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Nostalgia: This phone spoke to me like no other
Camera in a smartphone body.
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Robert Triggs / Android Authority
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I might be a bit jaded, but smartphones have become a bit boring. Don’t get me wrong, modern flagships are incredible pieces of technology. But across the board, what you get in terms of year-over-year upgrades are faster processors, better cameras, and slightly brighter screens, but there’s rarely a phone that makes me stop and go, “Wow.” Now that the market is more or less commoditized, I don’t think we’ll ever see that again.
However, things were different a decade ago. Phone makers were experimenting with everything from modular designs to 3D displays. Some of those ideas were downright terrible, while others got folded into smartphones we have today. For me, no phone embodied that spirit quite like the Nokia Lumia 1020.
What do you miss most about old smartphones?
A camera that broke all the rules (for its time)
I owned the decidedly bright and bold yellow version. At a time when most phones were black plastic rectangles, the Lumia 1020 looked like nothing else on the market. Was it a bit loud? Sure. But hey, who said tech has to be boring?
I prefer to call it unapologetically different. More importantly, it was a phone that put photography ahead of just about everything else — and I loved it for that.
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
The Lumia 1020 launched in 2013, right at the cusp of the megapixel race. The iPhone 5s had an 8MP camera, while Samsung’s Galaxy S4 offered 13MP. Nokia, meanwhile, decided that 41MP was a perfectly reasonable number to put on a phone.
The Lumia 1020 was a phone that wanted you to think about photography before tapping the shutter button.
But that number didn’t come out of nowhere. Nokia had previously used the sensor on the Symbian-powered Nokia 808 PureView — another favorite of mine.
That massive PureView sensor wasn’t just a marketing gimmick, either. Nokia used oversampling to combine information from multiple pixels into a sharper 5MP image. The result was a photo that retained an impressive amount of detail, even when you zoomed in or cropped it.
Oversampling and computational photography are the norm today, but these phones pioneered the technique and delivered results that hold up even today.
But the camera was about more than megapixels. You got optical image stabilization for stable shots and longer exposures. You also got a xenon flash that could freeze motion in low light — a feature that I wish would make a comeback even today. And the phone had proper manual controls that, coupled with a manual shutter, actually made a tangible difference in the results.
This was a phone that wanted you to think about photography rather than simply point it at something and tap the shutter, though it could do that, too, with a dedicated two-stage shutter key to boot.
I trusted the Lumia 1020 enough that it was often my only camera when traveling around the world.
Taking a picture wasn’t particularly quick. The camera took its own sweet time to process those enormous images, and the experience could feel sluggish compared to what we’re used to today. But that was a limitation of the much slower processors and imaging pipelines. And you know what? I didn’t really mind it. The photos were worth it. Taking a photo felt deliberate, almost like using a dedicated camera.
Sure, I used an SLR alongside it, but I trusted the phone enough that it was often my only camera at concerts or traveling around the world. Heck, the Lumia 1020 served as the BTS camera at my own wedding. It was that good.
Of course, by modern standards, the dynamic range wasn’t quite up to scratch. But you know what? I made it work. Add incredible tuning to that, and you got CCD-like filmic results from the 41MP CMOS sensor that still hold up today. Just see the smattering of camera samples I’ve included as proof.
Hardware that matched the camera
The rest of the design was just as good. Nokia used a polycarbonate unibody that felt great in the hand and didn’t have the fragile, slippery feel of the glass-backed phones we have today.
Things got even better with the official camera grip. It added a proper handgrip, an extra battery, a tripod mount, and a two-stage shutter button. You could half-press the button to lock focus before pressing it all the way to take a picture.
The official camera grip added a proper handgrip, an extra battery, a tripod mount, and a two-stage shutter button.
Honestly, that grip and the Lumia 1020 put together actually did make the phone feel like the point-and-shoot camera it was. My only gripe with it then and now was Nokia’s use of rubber, which hasn’t aged well. It would get sticky in the heat, and 13 years later, it has completely degraded and crumbled. That is unfortunate.
Windows Phone made it even better
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Say what you will about Windows Phone, but I’m of the opinion that it was a great operating system launched under the wrong team and at the wrong time. The Lumia 1020 ran Windows Phone 8, an operating system I still think was one of the best-looking mobile platforms ever made.
Instead of copying the app icon grid used by Android and iOS, Microsoft built its interface around Live Tiles. Your home screen could display photos, messages, and other updates without making you open individual apps. The interface was clean, colorful, and full of personality. But the app gap was real, and despite Microsoft’s efforts, there was just no room for a third platform at a time when the Android and iOS duopoly was accelerating the transition from dumbphones to smartphones, courting app developers across the spectrum.
I was willing to put up with the shortcomings of Windows Phone because the rest of the experience felt so unique and, frankly, cool.
It didn’t help that Google and Meta (then Facebook) never truly supported the platform. While Microsoft’s Gmail integration was great, it wasn’t the same as a native Gmail app. Similarly, there was no official Instagram app, and you had to rely on excellent, albeit limited, third-party apps.
It was frustrating. You could have a phone with some of the best hardware around and still find yourself missing out on apps your friends used every day. Eventually, the lack of developer support caught up with my use of Windows Phone, so I switched over to Android. But at the time, I was willing to put up with its shortcomings because the rest of the experience felt so unique and, for lack of a better word, cool.
Why I still miss the Lumia 1020
Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
There’s no question that modern smartphones are a better package. Cameras have come a long way, and so has the hardware. But in many ways, the modern smartphone is also an appliance. It just works. You might get a new style of a foldable, but the fundamentals don’t really change. Outside of a few interesting devices like the upcoming Clicks Communicator or, say, the IKKO Mind One, there’s a distinct lack of character.
The Lumia 1020 wasn’t trying to appeal to everyone, and that made it even more special.
That’s what I miss most about the Lumia 1020. It had a very specific way of rendering images. It was more involved, an almost analog experience in hindsight. But more than that, I miss the ambition behind the phone. The Lumia 1020 wasn’t trying to appeal to everyone. It was a specialist device that put one feature front and center and built everything else around it. That singular focus is also what made it such an incredible device that literally had no alternative or competition. I still have my phone, but the battery no longer charges up. Perhaps it’s time I swapped it out and took the phone out for a spin again, for old times’ sake.
