HMD Might Resurrect the Lumia 1020, But Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

HMD is now offering smartphones under its own brand, and the company is clearly taking inspiration from Nokia for the design of some of these phones. Now it seems that the company is working on a device inspired by the Lumia 1020.

HMD News has posted a drawing (seen below) showing an upcoming HMD smartphone that appears to be inspired by the Nokia Lumia 1020. The image shows a phone with squared corners and a circular camera housing, broadly in line with the older device. There’s no way to judge the size of the camera bump at this point, but there are four sensor cutouts here.

We also have what appear to be metal contacts on the bottom of the rear case. The Lumia 1020 had similar contacts on its rear case, although these were used to facilitate wireless charging via a compatible case. It’s unclear whether this is just an aesthetic element on the HMD device or if it serves a similar purpose.

A reboot of the Lumia 1020 in name only?

Still, we don’t expect this phone to be a revolutionary new thing in the same way the Lumia 1020 redefined camera phones. Nokia’s release was a milestone for the industry due to a massive 41MP camera sensor (echoing the previous Nokia 808 PureView), optical image stabilization at a time when it was still a rarity, lossless cropping for zoom, oversampling technology that was close to pixel-binning, and distortion-free microphones. The phone also offered other tricks like computational photography tricks, simultaneous oversampling/full-resolution capture, and previously unseen professional camera controls.

We don’t expect a similar number of camera innovations (if any at all) from HMD’s new phone. The recently released HMD Skyline was the brand’s best-performing smartphone in years, but it’s still a mid-range device that lags behind the best Android phones in terms of camera hardware, performance, and other areas. Still, we’re hoping the upcoming phone will also offer serviceable focus, in line with the Skyline and other HMD devices.