INTRODUCTION:
Because of my circumstance, I have used in the past, or am currently using, at least two models from each major OS: the very first iPhone, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, Galaxy S2 LTE, Galaxy Note, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, Lumia 900, and now Lumia 1020. This puts me in good position to judge Lumia 1020, I think, in comparison to other devices. To make the long story short, Lumia 1020 is an absolutely amazing technological feat, a marvel, something that an engineer could only dream in his wildest dream of making. I am from a technical background myself and I still cannot fathom how Nokia engineers could house the 6 Zeiss lenses unit into the tiny package, while sacrificing or compromising virtually nothing. Incredible ingenuity, to be sure. The ideas are brilliant, the execution perfect, and the result is a landmark phone-camera. Just look at the photo samples above. It renders my Canon 5D with huge 70-200 mm zoom lens almost useless. Not quite, but sufficiently so, at least for non-commercial purposes. Better yet, Lumia 1020 can take a shot that is at once zoom and wide-angle at the same time depending on what you want to do with the image, something which no DSLR is capable of.
MAIN OBSERVATION:
The other day I visited a local violin shop and was reading boardfull of ads, standing in front of a wall in the shop, as I was searching for a violin instructor. Suddenly a thought came into my mind 'Wait, why am I doing this? All I have to do is to take a photo of the entire wall from a few steps back, go home, blow it up on my computer screen, and I can read even the finest fonts on the ads including contacts.' Old habits die hard and I was not utilizing my new Lumia 1020 until this idea hit me! So I did just that, and bingo, there was nothing I could not read at home, even though the photo was taken under dim light of the shop! (By the way this camera has xenon flash as well, but ISO 4000 did the trick without the flash.)
You cannot possibly know the usefulness or desirability of something until you have one. Someone once said, "The world never needed Beethoven's ninth symphony until he created it. Now the world cannot live without it." You cannot know how convenient it is to have a camera that is far sharper than your own eyes until you have one. No matter where you go, you have the world's best capturing and recording device with you. Now that I have one, I am discovering new uses everyday and imagining even more. If I can go back to my college years, I would no longer need to take notes, at least not from the blackboard -I can simply capture the entire blackboard image when the professor is done filling it up and should be able to read the faintest chalk mark later in my room. These days I capture almost everything (product manuals, my sons' report cards and paintings at school, bulletin boards, advertisement boards, receipts, my car tire's recommended pressure, my car tire's specification...) and I have perfect peace of mind. I left for my summer vacation without my DSLR but I felt just fine and rightly so. My night-time fireplace shots taken with this "phone" came out much nicer than my friend's shots taken with a "proper" camera; Lumia 1020's low-light photography is simply spellbinding.
By the way, 41 Megapixel does not mean you will get 41 megabyte size photo files with every shot you take! Thanks to the amazing Pureview technology that packs 7 mega into each mega "super" pixel, you get a 5 megabyte photo plus 1 megabyte email attachment size automatically. You can further crop anyway you want on your camera and the result will be still far better than any smartphone photography in the world, if not most compact digital cameras. (Sad to say, I think this really nailed the last one on the coffin of the category called "compact digital cameras." Who needs those now when Lumia 1020 has a better lens, better sensor, far better software technology, and you can even use it as a phone?)
With Lumia 1020, the background passerby's face will be sharper than the carefully composed shot of your grandma that you took with your Galaxy -that is unless you intentionally tried "outfocusing" effect which you can also do with this super smartphone. So if you need to capture certain information but unsure of which to take, or if you are not sure of the composition of your shot, just capture the whole thing and then worry about it later -you can crop, view, do whatever you want and your photo will still retain that sharp resolution.
OTHER PLUSES:
-Windows Phone 8 is EXTREMELY stable. I repeat: no crashes whatsoever. Totally different experience from using Android.
-Double Core Lumia 1020 certainly feels whole a lot faster than the quadcore Galaxy S3 I used. I think quadcore is a marketing ploy, a gimmick.
-Touch is so much more accurate than all android systems I used including Galaxy S3 and Nexus 7. So much fewer mistyped characters when writing emails or sending messages.
-Separate and independent camera button (real, physical one) a big plus. No need to go through the app process to take a picture. It's like having a completely dual identity: a phone and a camera. Neither is subordinated to the other. Each stands on its own.
-Best of all, wifi and 4G LTE data switching is seamless and fast. My Galaxy S3 used to search for the "right" wifi or data all the time and when the wifi signal was weak, it would not work at all so that I would have to "turn off" wifi when there was weak wifi around just to use the data. No such things ever happened. Extremely strong wifi signal reception and superfast 4G LTE with AT&T. Totally happy with this.
-Having "Live Tiles" is like having widgets in lieu of app icons. They display information in the absence of activating the app such as where you last left off in your Kindle, what appointment you have today, etc. Furthermore, you can change the sizes of them (just like widgets) so that you can vary the sizes according to each app's importance, how much information you want to view without activating the app, etc.
-Rock solid. I dropped mine twice without any protection from about 1.5 meter heights. Not a scratch.
-Beautifully organized filing system for photos. With Android, the pictures I took were all over the folders. This is whole a lot neater.
MINUSES TO SOME (BUT NOT TO ME):
-No Instagram and no Temple Run. (Frankly, I could not care less. All the major apps I use are there -Viber, Office, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Chessgenius, Amazon, Kindle, Yelp, Flixster, Skype, etc.)
-$300 with 2 year contract. Good things cost money in life I get over it. (Frankly, I would have paid $300 even without the phone -just to use the phenomenal digital zoom camera that is both wifi and data capable.)
MINUSES TO ME:
-No automatic screen rotation off. This gotta be the worst oversight. For those who read their smartphones while lying down on bed, the automatic screen rotation is a pain. Nokia and Microsoft, if you read this, PLEASE IMPLEMENT THIS FEATURE IN YOUR NEXT UPDATE!
-Lack of file manager. This is a big minus to someone like me who does extensive work with phone and attaches many documents of different types to emails, but may not be so to many others. For me, there's gotta be a way to attach various documents (other than just photos) from the new email window directly.
-Copy & paste loses style when used in email.
-Included video player does not properly show subtitles when in .smi format. Again, this is a big minus only to someone like me who watches many, many foreign movies, but may not be so to many others. I miss MX Player Pro on my android.
-Windows' fancy way of opening apps (ie turning like a book page) can look pretty to some but I prefer minimum distraction. Would be nice to have an option to choose page-turn or plain-turn. This is my nitpick.
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