The Nokia Lumia 1320 is a perfect example of the company's perpetual U.S. struggle. In a better world, this would be a free-with-contract or free-up-front phablet, brightly colored and cheery, with a nice big screen for media playback. It would be a low-cost competitor to Samsung's Galaxy Mega, which has a small, but healthy fan base.
But sadly, that isn't what we have here. As U.S. carriers seem to glory in thumbing their nose at Nokia, the 1320 is a $429 unlocked phablet available only through Amazon, fully compatible only with AT&T, without U.S. LTE bands and with a tight 8GB of built-in storage. That turns the 1320 from a great opportunity to a missed opportunity. The $199.99-with-contract Lumia 1520 is a better choice on AT&T. Our general Editors' Choice for phablets, meanwhile, is the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which has the advantage of being available on whatever network you choose.
Physical Features and Call Quality
WAKE UP! The Lumia 1320's aggressively bright design is the best thing about the phone. Nokia are masterworkers of polycarbonate—Samsung take note—and the 1320 has a great-feeling removable matte back in red, yellow, black, or white.As a six-inch phablet, the 1320 is comically huge. It's 6.4 by 3.4 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 7.8 ounces; it did not fit into any of my pants pockets, front or back, and it was tall enough to peek out of my jacket pocket. The volume, power, and dedicated camera buttons are all on the right side.
Most of the black front is a 6-inch, 1,280-by-720 IPS LCD screen. At 244 pixels per inch, it's noticeably below Retina resolution, although it's a little higher density than the Galaxy Mega's 233 ppi. I only really noticed pixelation in high-end games like Asphalt 8, where graphics looked a little soft. The screen is visible outdoors, and works with thin gloves.
As the 1320 is an international unit only being sold in the U.S. on a lark, it lacks the right U.S. frequency bands for LTE. HSPA+ 42 is available on 850/900/2100 MHz, which doesn't work with T-Mobile at all, so this is an AT&T-only device. I got terrific speeds on the speedtest.net app with 7Mbps down and 2Mbps up in midtown Manhattan, so reception is rock-solid on the few bands it covers.
Voice quality, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired. The earpiece is loud, although the phone is so big it's hard to figure out where to hold it to get the earpiece placement right. Sound through the earpiece was harsh and trebly. Transmissions through the mic, which ends up quite far from your mouth, were wobbly, thin, and hissy. The back-ported speakerphone is loud enough for indoor or in-car use, but transmission through the speakerphone mic were scratchy, blurry, and incorporated a ton of background noise. Don't use this phone for calls without a quality Bluetooth headset like the Jawbone Era or Plantronics Voyager Legend.
The big 3400mAh battery clocked in 15 hours, 59 minutes of talk time—much shorter than Nokia's claimed 21 hours, but good nonetheless. Nokia says you'll get up to 9 hours of video playback as well.
OS, Performance and Multimedia
The Lumia 1320 runs a 1.7GHz, dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, similar to the one in the Moto X, but clearly with an older GPU. Basic app performance is fine, but graphics performance leaves something to be desired, with results of 11 fps and 16 fps on our standard GFXBench 2.5 Egypt offscreen and onscreen graphics benchmarks.