Nokia Lumia 930 review

First Impressions

The Lumia 930 is seriously bright and comes with Windows Phone 8.1

The Nokia Lumia 930 is the successor to the Lumia 925. It's a high-end 5-inch screen Windows Phone, with a focus on camera technology. However, it's not quite as camera-obsessed as the Lumia 1020, making it a slightly more accessible phone.

We took a closer look the phone at its launch to find out if it deserves to head-up Nokia's 2014 phone line-up

Design

Like the Nokia Lumia 925, the Lumia 930 has a metal shell, into which a plastic back plate is plugged. It's a slight evolution of last year's design, with less bulbous sides.

It was a necessary change too, as with a 5-inch screen a phone needs to trim down its body to avoid being difficult to use with one hand. The screen bezel has been reduced since the Lumia 925, and this makes it roughly the same width as the 5-inch competition, such as the HTC One M8 (and significantly less tall, in that particular case).

It weighs 167g, which is among the heavier 5-inch phones – it's a good 22g heavier than the Galaxy S5. But it's nothing like as heavy as the old Lumia 920, which had a much smaller screen but weighed 185g.

You’ll be able to get the Lumia 930 in green, orange and white – apparently this year’s catwalk colours according to Nokia’s research. I tried the green version, whose bright hue is likely to be an acquired taste in my opinion, but it’s true to the Lumia series’s colourful style.

As is the norm for high-end Nokias, build quality of the Lumia 930 is excellent. You get that expensive, hard feel of metal matched with a plastic back that has enough rigidity to stop it feeling plasticky. It’s a class act – as long as you can stomach the colours.

The phone uses a microSIM, and it sits in a tray on the phone’s top edge. Unlike an iPhone 5S, you can open it with a fingernail – other SIM trays tend to require a paperclip.

Screen

Until recently, Window Phone mobile screens tended to lag behind the competition in spec terms, but the Lumia 930 is right up there with top phones like the Galaxy S5. It has a 5-inch screen of Full HD resolution.

It’s an AMOLED panel that earns the Nokia ClearBlack branding. This term is assigned to Nokia’s top mobile screens, and is intended as a seal of image quality. And blacks don’t get much deeper than AMOLED blacks. Consequently, it’s the perfect canvas to show off the colourful Windows Phone interface.

It is also bright, sharp and colourful. We’ll take a look at how it compares to phones like Galaxy S5 and Xperia Z2 when we get our unit in to review.

Software

The Lumia 930 will be among the first phones to launch with Windows Phone 8.1 fresh out of the box. And unlike iPhones, you do have to wait a bit for Windows Phone updates to arrive as they require network approval (assuming you don’t have an unbranded phone).

New things in Windows Phone 8.1 include a proper notification centre, universal search within the phone (rather than just the internet) and Internet Exporer 11. Microsoft has also implemented a switch that will let you choose between home screens of 3-icon width or 2-icon width.

Last year a phone this size wouldn’t have packed in quite as many Live Tiles. And that’s good news for any experienced Windows Phone users out there. The basic feel of Windows remains, though.

Camera

One of the strongest hardware features of the Nokia Lumia 930 is its camera. It uses a 20-megapixel sensor of 1/2.5-inch size. That’s the same size sensor as the Galaxy S5, but has OIS packed in too.

The high-resolution sensor will give excellent detail levels in good lighting while the optical image stabilisation should provide decent low-light performance. This is something I’ll be testing properly when we get the phone in to review, though, as the sensor pixels of this phone are absolutely tiny. Small camera sensor pixel size is one of the reasons mobile phone cameras can't really compete with 'proper' cameras in tricky lighting.

Nokia has also tweaked the Lumia 930 camera app a bit. The basics are the same, with a dead simple basic interface and a special Nokia interface for more advanced users that gives you great manual control over settings. But you also get five additional filters for better Instagram-isation of your snaps.

The bodywork, the screen and the software are all clear improvements on the Lumia 925, and so are the insides. The Lumia 930 uses a Snapdragon 800 quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM.

Although it’s one step behind the newest Android phones, which use Snapdragon 801 chips, power tends to go further with Windows Phone. And, like just about every Windows mobile, general performance is great.

First Impressions

The Nokia Lumia 930 isn’t going to get camera geeks quite as excited as something like the Lumia 1020. But this seems like another Nokia success. A good-looking, part-metal design (although we’re not sure about the green), an impressive-sounding camera and the reliable Windows Phone software make this a phone to consider if you simply don’t want an Android.

Source:trustedreviews.com