HMD could resurrect the Lumia 1020, but don't get your hopes up

HMD is now offering smartphones under its own branding, and the company is clearly taking cues from Nokia for the design of some of these phones. Now, it looks like the company could be working on a device inspired by the Lumia 1020.

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

We’ve also got what appears to be metal contacts on the bottom of the rear cover. The Lumia 1020 had similar contacts on its rear cover, although these were used to facilitate wireless charging via a supported case. It’s unclear if this is merely cosmetic on the HMD device or if it serves a similar purpose.

A Lumia 1020 reboot in name only?

Nevertheless, we don’t expect this phone to be a game-changing release in the same way that the Lumia 1020 redefined camera phones. Nokia’s release was a milestone for the industry owing to a massive 41MP camera sensor (echoing the earlier Nokia 808 PureView), optical image stabilization at a time when this was still a rarity, lossless cropping for zoom, oversampling tech akin to pixel-binning, and distortion-free microphones. The phone also offered other tricks like computational photography tricks, simultaneous oversampled/full-resolution capture, and hitherto-unseen pro camera controls.

We’re not expecting a similar number of camera innovations (if any) from HMD’s new handset. The recently released HMD Skyline is the brand’s most capable smartphone in years,  but it’s still a mid-range affair that lags behind the best Android phones when it comes to camera hardware, performance, and other areas. Still, we hope the upcoming phone offers a repairable focus too, in line with the Skyline and other HMD devices.