Rounding up the new Lumia launches from Nokia is the Lumia 1320. This is Nokia’s offering for all those looking for a budget ‘phablet’. With a screen size of the Lumia 1520 and more RAM onboard as compared to the Lumia 625 – is the 1320 worth the Rs 7,000 premium over its predecessor? Even though Nokia might not say it out loud, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s in fact, a replacement for the Lumia 625. Our question is, why does it cost so much more?
Design and Build
One glance at the Nokia Lumia 1320 and it’s easy to mistake it for the 625. That’s because it has the same curvy design and interchangeable back panel as the old one. The Lumia 625 made quite a bit of noise when it launched since it was the largest Lumia at that time that was relatively inexpensive. The 1320 follows in its footsteps by offering an even larger 6-inch display. Thankfully, Nokia has upgraded the resolution as well to 1280 x 720, so text and images are a bit crisper. Also, thanks to the addition of a ClearBlack display (which was absent in the 625), the colours are more punchy and blacks are deeper. Sunlight legibility has also improved.
The Lumia 1320 isn’t much of a looker when it comes to aesthetics
Needless to say, the phone feels monstrous in your hand and you can forget about single-handed use. It’s a bit heavy at 220g but manages to stay quite slim at just 9.8mm. The capacitive buttons aren’t backlit for some reason as it seems Nokia is randomly adding this in some models. The matte finish cover snaps off pretty easily and underneath, we have the fixed 3400mAh battery and microSIM and microSD card slots. There’s also a dedicated camera shutter button.
The slot for the miroSIM and microSD card
Overall, the Lumia 1320 is well built and feels sturdy to hold. However, it’s quite heavy and it’s simple too large to be used comfortably every day.
Features
The Nokia 1320 comes with the Lumia Black update out of the box and is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC, running at 1.7GHz. The biggest change however, is the inclusion of 1GB RAM, which opens doors to all the apps in the store. Thanks to the speedier chipset, games and apps run smoothly without a hitch. The Black update all lets you install most of the custom Nokia apps like the Nokia Camera, although some apps like Refocus is still restricted to PureView devices.
Thanks to the larger screen, we can now squeeze in another column of icons
The Lumia 1320 also comes with a bunch of bundled apps like free global HERE Maps, Nokia Sotoryteller, Office, Evernote, Vimeo, Flipkart, Adidas miCoach, InNote and a couple more.
Media
The extra-large screen is great for watching videos. Colours are punchy and viewing angles are very good. The same goes for the audio quality through the speakers and earphones. There’s also FM Radio to keep you company when local music is unavailable. The 1320 also features Dolby Headphone enhancement, which adds a nice punch to your audio. There’s 8GB of internal memory which can be expanded by 64GB.
Media playback is good, just like all Lumias
Connectivity
The Lumia 1320 supports LTE, quad-band 3G and GSM networks. Also present are Wi-Fi ‘n’, Bluetooth v4.0, GLONASS and USB 2.0. There’s no wireless charging or NFC present as well. We didn’t have any trouble with call quality however as the earpiece is loud enough even for noisy environments. The mono speaker in the rear is decently loud for alerts but can get muffled easily when you hold it.
HERE Maps does a good job with navigation
Camera
At the premium the phone is selling at, it’s sad to see Nokia hasn’t upgraded the camera at all. It’s the same 5MP shooter taken from the Lumia 625. We even have the same VGA camera in the front. With the Nokia Camera app, you can get some pretty good shots and the sensor isn’t too bad for indoor shots as well. The only problem we have is at this price point; we expected at least Carl Zeiss optics or a higher megapixel count.
Not to shabby for a 5MP shooter, but we expected better.
Battery Life
Windows Phone 8 has always managed to deliver good battery life and with a 3400mAh battery pack, you can easily expect up to two days of usage. We finished our 8-hour loop test with about 45 percent of battery to spare. This is probably the best feature of the Lumia 1320 by far.
Verdict and Price in India
At a retail price of Rs 24,000, the Lumia 1320 is simply too expensive to consider. The highlight feature is of course the battery life and the fact that you can now install pretty much any app without a problem. But apart from this, there’s little else going in its favour to warrant such a hefty premium when compared to phones like the Lumia 625 and Lumia 720. We would still love to see a ‘Lumia 725′ with 1GB RAM, which will undoubtedly be a much better buy than the 625 and 1320 put together. To sum up, the Lumia 1320 would make a good smartphone at Rs 16,000, if you’re into ‘phablets’. You are paying far too much if it’s anything more than that, and we recommend you skip it.
