Lumia 1020 - cameras and phones considered

I am not particularly interested in photography. I am not a "prosumer". The only camera I own - a compact Lumix with a lowly 8 megapixels - is barely worthy of discussion.

Yet I am quite interested in the Lumia 1020 phone, which combines a great camera with a phone (or so I am led to believe - I have never used one). Despite having no real interest in photography, like many parents with young children, I take quite a lot of photographs. And I don't use my phone for most of them.

Why not, given that I carry my phone everywhere? Simply put - the most disappointing aspect of my iPhone 4S is the mediocrity of the camera. Remember all that rubbish at the launch of the 4S where we were told that "the camera on the iPhone 4S will often be the best camera someone has owned"? Well, that might have been the brief to the camera team in Apple but it wasn't what they delivered. In indoor situations, even in moderately good light, the image quality is awful.

As an example, let's look at a shot I took while on holiday. These images were taken with my iPhone 4S and my Lumix compact, both on the fully automatic modes with no post processing.

iPhone 4S image

Lumix (camera) image

 Even just looking at the images you can see how much worse the one from the phone looks. Maybe I could fiddle around in a photo editor to make it look less bad, but the point is to show what the results are like for someone who just wants to take the photos and not get involved in post processing. If I crop both of them, you can see a large amount of noise on the image from the phone.

Cropped version of the iPhone 4S image

Cropped version of the Lumix image

So having conclusively demolished the idea that the iPhone 4S is a suitable device for a novice taking anything but the most transient of photographs, why do I care about the camera on my phone? Well, although my compact camera is not heavy, I do still find it awkward to carry around and transferring the files from it is a pain. The phone has everything in its favour, yet since I might want to keep the photographs for more than a day I am still motivated to put up with the relative inconvenience of the camera. A lot of people may not feel the quality is bad enough to warrant carrying around a camera but that does not necessarily mean they would not welcome a quality camera phone, if other features are acceptable.

I have never really seen any phone manufacturer highlight the camera as much as Nokia, and from what I have read it would seem that the engineering of the hardware is exceptional, and the software is good (although could be better). If I assume without testing it that it meets my requirement in terms of the camera, would I actually buy one?

This review in the Guardian of the Lumia makes an analogy with audio technologies to argue that the trade-off is too great: that people ultimately want native apps (i.e. don't want Windows 8's paucity of apps) therefore won't buy the Lumia. It is true that people were happy to trade sound quality for convenience in the battle that MP3 won over Super Audio CD. But in a world where phone hardware capabilities are becoming more commoditised, the camera is a differentiator that many will welcome, and the trade off is getting more complex to evaluate. What things are people really willing to trade in terms of the software platform to get a decent camera?

I use several Google services - mail, search, maps, blogger. I store my photos on Flickr. The only Microsoft consumer service I use is SkyDrive (after much consideration). I definitely would not move to Windows Phone if it forced me to use Outlook.com, Bing and so on. But which of the many apps on my iPhone are really key to me? Gmail, Flipboard, Twitter, Kindle, RSA Securid (for VPN), SkyDrive, Spotify and Chrome. I have some others but not in my must-have list - such as my local taxi firm and Peppa Pig to keep my daughter amused from time to time.

The most important app is Chrome. Not just because I use it everywhere and my bookmarks follow me, but because it is the app that is actually becoming a platform (although to be fair it's not quite there yet on mobile devices in terms of a store). We can all see that as the capabilities of Chrome as a platform and abstraction layer increase we will see more apps move from native to Chrome. We are already seeing UI sophistication growing rapidly for HTML mobile apps; by cementing that with a richer platform, the operating system on the phone will be less and less relevant.

So there we have it: my decision about whether to buy the Lumia 1020 Windows Phone rests with Google - will they port Chrome to Windows Phone 8?