Nokia Lumia 1520 price and specs revealed

Nokia has taken the wraps off its first Full HD smartphone – the Lumia 1520.

While even previous high-end Lumias, such as the Lumia 1020 , have had 1,280x720-pixel displays, the Lumia 1520 finally goes the whole HD hog with 1,920x1,080 pixels.

This doesn't lead to class-beating pixel density, though, as the 1520 has an enormous 6-inch display. The large screen and resolution gives you plenty of room for Windows Phone 8's tiles, and, as our experience with the Samsung Galaxy Mega showed, carrying a phone this big around with you isn't much of a problem, as long as you don't plan to use it one-handed.

There's no messing around with the phone's internals, either. The Lumia 1520 has a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor running at 2.2GHz, which is the most powerful Lumia chip yet. Previous models have only had dual-core processors, and still ran incredibly quickly, so we're sure the Lumia 1520 will give you a seriously smooth Windows Phone experience. A large 3,400mAh battery should offset the large screen and powerful processor nicely.

As expected, Nokia made a big deal about the 1520's camera. It's not trying to outdo the 1020 as the ultimate camera phone, so doesn't have a 41-megapixel sensor (and corresponding bulge on the back of the handset) but 20 megapixels is still not to be sneezed at. The large megapixel count also gives you a 2x lossless digital zoom. However, despite branding the camera as "Pureview" Nokia is nowhere claiming that its sensor is as large as the Lumia 1020's 1/1.5in model, so we're not sure whether it will match that camera's superb low-light performance.

The Lumia 1520 should be available near the end of the year, but will launch first in Hong Kong and the US, so may not arrive in Europe until early next year. Its US price is $750 SIM-free before taxes, so we'd take a wild guess at a hefty £600 in the UK.