[rwp-review id=”0″]
The Nokia Lumia 930 – The Challenger
I noticed the transition that Microsoft was making in the mobile market when they first launched the tile design in Windows 7 mobile – and I loved it. That was a long time ago, and the Windows for mobile interface has come quite a way since then.
When I got my hands on the Nokia Lumia 930 a couple of weeks back, I knew from reviews I had read that it was a great phone with a great camera. But having heard the same reviews for various different devices, I didn’t want to judge till I had given it a go for a few weeks.
Once I opened up the box, I was already stunned by the impeccable design – before I had even switched it on. Less than half an hour later, quite excitedly, I had yanked in my SIM card, set up favorite apps, copied in my contacts and started tweeting. I knew I had a phone I would be holding for some time.
The Nokia Lumia 930 comes with a 5 inches display and 1080p resolution along with ClearBlack OLED display technology – and yes, it’s amazing. Size-wise, it’s a much larger phone than I’m used to holding (currently own an iPhone 5S and an HTC One M8), but with a great grip. It comes with 32GB in-built, but no microSD card slot. However, if you sign up, you are entitled to 7GB of space on Microsoft’s cloud storage, OneDrive.
Running on the latest Windows Phone 8.1, an update that includes a notifications area similar to Android, in that it can be swiped down from the top, it also comes with a 20MP Pureview camera, which, in my experience has been the best camera on a smartphone I’ve seen so far.
Nokia Camera
The phone comes with 2 camera apps. The first is the standard app that activates the camera on the phone – a default Windows mobile app. If you want to have a bit more fun, and a lot more control, I’d recommend the Nokia Camera app.
Armed with this, I went out on the town clicking away. The app gives immense control to so many aspects that would appeal to the amateur photographer from exposure to color balance to aperture settings to manual focus; in fact, one of the best manual focus features I’ve seen on a smartphone camera. And yes, I do have photographic evidence.
Design & Build
The Nokia Lumia 930 is instantly a thing of beauty, with a matte back that doesn’t feel plastic-y, and a nice aluminum frame. To finish things off, the OLED display is covered in a gorgeous, curvy Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3. It is one of the heavier smartphones around, but the build is amazing.
Hardware & Performance
A quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 running at 2.2GHz, and supported by 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage sit snug inside the Nokia Lumia 930. What this means is that not only is the processing of information and loading of web pages faster, but the overall reaction time of the phone from the moment your fingers touch the screen to when the tiles react is super fast and super responsive, making the entire experience work the way it should.
Battery & Charging
Embedded batteries are becoming a norm in smartphones and the Lumia 930 follows suit. This is an area where the device is somewhat disappointing. It takes quite a while to reach full charge, although, to be fair, I never used the charger that came in the box, and instead opted for the already-plugged-in HTC One M8 charger on my wall. On top of that the phone is a juice drainer and once your day begins and you receive a few emails, check out your Facebook and maybe take a picture and upload to Instagram, you’d find yourself staring at the halfway mark of what was a fully charged battery.
The pack I received came with a Fatboy wireless charger, which I only used a couple of times, but seems to charge at the same speed, if not slower. Plus, it’s a bit tricky – make sure your phone is placed correctly on the pillow and wait for the charging beep, or you’ll return in an hour to face utter disappointment (as I did) because the charge cycle never started!
Storage & OneDrive
I love taking pictures and capturing video on my phone, but even then, I feel (IMHO) that 32GB should be enough for anyone. That’s also because I take regular backups of my devices, so I keep them fairly opened up in terms of space. I can understand how some people may groan at not getting a microSD slot on this, which I’m sure Nokia would tackle in further models, but for the time being, Microsoft’s cloud service OneDrive did pretty well for me.
Once you’re logged in, it starts to back up your device photos. I already had an account as I use OneDrive to share documents, and I find it better than Google Docs (or is it Drive?!) so all my documents synced in well. As far as cloud storage is concerned, I swear by Dropbox and wasn’t pleased when I discovered they hadn’t made one for Windows Mobile. Upon some research, though, I came across some solid third-party apps and started using Cloud Six, which worked perfectly.
Navigation & Maps
One of the more interesting features the navigation apps provide is the ability to download apps for the city you want, since not all of us have the luxury of using Google Maps over data when traveling. The maps are quite decent, and pretty accurate. They do however, feel a little heavy on the processor, as compared to a Google Map, plus, since they can work solely on GPS, one may not always get updated traffic information.
Apps
Windows mobile has been “accused” of lagging far behind its competitors in terms of the number of apps available. This is true, but it’s getting better.
The Lumia 930 comes packed with some neat apps of its own. We’ve already discussed the Maps and Nokia Camera, but aside from that, an app I really enjoyed was something called Nokia Cinemagraph. A simple app, and you might need a few tries to make it work right, but the results can be quite neat. Basically, it takes a still photo of you and you have a window of a few seconds to make a minor movement. Once done, you can animate parts of the video.
Here’s one I made:
http://http://instagram.com/p/rXlVbDmMId/
Okay, let’s face it, that’s probably not the coolest thing you’ll see today, but the Nokia blog does host some examples of neat cinemagraphs which you can check out.
Overall
This is a great phone for fun, photography, reading, listening to music on, social media and, with Exchange syncing and Office apps, for work. It’s a bit large in size, but retails at AED 2199 (and a killer deal of AED 2299 if you the buy the box with accessories that include Wireless Charger and the Treasure Tag) so, compared to other flagships, pretty competitive on price. If you’re not overly attached to your iPhone, or utterly sick of your Android, do give the Nokia Lumia 930 a try. It’s a real challenger to the current leaders.
