Nokia Lumia 1320 review

If the Nokia Lumia 1520 is a little too far out of your price range, the Nokia Lumia 1320 could be the huge Windows Phone 8 handset for you.

Nokia Lumia 1320 Display and Design

At just over £250 SIM-free, the 1320 is a lot cheaper than the £500-plus 1520, but it still comes with a large 6in screen for watching films and TV shows on the go. Its screen doesn’t have the 1520’s Full HD resolution, but its 1,280×720 display still provides ample room for apps and icons on the home screen and enough pixels for showing web pages clearly.

As with any phone/tablet, or phablet, the 1320’s huge size takes a little getting used to. It’s difficult to use in one hand, but we found the phone’s rounded corners made it more comfortable to hold than the Lumia 1520 with its pointed edges. Nokia hasn’t compromised on the 1320’s build quality either, as it shares the same smart unibody design as the 1520. We did notice a very slight amount of flex in the back panel, but it otherwise feels very solid and well-made for what is essentially a budget big phone.

Like the 1520, the 1320 has an IPS rather than AMOLED display. Colours looked bright and vibrant onscreen, and when we compared the 1320 side by side with the 1520, the difference in image quality was surprisingly small. The 1320 had marginally yellower whites and greys, but otherwise we had a hard time choosing between them. This is an impressive feat considering the phone’s price.

Nokia Lumia 1320 Chipset

The 1320 is also one of the quickest Windows Phones we’ve tested recently. Its 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor is incredibly quick for a dual-core chip, and the operating system feels easily as smooth and responsive as on the more expensive 1520. The phone’s version of Internet Explorer doesn’t lag behind either, as it completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in just 713.4ms. This puts it right in between the lightning-fast 1520 and the Lumia 1020. The 1320 is also a lot quicker than other phablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Mega, which took 1,111ms to complete this test, which is a good indication of web browsing performance.

The 1320 coped effortlessly with web browsing. Zooming in and panning round pages was smooth and images loaded quickly, even on complex and graphics-heavy sites such as The Guardian. The screen’s resolution meant, unlike on a Full HD screen, reading desktop-based web pages when fully zoomed out was a bit of a strain, so you may still need to zoom in slightly to get stuck into some long-form articles.

Our only minor annoyance was the behaviour of the 1320’s back button. Pressing the button while browsing will take you back through your previous pages, but once you return to the main home screen and re-open your browser, it won’t remember your previous browsing history. Instead, pressing back simply returns you to the app tray. The recent pages tab in the browser’s menu bar is a decent workaround when it comes to remembering lost web pages, and you can always install a third-party web browser such as the UC Browser to compensate. This is also one of the Windows Phone annoyances that will apparently be fixed in the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 update.

We weren’t able to run our normal 3DMark benchmark as it’s not available for Windows Phone, but we did run the GFXBench T-Rex HD test instead. The 1320 only completed this with a jerky average frame rate of 7.1fps, though, so the 1320 will struggle with demanding 3D games. Despite this, simpler titles such as Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride worked perfectly well.

Nokia Lumia 1320 Camera

Another compromise Nokia has made on the 1320 is downgrading its camera to a mere 5-megapixel sensor. This is a big step down from the 1520’s 20-megapixel model, and you don’t get Nokia’s Pro Cam app either, with all its fancy effects. As a result, our outdoor shots weren’t much better than those we’ve seen from budget smartphones. Noise was present throughout the image, and detail was lost in muddy patches of pixels. The sky was overexposed, too, with sunlight appearing as searing white patches in the background.

This is mildly disappointing when the rest of the handset is so close behind the 1520, but one area where the 1320 truly excels is battery life. In our continuous video playback test, its 3,400mAh battery managed an impressive 13 hours and 22 minutes with the screen set to half brightness, which beats both the 1520 and 1020 by a good hour. This is superb for a mid-range phone, making it perfect for keeping you entertained on long journeys.

Bear in mind that the 1320 also only has 8GB of storage, which will limit how many films you can take with you on the move. There’s a microSD card slot just below the micro SIM card slot underneath the back panel, though, that can take cards up to 64GB in size.

Nokia Lumia 1320 Apps

The Windows Phone Store still isn’t quite as wide-ranging as the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store, but you should still be able to find most essential apps. BBC iPlayer, Netflix and 4oD are present for on-demand films and TV catch-up while Spotify, TuneIn Radio and Deezer should cover most music tastes. National Rail still hasn’t made an appearance, but Trainline’s there to fill the gap for commuters, and the National Rail mobile website works well enough.

The 1320 also comes with a few Nokia-specific apps that are surprisingly good alternatives to Microsoft’s. Our favourites were Nokia Beamer and HERE Maps. Nokia Beamer builds on the Photo Beamer app, but rather than simply displaying photos from your photo gallery in another device’s web browser, it will also mirror the 1320’s whole screen, effectively turning your phone into a portable projector. You just need to go to beam.nokia.com on your other device’s web browser and use your phone to scan the QR code shown to begin beaming. It’s no good for video, though, as there’s a significant delay between each refresh on your other device, but it’s a fun way of showing off photos without having to worry about connecting any cables.

HERE Maps, on the other hand, has offline mapping support, which is incredibly handy if you’re lost and can’t find any signal for data, or want to find your way abroad without incurring large data charges. Its Point of Internet data isn’t quite as comprehensive as Google Maps, but we think it’s a small price to pay for its extensive offline support.

Nokia Lumia 1320 Conclusion

The Nokia Lumia 1320 is a great mid-range Windows phablet. While the camera’s by far its weakest point, it’s a superb alternative to the considerably more expensive Lumia 1520 and we greatly prefer it to other Android phablets such as the HTC One Max and Samsung Galaxy Mega. If you’re not fussed about taking pictures then the 1320’s great screen and excellent battery life is just the thing for surfing the web and watching films and TV on the move, all without breaking the bank.