Nokia Lumia 630: – The art of omission

Nokia knows better than anyone how to make cheap phones. The Lumia 520 , Nokia’s cheapest smartphone, convinced many people to choose a Windows Phone and became last year’s best-selling Windows product. But the Lumia 520 is now a year old, so it’s time for a successor. What does the Lumia 630 have to offer?

The Lumia 520 turned out to be such a success because it saved on the right things: the design, the hardware and therefore the user experience were all reasonably good, Nokia had saved on the camera and the brightness of the screen, among other things.

Screen

With the Lumia 630 – which costs less than the Lumia 520 did when that device came out last year – Nokia has again saved on the same things, but it’s now going a step further. The screen initially seems like an upgrade: instead of the 4″ of the 520, it has a diagonal of 4.5″ and it has slightly more pixels in height: 854×480 instead of 800×480 pixels.

Nokia has also given it its ClearBlack designation and it is an IPS LCD with excellent viewing angles. Don’t be fooled though; unlike other ClearBlack screens from Nokia, this screen won’t be as easy to read if you’re outside on a sunny day. The brightness is about the same as the Lumia 520 and – which can be very annoying – the option for automatic brightness is missing. Nokia has omitted the necessary light sensor. Many people will expect automatic brightness on a smartphone and that it is missing is a strange choice in our view.

The Lumia 630 is the first Windows Phone with the buttons on the screen, instead of below it. This makes it possible, among other things, to adjust the background color of the buttons, but the layout and size always remain the same.

The onscreen buttons are more difficult to hit than the variants below the screen: the space between the normal interface and the buttons is smaller than on devices with buttons below the screen and the bar is also relatively small. Nice detail is that the buttons rotate with the interface.

Design

Anyone who has seen Nokias in recent years will immediately recognize the design: it is a typical Nokia. At the TeleVisie telecom fair stand where Nokia showed the 630, various variants were on display, some of which had a smooth and some a matte finish.

The device looks more like last year’s Lumia 620 than the sleeker 520 and it feels significantly different from both devices. Around the device is a similarly colored raised edge, Nokia has kept the back taut۔

The phone feels good, though it’s significantly larger than Nokia’s current budget models; the screen is the same size as a Lumia 1020, for example. Strangely enough, it is a lot smaller than the Lumia 1020 or 920, because Nokia has kept the screen edges narrower, especially in height. This makes it a relatively small phone for its screen size.

Hardware

The Lumia 630 runs on a soc that Nokia has not used before: Qualcomm’s MSM8626, also known as Snapdragon 400. This soc is also used in Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 4 tablets and the Moto G smartphone, among others. It has four Cortex A7 processor cores at 1.2GHz and an Adreno 305 GPU. It may therefore be called a quad-core processor, but nevertheless it is not a speed monster on paper.

The 630 is noticeably faster than the 520 and 620 on Windows Phone 8.1; animations are faster, web pages load more smoothly and it finishes everyday tasks like opening apps sooner. Side by side, the difference is significant and noticeable, although – of course – the high-end devices such as the 1020 and especially the 1520 are still a lot faster.

Nokia has mainly saved on working memory; the device has 512MB on board, which means that many apps and especially games will not run. Because the GPU is capable, it is a disappointment that users cannot run many things due to this limitation. This is another saving that users may experience.

The Sensor Core, with which the phone can track input from sensors without asking too much of the battery and pass it on to apps, is in the Lumia 630; that is especially useful for fitness apps, for example. It will be one of the cheapest devices with this option and it’s good to see that Nokia has built this in, although there aren’t many sensors in the device that the Sensor Core can keep up with; GPS and the accelerometer are the most obvious.

Software and cameras

The Lumia 630 will be the first device to run on Windows Phone 8.1 with Lumia Cyan, the update that Nokia will release for existing devices at a later date. Current users of a 520, for example, can already install Windows Phone 8.1 by registering – free of charge – as a developer with Microsoft, which is recommended because it is an update with many useful new features . Users will have to wait for the Lumia Cyan features that Nokia adds.

The update includes the Device Hub, where users can manage connected devices. There are also changes to the interface for viewing photos and the app that allows users to edit photos.

But editing photos only makes sense if the raw material is good too. That will not be easy with the Lumia 630: although it is a nice 5-megapixel camera with autofocus on paper, it lacks an LED flash – which many people also use as a flashlight – and the quality seems very good based on our short experience. moderate, but the lighting conditions at a trade show rarely cooperate to take good pictures.