State of the Art: Lumia 1020, a Great Camera Grafted to an Oddball Phone

Lumia 1020, a Great Camera Grafted to an Oddball Phone

For years, every decent photo from a cellphone has earned the same faint praise: “That’s a great picture! You know, for a cellphone.”

The Lumia 1020 from Nokia.

The mediocrity of cellphone pictures hasn’t stopped us from hitting our phone’s shutter button, of course. Every year, we take billions of photos with our phones, often choosing them over powerful cameras to record even important life events. The cellphone’s handiness seems to excuse a long list of photographic disappointments: feeble sensors, no zoom, no real flash, no ability to freeze action and heartbreaking low-light graininess.

Well, good news: Little by little, the world’s electronics companies are finally turning their attention to this problem. Some of them try to graft cellphones onto cameras; others try to jam real cameras onto cellphones.

Nokia has taken the latter approach with its new Lumia 1020 cellphone ($300 with a two-year AT&T contract, $660 without). It’s a huge Windows Phone 8 phone with an absolutely amazing camera.

Now, Nokia says that this phone has a 41-megapixel camera. But if you think megapixels equal picture quality, you’ll be sorely disappointed, both in this camera and any other. The megapixel count really means very little. There have been 2-megapixel cameras that took wonderful photos, and 20-megapixel cameras that took terrible ones. A high megapixel count is primarily a marketing gimmick.

And in any case, any picture you send wirelessly from this phone â€" by e-mail, text message, Facebook, Twitter or whatever â€" is actually a five-megapixel shot. Which, again, doesn’t mean anything good or bad; five is plenty even for a big printout. (The only way to get the full-resolution originals off the phone is to connect the phone to a Mac or PC with a USB cable.)

The high megapixel count is useful in exactly one situation: when you want to crop out much of the scene. If you’re starting with 41 megapixels, you can throw away a lot of a photo and still have enough resolution for a big print. The phone’s Smart Cam app is made for just that: it lets you create photos from a piece of a larger scene.

In total, the 41-megapixel business is a lot of hot air. What Nokia should really be bubbling about instead is the superiority of this camera’s sensor â€" its digital film. Compared with the sensors in most phones, this one is huge and especially light sensitive.

You’ve never seen, or even contemplated, photos this good from a phone. They really are spectacular.

Most of the time, the photos are just as good as what you’d get from a $300 pocket camera (you know, the kind that doesn’t also make phone calls). Often, they’re better. The low-light shots seem like they came from some kind of “Mission: Impossible” spy gear. And if the subject is close to the lens, the background melts into a delicious blurriness, just as in professional portraits.

Sometimes, though, the photos are worse. Shutter lag (a delay after you press the shutter button) is a problem. There can be distortion at the outer edges of the frame. Some photos are a little “soft.”

Furthermore, even this cameraphone doesn’t have a true zoom; a three-inch telescoping lens would probably be uncomfortable in your palm when you’re on a call. Instead, it has a 3X digital zoom: slide your finger up the screen to magnify the scene. You’re not really zooming at all, of course â€" just cropping into a smaller area â€" but it works well enough.

On most cameras, what you get by way of a flash is really just an LED lamp that momentarily lights up for short-range illumination. On this one, you get an actual flash â€" a mini strobe that works much better. Like most Windows Phone devices, this one has a physical shutter button on the edge, too, so it feels like you’re holding a real camera. (For $80, you can buy a “camera grip” that adds an extra battery, a more convenient handle and a tripod socket.)

The 1020 also has a superb image stabilizer that comes in handy for videos. This phone’s videos really are something: stable, bright, 1080p high definition with crisp stereo sound.

App Smart: Turning to Your Phone for a Better Night’s Sleep

Turning to Your Phone for a Better Night’s Sleep

I’m terrible at sleeping. Over the years, I have tried various remedies and tricks, and they haven’t helped. I figured there wasn’t much I could do about my problem until I discovered sleep-aid smartphone apps.

Sleep Cycle, a $2 iOS app.

Sleep Pillow Sounds, a $2 iOS app.

Relax and Sleep, a free Android app.

My favorite is Sleep Cycle, a $2 iOS app. Although this app doesn’t help get you to sleep, it does help you learn about your sleep habits. It’s also designed to wake you at just the right point in your sleep cycle, when you’re sleeping lightly, so you won’t feel that familiar sinking sensation after your alarm clock jerks you awake.

The app is meant to work with your phone set on your mattress. It uses the iPhone’s sensors to monitor movements, recording when you were in different phases of sleep â€" from light to deep. In the morning, you get a time graph showing how well you managed to stay in deep sleep.

There’s a notes section for each night’s data, so you can track if drinking a cup of tea upsets your sleep or if your sleep patterns are related to stress. If you’re really interested in detailed analysis of your sleep habits you can export the data to an Excel spreadsheet.

The app’s instructions are easy to follow, and the interface is easy to use. I’ve found it usually wakes me when I’m feeling well rested. It does take a while to get used to this, because it means you’re awakened in a window around your chosen alarm time instead of, say, at 7:30 a.m. sharp. Perhaps my only criticism is the app’s array of soothing alarm sounds can get tiresome, but you can also set it to use your downloaded music.

A very similar free app on Android is Sleepbot. It also uses your device’s motion sensors to track your sleep patterns, and can wake you gently when you’re in light sleep. Its interface isn’t quite as polished nor as easy to use as Sleep Cycle’s, but this app is more powerful. You can set target sleep times and see over several days if you have a sleep deficit, and you can set a reminder to go to bed. It also has a sound-monitoring function so you can see if there are noises that disturb your sleep, or how your sleep correlates to quiet environments.

Another way apps can help you sleep is by playing soothing sounds for a time and then quietly shutting off. One of my favorite sleep apps is Simply Rain, a $1 iOS app that plays soothing rain sounds. Its interface has a large slider to control the sound volume and a small slider to adjust the intensity of the rain. You can choose to have different intensities of thunder sounds in the mix, and set the app to oscillate the volume to simulate the variation in a real rain shower. There’s also a simple sleep timer. I find I fall asleep easily to this sort of white noise, but it may not suit you.

For alternative sleep sounds try Sleep Pillow Sounds, a $2 iOS app with sounds like rain on water, crackling fires or lapping waves on the shore. You can even layer these sounds on top of one another. The app has a cute, graphic-heavy interface and a sleep timer, but the timer has a maximum setting of only 75 minutes. It’s also possible to notice patterns in the sounds, and that may bother you.

On Android, Relax and Sleep is a similar app. It has an impressive array of sounds, like wolf cries and a rocking chair. You can layer multiple sounds, setting each sound at a desired intensity. The repetitive nature of some of the sounds seemed more irritating than relaxing, but your mileage may vary.

Finally, I’ve learned listening to audiobooks can help me sleep â€" it’s like being read a bedtime story. Audiobooks from Audible (free on iOS, Android and Windows Phone) are my sleep weapon of choice because of the huge selection of titles and the sleep timer function. I also use it with a sleep-monitoring app.

Audible’s one downside is that the price of some of the audiobooks may surprise you: The first Game of Thrones book is nearly $32, unless you sign up for one of the app’s monthly membership options.

Quick Call

Microsoft has released a suite of Bing-related apps for Windows Phone 8 devices that bring real-time news alerts on finance, news, sports and weather. These apps are free.