Nokia Bandit rumours: a 6-inch, quad-core 1080p Lumia phablet

Device said to be relased by the end of the year

A worker poses with the new Nokia Lumia 925 at its launch in London May 14, 2013. Nokia unveiled a lighter, metal model in its Lumia smartphone range, as it tries to catch the eye of buyers to close the huge market lead of rivals Samsung and Apple Inc in

The latest addition to Nokia’s Lumia seems set to be a souped-up phablet with a 6-inch screen, a rear camera with at least 20-megapixels and a quad-core processor.

News of the new handset (somewhat endearingly given the codename ‘Bandit’) has been leaked to The Verge, who report that it will be the “first of many” Windows Phone devices with 1080p screens.

With a polycarbonate body the Bandit will be relatively thin and lightweight, though the high-grade camera will necessitate a slight hump in the back of the body – nothing like as noticeable as the Lumia 1020, but nearer to the 925 (see picture above).

 The device should be headed to stores by the end of the year though there’s no news as to how the launch might be staggered between the US and the UK.

The phone’s release will supposedly coincide with a large update to Windows Phone 8, the mobile Windows operating system. The update is so far only known as General Distribution 3 (GDR3) and is designed to complement new hardware, including the rumoured bandit.

Some changes will be basic (for example adding an option to turn the auto-rotation of the screen on and off and ensuring that the Live Tiles UI will work for 1080p screens) whilst others sound more promising – including a text message syncing service that works across multiple platforms (eg Skype and Facebook chat) and stores your messages in the cloud for access at all times.

Windows Phone recently leapfrogged BlackBerry to become the third most popular mobile OS globally, though with only 3.3 per cent of the global share (compared to Android’s 79% and Apple’s 14.2%) there’s still quite some way to go for the software.