NokiApple LumiPhone 1020 SE merges Windows Phone body with budget iPhone guts

Remember the Lumia 1020? It’s back—in iPhone SE form.

The Lumia 1020 was a lot of smartphone in July 2013. It debuted with a focus “almost entirely on the phone’s massive camera,” Ars wrote at the time. That big 41-megapixel sensor jutted forth from the phone body, and Nokia reps showed off its low-light, rapid-motion camera abilities by shooting pictures of breakdancers in a dark demonstration room. The company also offered an optional camera grip—one that made it feel a lot more like a point-and-shoot camera. In a more robust review, Ars suggested the Lumia 1020 might actually make the point-and-shoot obsolete.

Front of the Lumia 1020, showing a bit of Windows Phone square grid flair.

Casey Johnston

Front of the Lumia 1020, showing a bit of Windows Phone square grid flair. Casey Johnston

Back of the Lumia 1020, with oh-so-much yellow.

Casey Johnston

Back of the Lumia 1020, with oh-so-much yellow. Casey Johnston

The accessory camera grip for the Lumia 1020, shown at its press reveal.

Casey Johnston

The accessory camera grip for the Lumia 1020, shown at its press reveal. Casey Johnston

Back of the Lumia 1020, with oh-so-much yellow. Casey Johnston

The accessory camera grip for the Lumia 1020, shown at its press reveal. Casey Johnston

The Lumia 1020 contained yet another cutting edge concept of the day: Windows Phone, Microsoft’s color-coded, square-shaped companion to its mobile-forward Windows 8. The mobile OS never got over the users/apps, chicken/egg conundrum, and called it quits in October 2017. The end of that distant-third-place mobile OS would normally signal the end of the Lumia 1020 as a usable phone.

But there was a person named /u/OceanDepth95028 who saw beyond, and where others thought, “LOL,” this person thought, “Why not?” And this person looked at the Lumia 1020 and saw a third-generation iPhone SE inside of it. And then this person made that phone, and it booted. And the person saw that it was good, and they posted the tale to Reddit’s r/hackintosh.

The back of OceanDepth95028’s modded Lumia 1020, with both a camera and a Touch ID/home button in the camera bump-out. Note that this body-hacked iPhone is sitting on top of a Dell Hackintosh.

Credit: OceanDepth95028/Reddit

Pretty much everything inside this modded device comes over from the 2022 iPhone SE 3, the last iPhone with rounded edges and a physical home button. “The only 1020 aspect about it is the outer shell and front display glass,” writes OceanDepth95028. That meant:

• Relaminating the iPhone’s LCD screen onto the Lumia’s front glass (and ditching the capacitive buttons at bottom)
• Putting the iPhone’s camera inside the Lumia’s big “Oreo” bump on the back, and using the extra space to put a working Touch ID sensor and home button back there, Android-style
• A plugged-up headphone jack, because you just can’t make that work on even a years-old iPhone now
• Mapping the Lumia’s dedicated camera button as an additional volume-down key on the iPhone, so it can functionally work as a shutter button while the camera is open

What resulted is a hell of a case swap, with everything working at the end. The poster acquires extra geek points by syncing their “LumiPhone” to a Dell laptop running a Hackintosh version of macOS Sonoma. Commenters get a chance to reflect on the bold designs of that era’s Nokia phones, whether or not HMD’s theoretical continuation of the Nokia name is a worthwhile effort.

“This is so silly. I want it,” said redditor /u/osxdude, capturing the whole feel of the thing more succinctly than this writer.