Microsoft announces Lumia Denim update, available Q4 2014

Microsoft has announced the next major Nokia Lumia update called Denim. It follows Nokia Cyan and strives to offer a better Cortana experience, a better camera integration and a faster shooting process.

Nokia Denim will allow you to launch Cortana form everywhere in the interface with one simple command - "Hey, Cortana". It's pretty much similar to "OK, Google!" so it won't win any originality contests but it's nice to have that on Windows Phone as well.

The next major update is the Nokia Camera app. It now shoots much faster (finally!). It can also be activated by a tap and hold on the camera shutter, while your phone is asleep, and reportedly, it will fire up and take a picture in less than 1.5s.

If you tap and hold again once your camera is active, it will start recording a 4K video at 24fps. Once you are done, you can easily extract high-quality frames from this video. Yup, you got that right, the new camera app will enable 4K video recording on select smartphones (Lumia 930, 1520 and Icon).

The new camera app is also capable of taking live images and Rich Capture. The first one captures a few moments before the actual scene and you can see the image in the gallery with a 1sec animation leading to the picture.

Finally, the Rich Capture mode will allow you to turn on and off the flash, including adjusting the flash strength after you've taken the picture. We guess the phone starts taking pictures before the flash goes off, and also shoots during the firing process and finally, when the flash is on. Thus you can choose the merging of the resulting images.

The Lumia Denim update will first launch on Lumia 930, Lumia 1520 and Lumia Icon by the end of Q4 this year. It will be expanded over the entire compatible Lumia range shortly. The new Camera app will be available only on Lumia 930, 1520 and Icon. The newly announced Lumia 830 is already running on Denim including the updated Camera.