Back when Windows Phone 7 was released in 2010, I was an early adopter, picking up a HTC HD7 in October of that year. While the initial release wasn’t perfect it was certainly impressive, helped by the presence of some manufacturer-provided apps.

Over time, the quality of these apps was degraded slightly as new and better third party replacements became available. HTC did a good job with their Windows Phone apps, but they were better off sticking to handsets.

Years later, I’m the owner of a Nokia Lumia 920, powered by Windows Phone 8, and thrilled each time Nokia releases a new app. Although manufacturer apps aren’t available to owners of other devices (for instance, HTC users can’t use Nokia apps, and vice-versa), the Nokia apps tend to have a quality and authority that is missing from many of the poorer third party titles.

In fact, there is a collection of superb manufacturer apps for the Nokia-built phones – apps that you should check out if you’re using a Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone 8.

Benefits of Nokia Apps

There are clear advantages to using apps produced by a manufacturer, from low cost (you’ve already bought their phone) to trusting the company to release good quality software. This is certainly the case with Nokia, a pioneer in the app production business.

With Windows Phone, Nokia has a huge investment of money and talent and their apps reflect this. Phones such as the Nokia Lumia 920, 925/928 and 1020 represent some of the best smartphones available and all come with superb displays, audio reproduction and cameras (the latter being one of the strengths of the Nokia Windows Phones).

As a result, you’ll find a great selection of quality apps in the Nokia collection section of the Windows Phone Store app. These are apps that are either available exclusively to Nokia Lumia owners, or released with a different price point or feature set than can be found on other devices.

However, although there are a lot of non-Nokia apps in this manufacturer mini-store, what we’re looking at here are five superb apps produced by Nokia to enhance Windows Phone. The quintet below are available only to Nokia Lumia owners running Windows Phone 8, and are among the best available…

Nokia Music

If you’re a fan of services such as Pandora or Last.fm, Nokia Music should be right up your street. Offering curated selections of music in many specific sub-genres, this free service streams music direct to your phone, enabling you to enjoy the type of tunes that you really like with a single tap.

While the app originally required some programming (by entering the name of a favourite artist) the process now relies on selections chosen by the Nokia Music team. In addition, you can scan the MP3s on your smartphone to update your music profile.

Note that this really is a curated music player, however. Don’t expect Nokia Music to be a replacement for the native player – it’s designed to help you find great new music!

Nokia NFC Writer

The magic of near field communication is available in several Windows Phones, notably those produced by Nokia, and as a result you would be well advised to look at the Nokia NFC Writer app.

Available free, this app contains a number of preset commands for settings and apps that can be initiated simply by placing your Nokia Windows Phone on the programmed NFC tag. Nokia NFC Writer noticeably speeds the process of creating actions and writing them to NFC tags, and is the best such app for the platform.

For more on using Nokia NFC Writer and near field communication on Windows Phone, see How To Program NFC Tags & Automate Windows Phone 8.

Nokia Xpress

Although browsing the web with the native Internet Explorer mobile app is usually fast enough, Nokia Xpress offers a useful speed increase by compressing web pages for download, which can also save you money on metered data connections.

Meanwhile this handy and flexible app also includes a tool to save web pages for reading later and the ability to compile your favourite online content into a sort of magazine.

Although not great as a browser (basic browsing is okay but running scripts isn’t supported) the Nokia Xpress app remains a useful app.

Nokia Reading

One of the things that Nokia has worked hard to do with its Windows Phone apps is to put the platform on a more even keel with the two market leaders, Android and iPhone. One way in which it has done this is to bring Spotify and other popular apps to Windows Phone. Another is by opening a bookstore.

While the Windows Store doesn’t stock books, Google Play and the Appstore do. Nokia Reading is a response to this, offering both a digital bookstore and the ability to read files stored in your SkyDrive cloud storage.

Compatibility for Nokia Reading may seem a little uncertain. Although the app listing above will say that it is only available for Windows Phone 7.5, I have had it on my Nokia Lumia 920 for some months, and it can be installed directly from the Nokia collection. Don’t worry about running the app – it works perfectly well!

Here City Lens

Lost in a new town or city and looking for a coffee shop or museum? Visiting a business park and can’t quite find the company you’re visiting?

What you need is an augmented reality map that combines satellite imagery of the surrounding area with the sort of information found in Yellow pages, listing numbers, email addresses and websites – perhaps even photos – for the business you’re looking for.

Here City Lens might prove initially intimidating, but you should find that you have got it working within minutes. It certainly shouldn’t take too long for you to view an augmented reality representation of your immediate surroundings, scroll through them and follow up a few web links.

Perhaps the problem with Here City Lens is that it is remarkable eye candy – you might forget you ever wanted that coffee!

Apps Are a Good Reason to Buy Nokia Windows Phones!

Sure, you’ve got Samsung, LG and HTC building Windows Phones, and many of them are good devices. But do any of them have the prestige of a Nokia device?

While Nokia might have hit hard times in recent years their stock is still high in the UK, Ireland and Europe. As such, their Lumia handsets have proved quite popular over the past few months, regularly turning up in commercials and product placement.

Most importantly, however, these apps demonstrate that Windows Phone is a competent platform, if given complete manufacturer support. Here City Lens in particular is a surprisingly strong augmented reality experience, and perhaps the closest thing to a killer app for Windows Phone.

Nokia Lumia Windows Phones are great, and Nokia’s selection of in-house apps are excellent – so if you’re buying a Windows Phone device, make sure you opt for a Nokia.

We have a regularly updated list of the best Windows Phone apps and games but do you have any other suggestions for Nokia apps that you might have expected to see in this list? If so, let us know in the comments!

They say the best camera is the one you have with you. In the case of the Nokia Lumia 1020, you might as well be carrying a high-end point-and-shoot in your pocket, as the phone’s 41-megapixel camera outclasses the shooters on both the Apple iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 by a good long mile.

Nokia has always emphasized its phones’ camera capabilities, and the Lumia 1020 is no exception: Along with the crazy megapixel count, the phone features a custom camera app that has functions never before seen on a smartphone. But for all these advancements, the Lumia 1020 sometimes feels rough around the edges, and a handful of problems keep it from attaining perfection.

A familiar look

Michael Homnick

The Nokia Lumia 1020 (not to be mistaken for the Nokia Lumia 920).

The Lumia 1020 is essentially a Lumia 920 with a better camera tacked onto the back. The phones share some design elements—such as a rounded chassis and a large, 4.5-inch screen—although the 1020 doesn’t feel as chunky when you hold it in your hand. This phone is slimmer than the 920, but the camera on the rear of the 1020 protrudes a bit and can make the handset feel awkward while it’s resting in your pocket. That isn’t a deal breaker, necessarily. It’s just something to keep in mind if you tend to wear skinny jeans. (The camera housing will dig into your thigh every time you sit down.)

Michael Homnick

The rear camera on the Lumia 1020 sticks out a considerable amount.

The Lumia 1020 boasts a display resolution of 1280 by 768, which would have been fine had the phone launched a year ago. Nowadays, with everyone and their mom making smartphones touting 1080p displays, it’s disappointing that Microsoft has yet to update the Windows Phone OS to support higher resolutions. The screen on the Lumia 1020 is acceptable for watching movies or playing games, but it would have been nice to have a sharper display available for viewing photos shot with the phone’s impressive camera. The Lumia 1020 could have been the first Windows Phone with a 1080p display, and the fact that it isn’t feels like a missed opportunity for both Nokia and Microsoft.

Overall, the Lumia 1020 is extremely well built, and it probably could survive its fair share of drops and spills. I would still take special care with the camera module, though, as a well-timed drop could be all it takes to damage the sensor inside and make your handset just another Windows Phone.

Old guts

Looks aren’t the only thing the Lumia 1020 has in common with its 920 predecessor: Aside from a slight bump in RAM, the two phones use the same 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor and ship with 32GB of internal storage. Although the Windows Phone OS runs fine on this somewhat antiquated hardware, I found that taking a lot of photos and videos would cause the phone to become notably hot to the touch. The two games I played, Jetpack Joyride and Radiant, worked flawlessly but didn’t look as good as their iOS or Android counterparts.

Call quality over AT&T’s network in San Francisco was good, with no hints of hiss or static. Obviously call quality will vary depending on where you live, so be sure to consult coverage maps to make sure you aren’t in an AT&T dead zone. The phone’s 2000mAh battery held up through an entire day’s use, though I noticed the charge level drop rapidly the moment I started taking photos. Packing a charger may be worthwhile if you’re going sightseeing and planning on using the phone as your primary means of capturing memories.

Desperate for Instagram

You know your app store is in bad shape when an app that displays a photo is beating out Amazon.

Perhaps the biggest drawback of the Lumia 1020 is that it uses Microsoft’s mobile OS. Although Windows Phone 8 runs buttery smooth, going through the Windows Phone Store in search of apps is downright depressing: A lot of the top-rated offerings are either apps made by Microsoft or games that have been ported over from iOS. I thought it was amusing that one app in the top-ranked section, when I checked the store, was designed to display a photo of the iOS home screen so that you could “trick” your friends into thinking you had an iPhone. Wow.

Although Nokia bundles a number of useful camera and photo apps with the Lumia 1020 (more on those in a bit), trying to find anything worthwhile in the store is a fruitless endeavor. At the time I searched, I saw a number of third-party apps that let you access services such as Instagram and Vine, but they just don’t work as well as the real deal. Right now, the Lumia 1020 is one official Instagram app away from being the best smartphone for photos, period. Only time will tell if such an app ever makes its way to the platform.

A first-rate camera

I could go on and on about how good the camera on the Lumia 1020 is, but maybe it’s better if I show you a picture instead.

Taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020.

When you take a photo, you actually end up with two images—one at full resolution and a 5-megapixel resampling of that image. The Lumia 1020 creates the 5-megapixel version so that you can share the photo via email, through text, or over your social networks, as trying to upload an album full of 10MB-plus images over a cellular connection would be a huge pain. You get access to both versions of your photos when you plug the phone into your computer, but you have no real way to access both images directly from the phone. Deleting an image from your camera roll deletes both the full-resolution photo and the 5-megapixel resampling, so you’ll need to hook the phone up to a computer if you want to save one versus the other.

Another photo shot with the Nokia Lumia 1020.

The Lumia 1020 comes with three separate camera apps: the standard Windows Phone Camera app, Nokia Pro Cam, and Nokia Smart Cam. Holding down the phone’s physical camera button automatically launches Nokia Pro Cam, and I couldn’t find any way to change this default in the phone’s settings. Not that you’d want to use anything other than Pro Cam, anyway: The app lets you adjust your camera’s ISO and shutter speed, and even features a rudimentary manual-focus mode. The biggest drawback to using Pro Cam, however, is that it’s slow to launch and often requires a few seconds to start up fully. It also takes a considerable amount of time to save and process photos, meaning that you have noticeable downtime between shots.

Nokia’s Smart Cam app lets you take pictures like this one.

Nokia Smart Cam is similar to the Zoe shooting mode on the HTC One. Smart Cam takes multiple photos in rapid succession and gives you options to remove unwanted objects from the scene. Smart Cam also comes in handy with group shots, because you can meld those multiple photos together to create a single image in which everyone in the group is smiling and has their eyes open. The app works pretty well, but you’ll need to make sure that you’re holding very still while taking photos—the slightest movement can throw off the process, leaving you with a bunch of mediocre images.

Bottom line

Michael Homnick

The Nokia Lumia 1020 faces an uphill battle: Not only is it competing against heavyweights such as the Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5, but it is also fighting against the stigma surrounding the Windows Phone OS. The Lumia 1020 is an excellent phone with one of the best all-around cameras out there, but its AT&T exclusivity and older hardware make it a hard sell. If you’re an AT&T customer who has been curious about Windows Phone, I strongly urge you to pick up the Lumia 1020. For everyone else, you’ll have to ask yourself whether a fancy camera and the struggling Windows Phone ecosystem are enough to break your contract over.