people have cottoned-on to the megapixel myth and since Nokia’s 14-megapixel flagship N8 smartphone released in 2006, Samsung and Apple have become the clear leaders in the smartphone race stealing Nokia’s thunder with smartphones that boasted as little as 2-megapixels.
Casual and professional picture lovers have known for some years now that megapixels don’t necessarily equal great pictures, lens quality, shutter speed, aperture, stabilization and lowlight performance are features that people are looking for now – especially lowlight performance.
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Photography Is Social
The majority of people take pictures on their smartphones in order to share them with apps like Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Snapchat, Keek and the like – yet more than half of these apps aren’t even yet available on Windows 8.
And even if they were, have you ever tried to upload a full resolution 10-megapixel image to Facebook from a mobile phone? You’ll more than likely waste half of your battery life watching a spinning circle before you’ve had a chance to tag your friends and write a hilarious caption. So how on earth are you going to get a full resolution image uploaded from the Lumia 1020? Oh wait, Nokia have made it possible to “dual capture” a 38-Mp alongside a 5-Mp image so that you can share the smaller shot, but that begs the question – THEN WHAT IS THE POINT OF CAPTURING IT IN 38-MEGAPIXELS!?
That leads me onto reason number 3, which is kind of reason 2.1
Pointless Pixels
How and where will you make the most of a 41-Megapixel image?
At Nokia’s fancy launch at Pier 42 in New York, they showed off a bunch of (as yet unreleased) images taken using the Lumia 1020, printed out using a high quality large format printer and measuring almost a metre high and over a metre wide. They looked great by all accounts, with sharp details and vibrant colours but how many casual picture takers will have access or be willing to use a large format printer for their pictures, and at what cost?
And if Nokia are targeting Pros, how many of us don’t already have cameras capable of capturing professional and printable images and would be willing to shell out another £400+ for a smartphone with (apart from megapixels) an inferior camera? Very few, if any, undoubtedly some people will jump onboard, but Nokia are at risk of aiming at a particularly niche market at best.
Most people view their images on phones and computer screens, despite some manufacturers – Sony and LG in particular – increasingly trying to encourage us to view them on TVs as well, with limited success – so with that being the case, how often will you ever get to make the most of and view such large images?
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Right Pixels, Wrong Price, Wrong Time
When the Lumia 1020 releases in the US on July 26 it will cost $299 with a two-year contract, but it will be up against the already established and popular iPhone5 (16GB) available for just $199. And although we don’t yet have a price for it in the UK, an educated guess says that it’s going to be about the same price, and it if it does land in September as CarphoneWarehouse‘s website suggests, it will be in the wake of the 16-megapixel Samsung Galaxy S4 “Zoom” capable of 10x optical zoom and it will also likely be directly up against the next releases from Apple’s iPhone range.
So with all that said, we’re excited that the boat is being pushed out, and we have to salute Nokia for continually risking it all to provide technological innovations that no one apparently is asking for – it’s courageous and admirable. But the reality is that Nokia need to garner significantly stronger support for it’s Windows operating system, much more than it needs convince smartphone users that capturing images in “super high resolution” 41-megapixels – that will rarely be printed and viewed mostly on small screens – is actually worth the fuss.
