Nokia Lumia 1320 (Unlocked)

                    Nokia Lumia 1320 (Unlocked)

BY SASCHA SEGAN

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$89.00 at Amazon, 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$199.99 at Best Buy is a better choice on AT&T. Our general Editors' Choice for phablets, meanwhile, is the Samsung Galaxy Note 3$285.00 at Dell Small Business, which has the advantage of being available on whatever network you choose.

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$179.99 at Amazon, 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.