Specs at a glance: Nokia Lumia 1520 Screen 1920×1080 6" (368 ppi) IPS touchscreen OS Windows Phone 8 Update 3 with Nokia "Black" update CPU 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 RAM 2GB GPU 450 Mhz Adreno 330 Storage 16GB (AT&T) or 32GB (everyone else) Networking Dual Band 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 including Low Energy, GPS, GLONASS Ports Micro USB, headphones Camera 20MP rear camera with OIS, f/2.4 aperture, 1.3MP front camera Size 162.8mm×85.4mm×8.7mm Weight 209g Battery 3400 mAh Starting price $99 with a two year contract

So here's the thing about the Lumia 1520. It's huge. Really, absurdly huge. I know it's not the first super-sized smartphone, but it's the first I've ever used in any meaningful capacity and it's just vast. There are apartments in Manhattan that boast less square footage than the Lumia 1520.

The Lumia 1520 represents a number of Windows Phone firsts. It's the first Windows Phone with a 1920×1080 screen. It's the first Windows Phone with a six inch screen. It's the first Windows Phone with a Snapdragon 800 processor, which in turn makes it the first quad core Windows Phone. It is, as far as I can tell, the first Windows Phone with 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

And it's the first Windows Phone that doubles up as a coffee table, or, in a pinch, a spare wing for a 747.

As a piece of hardware, the Lumia 1520 is pretty much what you'd expect of a Lumia with a six inch screen. Like the many Lumia phones that went before it, it's a polycarbonate unibody with a black pillow of glass on the front, and it has the usual Windows Phone buttons (volume rocker, power, half-press-to-focus camera) down the right hand side. The rear sports a small camera bulge for its 20MP camera; while nowhere near as pronounced as the lump on the back of the 41MP Lumia 1020, it's not flat.

It'll be available in white, black, red, and yellow, though I imagine that the fine (which is to say, infuriating) tradition of some colors only being available from some carriers will continue. Nokia's minor stylistic variations will also continue: the black and white phones, for example, have body colored buttons. The yellow and red phones have black buttons. The white phone is, and I believe the black and yellow phones also are, matte finish. The red appears to be high gloss.

One slight novelty for a high-end Lumia: adjacent to the SIM card slot (on the left, rather than the top, and demanding an oh-so-tiny nano-SIM) is a microSD slot.

It's hard to overstate how big this thing is

With one important proviso, the phone feels very nice in the hand. Nokia has always had a reputation for building solid, comfortable phones, and the Lumia range has a well-deserved reputation for feeling good. The Lumia 1520 continues that trend—except for the fact that it's enormous. Sure, as long as your hands aren't tiny, you can hold it one-handed. But you can't actually drive the thing when doing so. If I contort appropriately my thumb can sweep perhaps 20 percent of the screen.

For anything more than checking the time on the lock screen, the Lumia 1520—in common with its oversized Android peers—needs two hands. I can't even manage basic tasks like dialing a phone number one-handed. My thumb isn't long enough.

This isn't a Lumia 1520 problem per se, since obviously it's a feature of any phone with a screen this big. One of the things you give up with the giant screen is any pretense of one-handed use. I am, however, very much of two minds as to whether it's progress or not. Even on small phones like the iPhone 5, many operations are more convenient with the phone held in two hands. Typing is much quicker, for example.

A discussion of the merits of these supersized phones is beyond the scope of this review. I think most people looking at such phones know what they're getting into, and while I'm not sure they're necessarily for me, if their trade-offs work for you then so be it. I'm also not sure they're not for me, and I could be persuaded to go with a giant phone in the right circumstances.

One repercussion of the large size is a large battery. At 3400 mAh, the battery capacity is more than 50 percent larger that of the Lumia 1020, and it is comparable to the Lumia 1020 with its additional battery pack/camera grip attached. The 1520 easily survived a day of heavy usage. Our normal battery test won't really work on the Lumia 1520. In common with most other Windows Phones (though oddly, not all), there's no option to force the screen to be permanently on. Our standard battery benchmark, which loads a sequence of Web pages in the browser, is intended to measure the screen-on battery life. With the 1520's screen turning off, there's no way of getting a useful, comparable number.

The processor is fast (544ms in SunSpider compared to 899ms for a Lumia 920, for example), but outside of benchmarks I didn't notice any particular difference from the faster chip. The system feels pretty quick, but that's the case of slower Windows Phone devices too.





Kraken and SunSpider are both browser benchmarks more than system benchmarks, so the comparison between browsers demonstrates primarily that Internet Explorer 10 performs worse in these benchmarks than Chrome and Safari. It goes without saying that the in practice, the browser on the Lumia 920 and 1520 isn't, in fact, 4-8 times slower than Safari on the iPhone 5S. Still, the comparison between the 920 and 1520 shows that, when the same browser is used, the 1520 is a lot faster, as expected.

Nokia's "Black" update

The Windows Phone software that's shipping on other handsets on the market doesn't handle 1920×1080p screens. It tops out at 1280×768 and 1280×720. The Lumia 1520 has a new version—build 10517. This is a newer operating system build than the build 10327 (or thereabouts) that most Windows Phone 8 devices are on. It's also newer than the build 10512 that Microsoft rolled out to developers last month and will eventually become more generally available as Microsoft's third platform update to Windows Phone 8.

This new operating system build is coupled with a bunch of Nokia-specific extras that Nokia is calling "Black." Other Lumias are still on "Amber" and will get Black later.

Update 3 and Black bring a few new things to the platform. Importantly for the Lumia 1520, it provides support for the large, high resolution screen, and the Snapdragon 800 processor. There are a few new capabilities: Driving Mode lets you limit the notifications and alerts that the phone will display whenever the handset is paired with certain Bluetooth devices. Enabling Internet Connection Sharing is a little more integrated. Pair the handset by Bluetooth to a PC running Windows 8.1, and a "Windows Phone" network will show up in the list of available Wi-Fi networks. Connecting to that network and the phone will enable Internet Connection Sharing and the PC will connect to it automatically.

There are a few other very welcome improvements. There is, finally, a screen lock feature (although it's still awkward to use, as you have to go into Settings each time you want to toggle it). It's possible to explicitly close apps from within the task switcher. It's also at last possible to connect to Wi-Fi during the initial out-of-box setup experience, which is great if you live in an area with crappy cellphone reception, as I once did.

On the Black side of things, we have the latest iteration of Nokia's Camera app, which combines the features of the Pro Cam and Smart Cam apps that I looked at in detail when reviewing the Lumia 1020. The combined app builds on Pro Cam's convenient interface, giving instant access to the usual camera controls, but it also includes Smart Cam's rapid-fire shooting capability.

Like the Lumia 1020, the Lumia 1520's camera has a remarkably high resolution. Also like the 1020, the 1520 supports oversampling and digital zooming. By default, the phone resamples its pictures to produce 5MP JPEGs, in either a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. It can also, optionally, store a full size non-resampled image of 19MP (4:3) or 16MP (16:9). If you enable capture of the full size images, you can use the Camera app's after-the-fact reframing feature to create new 5MP cropped images from the full size image.







Black adds one new capability to the app: the ability to store full-size raw images from the sensor, in DNG format. These images can then be used in software such as Adobe's Lightroom to give photographers richer control over post-processing. If you store DNGs (rather than full resolution JPEGs) then you lose the ability to reframe the image on the phone itself, but if you're using Lightroom or other software, you'll probably want to do your reframing there anyway.

Amber introduced Nokia's "glance" feature, wherein the lock screen shows a clock and notifications either permanently, or whenever you put your hand near the screen. Black allows you to disable glance when the phone is charging. Black also adds support for Bluetooth 4 Low Energy mode.

Black also includes all the other Nokia bonus features, such as the ultrabright sunlight visibility mode, display color temperature adjustment, flip to silence, and so on.

New Nokia apps

Nokia has also added another couple of Nokia-specific apps with the Black release: Beamer (which I think replaces PhotoBeamer), and Storyteller.

Beamer is actually pretty cool. You visit beam.nokia.com which shows a randomly generated QR code. You then scan the QR code from the Beamer app. This connects the phone to the Web page. From here, whenever you shake the phone, the current screen will appear on your PC. There's also an autoupdate mode that will keep the PC's view more or less current.

This isn't a full on Wi-Di/Miracast-type experience; the PC view is a series of static images, not full video. But if you want to, for example, show off some photos on a screen that's even bigger than the one on your phone, it's a neat option. You can also share the screen remotely, by sending an e-mail or SMS message to someone, letting them see what you're looking at.

I'm not entirely sure of what the point of Storyteller is. The app lets you combine photos taken at the same time and place into galleries, lets you add annotations, and shows on a map where the pictures are. That's fine, I guess; I can see how it would be a nice way of handling photos taken on a foreign holiday, for example. But I don't quite get it, because I don't see what you're meant to do once you've grouped and annotated your pictures. The logical thing to do would be to share the stories you create somehow, but the app doesn't appear to have such a capability. I suppose you could show them to someone on their PC using Beamer. That doesn't feel like enough to me. This kind of app feels like it needs a sharing capability.