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Nokia Lumia 930 Review

(4G, Windows, 5-inch, 32 GB)

The definitive review:

• Gorgeous display. Literally one of, if not the best mobile displays you’ll ever set eyes on. Colors are vibrant and it’s 1080p so it’s crisp looking
• Two useful things: Lots of ‘kids control’ to let you restrict what kids can do on the phone. Secondly you can create a custom version of the phone’s interface – with restricted access of your choice – which you can turn on when, example, giving the phone to a colleague or friend. Lets you lend it to them but you can lock certain features up so they can’t use them.
• Good hardware specs. One of the most powerful phones you can buy. Definitely in the top three or four.
• Dead easy to use. If you like iPhones ease of use, this is far easier to use. Great choice for a ‘first’ smartphone as it has the gentlest learning curve.
• Syncing the phone requires a USB cable to connect to your computer. – That’s it – no proprietary software like iTunes. Just plug it in and drop your songs, photos and files on the phone or pull them off of it.
• Great build quality and finish. It’s a beautiful looking phone, make no mistake. And it just works out of the box with minimal fuss. You don’t need to spend hours setting it up. It even makes helpful prompts like the first time you open a map app it asks if you want to download any maps to the device so that they work offline, or the first time you open the news app it asks if you want breaking news alerts delivered as notifications.

I would say this:

Don’t be boring. Order in orange or green, you won’t regret adding a little color to your life! White looks classy too. You may be thinking ‘but black is more professional or discrete’ well let me say that when you see orange or green in person it doesn’t look tacky at all, it looks great. Orange is bold and great for showing off. Green is relaxing and fresh.

Pros:

• Nokia drive+ comes free with the phone. It’s a full-fledged sat nav app. You don’t need to buy a TomTom or a Garmin, your phone will do the job just fine but be warned battery life drains a lot faster when doing navigation. However you can turn the screen off and the voice will still read directions to you. The maps can be downloaded meaning the sat nav works without using up any data (it only requires GPS, which is free) and if you want to use it in the car it can read directions through any bluetooth stereo. To be fair the phone can read text (SMS) messages through bluetooth too if you are driving.
• Battery life is average. By average, I mean the battery on this could probably last a heavy user around 6-9 hours and a typical user just about a whole day. An occasional user could get maybe a day and a half out of it. 6 hours is a worst-case scenario IE: heavy video watching/gaming. Most people don’t game for 6 hours straight on their mobiles and if you do then you should consider a phone with a 3200+ mAh battery.
• Decent camera. Slightly above-average as phones go. Camera software though – Nokia Camera – is amazing. You can set the ISO, white balance, shutter speed, manual focus and exposure compensation. You can even overlay the screen with a rule-of-thirds shooting grid. Nokia definitely make great cameras.

Cons:

• The previous incarnation of Windows Phone had better social network integration. Your social networking contacts are still baked into your phone’s contacts menu (you can toggle this feature off by the way) but your Facebook chat is no longer baked into your SMS. In previous WP devices texts and chat from a single person all came up in one place which was handy. There is a specific reason why this integration was lost, but I won’t go into that here. Social Network integration is now on par with other mobile OS’s whereas it was a lot better before.
• ‘App gap’ may be closing fast but this is still a valid concern. And for some reason a lot of developers are slacking and making their apps far higher quality on other platforms. With that said, you’ll find most of the big name apps are coming over. I recommend going to windowsphone.com and typing the names of your ‘must have’ apps into the search box on the site; this will search the marketplace. Note down which apps are missing and see if an alternative exists (for example we have alternatives such as 6snap for snapchat)
• Settings menu is still a disorganized mess. The least they could do is list everything alphabetically.

We gave the Nokia Lumia 930