Nokia Lumia 630 Review

What is the Nokia Lumia 630?

The Nokia Lumia 630 is a new budget-price Windows Phone mobile. It follows the supremely popular Lumia 520, which has proven to be one of the most popular affordable mobiles of recent times – forgetting even that it runs Windows, rather than budget-staple Android.

We took a look at the phone to see whether it deserves the same success as the 520.

Design

As with other low-cost Nokia phones, the Lumia 630 keeps the colourful style of the high-end Lumia Windows phones, but uses a traditional removable plastic back cover rather than a unibody-style construction.

It doesn’t feel quite as robust as the Lumia 930, but it’s pocketable, cute and a cut above some of the lower-end Android phones we’ve reviewed recently. The 630 comes in a few different colours – orange, green and yellow alongside the more conservative white and black.

Nokia’s dedication to making even its low-cost phones look and feel pretty good is one of the reasons why I rate the company’s budget phones so highly. You know you’re going to get a certain grade of construction and general experience with a Lumia.

The finish on the Lumia 630 mobiles is matt, where the 4G edition (known as the 635) finish is glossy. However, you could conceivably tool-up your Lumia 630 with a 635 case after buying if you’re desperate for that shiny look.

Screen

Nokia’s usual decent build quality is evident, but so are the basic compromises involved in making a low-cost phone. The screen is just ‘ok’, a few rungs below what we see in Nokia’s top phones.

It’s a 4.5-inch 854 x 480 resolution display. And while Nokia gives it the ClearBlack branding, it’s not going to blow you away with its image quality. Resolution is noticeably a bit low, and while the IPS screen offers decent viewing angles, its contrast naturally not on-par with the OLEDs used in some of Nokia’s top phones. However, from a brief play it does seem that Nokia has improved colour reproduction in its entry-level screens.

What makes the Lumia 630 stick out most clearly as a budget model, though, is the execution of the virtual ‘soft keys’. Windows Phone 8.1 is the first edition of the software that does not require hardware nav buttons, and the design of these software alternatives needs work. The resolution has a hand in this too, but the button layout doesn’t look nearly as classy as it does in an up-to-date vanilla Android phone. They look a bit tacked-on.

Software and Performance

The budget cuts are not really evident in general performance, though. As usual, the Windows Phone software flys by, and the core specs of the Lumia 630 are sound at any rate.

The phone uses a quad-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 chipset. This is less powerful than the dual-core Snapdragon 400 model used in phones like the Galaxy S4 Mini, but it’s easily enough power to get the relatively efficient Windows Phone system running well. I’ll give the phone a proper gaming workout too see how it copes under strain when we get our review model in.

This will be one of the first phones to use new Windows Phone 8.1 software. It brings in a few of the extras you get in other platforms, such as a universal in-phone search, a voice assistant and a proper notifications system.

Camera and other hardware

One slight hardware disappointment is the Lumia 630's camera. It appears to use the same 5-megapixel sensor as older Lumia phones like the Lumia 520 and 620.

It’s a passable camera setup that we have found very easy to use in the past, but its small ¼-inch sensor is never going to produce particularly remarkable images. As in the Lumia 520, there’s no front-facing camera either, which may be a deal-breaker for some of you.

There are also a few other missing bits. There’s no NFC, and if you want 4G you’ll need to upgrade to the Lumia 635. As yet, we don’t know what sort of price bump such an upgrade will cause. The phone has an entry-level 8GB of storage, but there’s a microSD memory card slot under the back cover to bump this up if needed.

First Impressions

The Lumia 630 seems like another neat little Windows Phone mobile that should sell by the truckload if sold at the right price. But just like cheap Android rivals, its screen is rather shown up by the much higher-resolution Moto G, but otherwise Nokia seems to have made most of the right hardware decisions here.

Source:trustedreviews.com