Nokia Lumia 1320 Review

Feature set summary for Nokia Lumia 1320 Review

The Nokia Lumia 1320 is an affordable phablet with reasonable specs, but its price is its only standout feature.

Style and handling summary for Nokia Lumia 1320 Review

With the iconic colourful Lumia design the 1320 fits the range nicely, but its plastic build won't please everyone.

Battery power summary for Nokia Lumia 1320 Review

A sizeable 3400 mAh battery keeps the Nokia Lumia 1320 going throughout the day.

Performance summary for Nokia Lumia 1320 Review

The Nokia Lumia 1320 has a mediocre processor and performance to match, but it's not terrible for the price.

User friendliness summary for Nokia Lumia 1320 Review

Windows Phone 8 makes for a slick, attractive operating system, but it lacks the polish of iOS or the freedom of Android.

The idea behind the Nokia Lumia 1320 seems to have been to deliver a budget version of the impressive Lumia 1520.

With a rumoured price of around £250 it's roughly £200 cheaper, but its screen, camera and processor are all worse as a result. So is it worth 250 of your hard earned pounds or are you better off saving a little longer for a Lumia 1520? Read on to find out.

Design

The design of the Nokia Lumia 1320 is much the same as that of most other Nokia handsets. It's clad in colourful polycarbonate, which both looks and feels nice but won't wow people the way the metal HTC One and iPhone 5S do.

It's also slightly slippery to hold, making it hard to get a solid grip on the handset. It's unlikely to slip out of your hands but it can feel a little precarious at times.

It's quite a chunky thing too, coming in at 164.2 x 85.9 x 9.8mm and a hefty 220g. That's not entirely surprising given that it's a phablet, but the Lumia 1520 is more powerful and has the same size screen yet is only 8.7mm thick and weighs less at 209g.

Display

At 6 inches the screen is one of the big selling points on the Nokia Lumia 1320, as while smartphone screens are gradually growing in size few are this large, particularly at such a low price point. The size makes it ideal for web browsing, watching videos and even editing documents in a pinch.

It's not quite as pocket friendly as most handsets, but it's still perfectly portable. The real problem is the resolution of the screen, which at 1280 x 720 and 245 pixels per inch isn't great. It's not terrible either, the screen is perfectly useable and text is readable but it's far from sharp.

Power and Performance

While its big brother, the Lumia 1520, has a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, the Nokia Lumia 1320 is stuck with just a 1.7 GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.

Thankfully Windows Phone 8 doesn't require a vast amount of processing power to run and for the most part the Nokia Lumia 1320 performs adequately, but the lack of power is sometimes noticeable, leading to delays when launching apps and even minor slowdown at times.

This certainly isn't a phone to play high end games on, but for other media along with web browsing and the act of actually using it as a phone it should generally be fine.

Onboard storage, Connectivity and Cameras

The Nokia Lumia 1320 comes with just 8GB of built in memory, but it comes with a micro SD card slot, so you can expand that by up to 64GB.

It supports Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G LTE and Bluetooth 4.0. There's no NFC but then we wouldn't expect there to be at this price point.

The camera is a bit of a disappointment as it's only 5 megapixels, which is a slightly dated specification now, particularly coming from Nokia, a company which is known for the quality of its cameras. It performs as well as you'd hope a 5 megapixel snapper would, but it won't be threatening the photos of most 8 megapixel or above cameras. The Lumia also has a 0.3 megapixel front facing camera and can shoot 1080p video at 30fps.

Battery Life

Battery life is one of the Lumia 1320's strong points, as it has a large 3400 mAh battery built in. Even big batteries don't always go far on phablets, but the relatively low power of the Lumia 1320 ensures it lasts the day with ease.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 1320 is a capable enough phone but it's one that it's very hard to get excited about. The screen, camera and power are all just about adequate but do little to impress.

Battery life is good and finding a 6 inch 4G phone for under £300 is hard to do, so it has that going for it, but in most cases we'd be inclined to say you'd be better off either sacrificing screen size or spending a little more for a better all round handset.