Oh great, it is a feature in the Lumia 1020 according to Thurrott.
http://winsupersite.com/windows-phone/l ... nual-focus
It's never gonna end!
http://winsupersite.com/windows-phone/l ... nual-focus
What's different with the Lumia 1020 is that manually focusing on a particular object in a scene often creates a pleasant effect in which the object you focused on is perfectly clear while other objects in the scene are blurred out. This is called a bokeh effect, and while it can be abused, I've found myself using it a lot.
Here's an obvious example of how your choice of focus can impact a shot. In the first version of the shot, I've tapped to focus on the flowers in the foreground, so the background of the scene is blurred out.
In the second version, I focused instead on the background, so now the flowers in the front are blurry.
I didn't do this, but I could have taken a third short in which the focus was set to auto-or to "infinity" while the focus was in manual mode-and both the flowers and the background (i.e. the entire scene) would have been in focus.
Here's another perhaps too-artistic example.
It's never gonna end!
Half the blur cases comes from camera lens and/or focusing choices. But yes the blur stuff is annoying...