Picking up Nokia’s Last Flagship Phone
The Lumia 930 is among the last of the Nokia branded Lumia phones and the team at Microsoft did a fine job in bringing out this swan song.
After nearly two years of using the Lumia 920, it’s time to move forward and pick up a replacement. Not because the 920 is getting long in the tooth, far from it. The 920 remains to this day a fine phone and it handles the Windows Phone 8.1 update just fine. It has no noticeable lags, the screen still scrolls smoothly, the battery still lasts about half a day, and wireless charging works like a charm. In other words, it works just as well today as it did back in 2012.
So why would you consider an upgrade to the 930? A number of things. To start with, the 930 has a much better camera with far higher resolution that can capture far sharper details. The screen packs far more pixels to display images better. It also comes with double the memory to allow for much faster operations.
The graphics processor has been improved and the core processor is also significantly faster, not to mention being quad core instead of dual core. Tests on WP Bench benchmarking app show that the 930 is almost twice as fast in raw performance than the 920. There’s also the bigger battery.
I’ve been using the Lumia 930 for a week thanks to Microsoft Devices Indonesia, which was gracious enough to let me review the phone ahead of the local launch at the end of October 2014.
Design
Physically, the 930 is slightly taller but also thinner, and at 167 grams, it’s 18 grams lighter than the 920, which is remarkable given that the 930 has a larger battery and a larger screen. The phone is on the heavy side but considering it has wireless charging, this is an acceptable trade off.
For a phone with a 5-inch screen, it certainly didn’t feel like an oversized phone, perhaps because the 920 is already large to begin with and in designing the 930, Nokia decided it would do away with thick bezels surrounding the screen and shaved the a lot of the chin off. As a result, the Lumia 930 looks more streamlined and much easier to handle than expected.
Aesthetically it’s unmistakably Nokia. While it didn’t adopt the more curved approach of the previous generations of Lumia phones, it’s a clear evolution.
The hallmarks of Nokia design remain strong in the 930 with its curved, scratch resistant Gorilla Glass screen and polycarbonate back, the no frills surface, and the strong lines that present nothing that’s not necessary.
Its striking aluminum frame functions as a brace to distribute the force of an impact should the phone is dropped on its sides, which I actually did while taking photos of it for this review and it’s now chipped because it fell on sharp rocks (ouch, sorry guys). Worth noting that the back of the phone is extremely slippery so make sure you get a good grip on the glass if it starts slipping.
Battery
The Lumia 930 carries a 2420mAh battery which manages to last an average of 10 hours in the week that I’ve had the phone. Thanks to the low power mode which kicks in once it hits 20%, the phone can often hit 12–13 hours on a single charge with a lot of Twitter and Path usage, which happens to be two of the most used apps on the phone.
One downside of the battery is that each time I plug in any of my external battery packs, the phone would display a slow charge warning, which means that it would take a lot longer to charge. The battery packs charge iPhones and Android phones just fine though.
Screen
The screen on the 930 is among the sharpest available on a mobile device, packing 441 pixels per inch in a 5-inch display at 1920 x 1080p resolution. Photos and videos look really vibrant and you can place three regular square app tiles or six of the smaller ones across on the home screen. The AMOLED ClearBlack display shows contents of the screen very clearly making it easy to do some reading under bright sunlight.
Camera
The camera on the Lumia 930 is a 20 megapixel PureView, designated as one of the best in the line up with optical image stabilization and an aperture of f/2.4. The camera takes a 20 megapixel shot but also keeps a 5 megapixel compressed version to share through social networks, messaging, email, etc. With 32GB of storage and about 29GB free, there’s plenty of space to store videos and photos.
Like the 920, the 930 takes great pictures in low light conditions but thanks to a much better set of lens and sensor, the results are markedly improved.
While Microsoft’s built in Windows Phone camera app does the job just fine, it’s a sin to not set the default to the Nokia Camera which offers so much more shooting options and settings, making the mobile phone camera resemble a manual camera.
The Lumia 930 also has what’s called Living Images which, when activated, turns your photos into something like pictures out of the Harry Potter world. They move. Basically the camera takes around 10 frames, or less than a second of video, just before the shutter is pressed, so it can capture the moment, not just the snapshot.
At this point Living Images work only within the Nokia Camera and the Nokia Storyteller apps. If they can turn this into something shareable beyond the two apps, it’s going to be so much more fun.
Software
I wouldn’t go too much into the software side at the moment as there’s so much to talk about regarding this but let me just say that when it comes to apps built by Microsoft/Nokia, it’s among the best available.
The multitude of Microsoft/Nokia apps taking advantage of the camera is astounding and very easy to use, not to mention adding significant value to the phone when used primarily as a camera. The Lumia Refocus, Storyteller, Creative Studio, Panorama, Cinemagraph, Video Tuner, Video Trimmer, Director, and Video Upload make for a priceless collection for any PureView Lumia owner. And of course, there’s Mix Radio which gives you free music streaming and a boat load of playlists to choose from, and the ever useful HERE Drive+ and HERE Maps apps.
The built in Office suite, which includes Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote will make Office users quite happy especially as the new One Note now has Office Lens to scan whiteboards and documents and make the text easier to read.
Unfortunately with third party applications the quality just isn’t there for a lot of them. Popular apps such as Path, Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard, Flickr, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber, and Tumblr are of course available but they pale in comparison to their iOS and even Android counterparts. The apps function just fine, but they aren’t as rich and as complete, which is a shame because the Lumia series are great phones and Windows Phone is not difficult to use.
Oh also, there’s no YouTube or any other Google mobile apps for Windows Phone but Internet Explorer in 8.1 has been improved greatly including the ability to show sites the way they are displayed on Android and iOS browsers, so that tempers the loss quite a bit. At least the Mail and Calendar apps work with Gmail accounts.
Summary
The Lumia 930 is clearly a high end phone. It’s a worthy successor to the 920 and 925 and serves as Microsoft’s flagship. Simply put, it’s the best among Windows Phone devices. The large 5-inch screen doesn’t make the phone feel overwhelming thanks to the thin bezels surrounding it while the curved screen and back make it easier to handle, but please get a case for the phone because it’s very slippery.
Given the flagship status, it is also priced accordingly at Rp 7.249 million when it launches at the end of October 2014 in Indonesia, so it is not a cheap phone. While it does cost about the same as the 920 back in 2012, for the price, the 930 is a better offering today than the 920 back then.
The Lumia 930 is a great mobile device that’s let down by the lack of third party app support in terms of quality if not selection but the popular apps are there and functional and the lack of polish doesn’t seriously affect their usage (except maybe for Path and Flickr, which at this point are just ridiculously bad).
Low light comparison shots
The photos below were taken with default auto settings and have not been altered aside from being resized to match the width.
