Nokia Lumia 930 Review
by Brett Howse on September 8, 2014 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Mobile
- windows phone
- Lumia
Final Words
I feel like Nokia (now Microsoft of course) has done a lot right with the Lumia 930. The 5” 1080p display is a nice addition, and every time I use a larger phone it makes it hard to go back to one with a smaller display. I do not find it too awkward to use, and the increase in real estate on the home screen is a welcome change.
The design of the phone is also striking, especially when equipped with the more vibrant green or orange backs. The aluminum frame around the outside certainly gives the phone a premium feel. The Corning Gorilla Glass has a fantastic coating applied to it which makes it very easy to slide your finger over, and the curved edges of the glass really make the display feel like is part of a single cohesive unit.
The performance of this device is also spectacular, and finally gives Windows Phone some hardware parity with Android. Everything feels so much quicker on this phone than older models. While not quite the latest and greatest SoC from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 800 is a huge step forward from the Snapdragon S4 as clearly seen in the benchmarks. Benchmarks are not how we use the device of course, but they quantify how the phone responds to our actions.
Nokia has built a reputation on its phone cameras, and the Lumia 930 is a solid camera. While not as outright ridiculous as the Lumia 1020, it can still capture fantastic images and has decent low light performance. The new ISP helps here too, with much faster focus and capture latency. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Lumia 930 sports a 20 MP camera, when the Snapdragon 800 supports up to 21 MP using the built in ISP. Unlike the Lumia 1020, no custom silicon was required, and the result is a much faster camera. The Nokia Camera application also sets the benchmark in the mobile phone space with regards to manual control. If they would just add HDR, 4K video, and more FPS support on the video capture they would pretty much have the gamut covered, and it looks like that is finally coming later this year with the Lumia camera update and Lumia Denim firmware.
Windows Phone itself has also come a long way since the 8.0 release, and while there is certainly an app gap between Windows Phone and iOS/Android, it is less of an issue than it used to be if you can live without Google services. Microsoft spent so much time re-inventing the underlying operating system that it found itself in the unenviable position of being behind in not just apps, but also features and hardware. They have a lot of work to do in order to catch up, but Windows Phone 8.1 GDR1 is a big step in the right direction, and only a few short months after 8.1 was released.
There are of course some detractions from the Lumia 930. The form factor, while visually appealing is not a perfect fit in the human hand. With sharp sides and almost no taper to the device thickness, it really does feel somewhat unwieldy. The one missing feature which is most missed is Nokia Glance screen. Perhaps if you are new to Lumia phones you would not miss it, but as someone who is used to having Glance, not having it anymore is very difficult to get used to. We are used to progress moving us forward, and any regressions are difficult to cope with.
When evaluating an evolutionary device, we need to compare it against the previous version. Other than Glance support, the Lumia 930 is a fantastic upgrade over the 920/925/928 of the previous generation. The camera is good, the display is larger and crisper, and the design is a new take on the polycarbonate unibody design. But we also have to compare it with other devices in the same market, and here things are not so clear. The Lumia 930 has a camera which is one of the better cameras put into a smartphone, so that is a win, but with its thick body, it is less comfortable and possibly less appealing than something like the HTC One (M8) which is now available with Windows Phone as an option. If the Lumia 930 had Glance support, this would likely be an easy win for Microsoft, but right now the battle comes down to individual aspects of the competition and what you value more.
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Arbie - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
SD police here...So my low-end Nokia 520 has microSD, which lets me easily swap in TV series that I watch when traveling or to kill time waiting somewhere. A new 930 at much higher price won't let me do that.
Hmmm... my love affair with Nokia (the 520 is great) will be coming to an end.
Windows Phone doesn't even have the flimsy excuses of the Android camp for no SD. It can even be read-only dumb storage, with no security issues. But no.
Not interested / will never buy it.
tuxRoller - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
The Android issues aren't with security but, from what a Dev claimed (falsely, IMO) poor user experience.NikAwesome - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
SD, mSD or whatever external storage are at least an order of magnitude slower than eMMC or ONFI or more advanced NAND interfaces. When an application like the Photo Gallery browser has to read lots of pictures from SD it is really a torture (several seconds, or tens of seconds). In the first eras of tablets and smartphones, people get accustomed that all has to launch in less than second (give or take), faster than their desktop application launch at home/work. So in this context, several seconds is inappropiately interpreted as sluggish CPU performance when the real bottleneck is in the storage IOs. These delays severely impact usability if you are used to full internal flash storage, where everything opens in under a second.I am not against mSD cards, I have an 8GB S4 mini and 32 GB mSD. I can easily tell the performance difference, but I have no choice if I want to take lots of pictures or film lost of 1080p videos.
Summing up, performance is the real reason why Google do not allow external storage on their devices (Nexus smartphones and tablets). From Apple point of view is arguable that they had contracts with music label records inheriting the iPod policy: "easy to load music into the device, a pain in the ass to extract it in order to make piracy more difficult"
jimbo2779 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
If you think sd cards make viewing photos on a phone a chore them it could be your phone or its support of SD cards that is at fault on the Lumia 620 there is no noticeable difference between photos on the phone memory and in SD card.Also there seems to be very little difference, if any, between the 620with all pics on SD and a925 with no SD support so speed is not a reason.
tobi1449 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Plus: What's worse, photos that take a little bit longer to load or photos that either don't load at all because you don't have them with you or take much much longer and half of your free data?marcokatz - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Well Nokia sure is trying, but Microsoft is not exactly helping them out (they even released their own app for iPhone first... gosh). Anyway, as of today it's much better to go for one of the really good Android phones. /Marco from http://www.consumertop.com/best-phone-guide/tuxRoller - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
That wasn't the reason given, iirc. The problem he mentioned was one of user removes sdcard, doesn't see his photos/apps on phone and gets confused. The other issue was technical, but, again iirc, was fixable if they wanted.jimbo2779 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
While that is the one technical issue with SD card implementation I would say there is a very small amount of people that would be able / willing to switch out the SD card and not be aware that they would be missing the contents of that SD card when they go into their photos app.When you remove a DVD from your computer do you wonder why you can't watch your favourite film anymore? Would anyone?
I am sure it has happened to someone at some point but realistically how many people would that affect compared to the amount of people that would put an extra 32 or 64 Gb in their phone and just be happy to have doubled or tripled their storage to keep a years worth of photos and videos of their kids on their phone.
Either way you look at it having the option to massively extend the amount of internal storage to have more media / apps in your phone is more favourable to most compared to having to resort to the cloud (which is just a no-go for a good portion of smartphone users across the world) or constantly removing stuff to make the newest stuff fit.
I would miss Glance but without SD card I will not be buying this which is a shame I was looking forward to it, don't even get me started on how the rumours for the 830 got me all excited and left me disappointed when the phone was finally announced. Either the 830 or 930 could have been WP halo phones for a lot of potential detractors to the WP platform, instead they are just a few tweaks short of stacking up very favourably with their android competition.
tuxRoller - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
The technical issue was actually brought up by the poster below me (pjcamp). It was regarding creating a unified storage space across multiple devices.To be clear, I am NOT saying these were good reasons, I only brought them up in response to the parent who I thought MIGHT have been claiming that the reasons android dropped sd card support was related to security.
I really wish that sdcards (or some other removable storage standard) made a comeback on android.
Rama TT - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link
"""Summing up, performance is the real reason why Google do not allow external storage on their devices "" Yeah right and it has nothing to do with Google Drive