Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/08/hands_on_with_nokias_new_windows_phones/

Reg slips claws across Nokia's sexy sixties handsets, fondles flagship too

Budget contenders, premium wannabe break cover - briefly

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in OSes, 8th April 2014 07:06 GMT

Hands On Nokia launched the most important Windows Phone of 2014 last week - along with an impressive new flagship. But both launches were rather eclipsed by the massive update to the Windows Phone OS itself - an overdue pregnancy if ever there was one - and the historic news Microsoft is scrapping royalties.

Phones and smaller tablets will be royalty-free.

The new low-end Nokias (there are three variants of the same model: 630, 630 dual SIM and the LTE-capable 635) are important because their sales will tell us if Windows Phone’s momentum can be sustained.

WP is proportionally the fastest-growing platform (by volume: the fastest-growing is Android) but this is almost entirely due to one phone: the Lumia 520, a breakthrough device. In some markets almost 60 per cent of the platform’s market share consists of Lumia 520s. The phone has helped WP score a 10 per cent share in Europe and even overtake Apple (which still prices at a premium) in over a dozen markets, according to Microsoft.

Nokia had cut out the luxuries from the 520 to reach an aggressive price point - around £99 in Western markets, dispensing with - but once there, it made the competition look clumsy. Nothing could match such a friendly, slick performer at this price. Only with the arrival of the Moto G did Android provide some good value competition - but by then the G was almost 40 per cent more expensive. Nokia had finally got it bang on – catching pre-pay punters as they abandoned BlackBerry – and it vindicated the view that punters enjoy the Windows Phone UX once they get a chance to use it.

That’s a tough act to follow. The 630/635 is the 520’s natural successor. How does it shape up?

Cold cuts

First off, price. The 520 launched at €139 (£120, $184) before taxes and subsidies – hitting the streets at £99 (and $99 via AT&T Stateside). This time the lemons-for-lemons “list price” is down to $159 for the single SIM 3G Lumia 630. So we’re looking at a street price as low as £79 in real terms.

Most analysts were satisfied with this. As time moves on, components get cheaper and more capable, and intense competition between "packagers" like Qualcomm and Mediatek forces the hardware platforms to be dramatically cheaper. And these platforms improve: Android 4.4 Kitkat performs much better on lower-cost hardware than older versions, which gave it the “Landfill Android” TM reputation.

So the Lumia 630 packs in a quad core (Snapdragon 400) for less than last year’s dual core.

And WP hasn’t stood still either. The platform update is possibly the biggest single leap forward for any modern era smartphone system - as it packs in almost three years of user-land updates (Windows Phone 8 itself was mostly plumbing changes) and long overdue system updates, such as the ability to run apps from an SD Card.

Wise to the enterprise

In its promotional videos for Windows Phone 8.1, the demonstrations for Cortana are conducted using the 630. For many of you lot, the relevance here is that it’s finally enterprise-ready: VPN support, some MDM (mobile device management) features, enterprise mail encryption and enterprise Wi-Fi standards are finally supported. A lot of stuff here was in Windows Mobile 6.5 and stripped out - but finally, it’s back. In addition, Sharepoints are finally supported by the included version of Office.

With WP finally getting somewhere as a business platform, the 630/635 becomes a contender as a “fleet phone”, a cheap enterprise device that will be bought in large numbers.

Run apps from an SD card - and control where stuff goes.

Handling the devices, it’s clear Nokia’s product designers have stuck to the successful formula. The 520 omitted “luxuries” like an LED camera flash, front-facing camera, a magnetic compass sensor, the “Clear Black” screen polariser which makes the phone more readable outdoors, while the oleophobic display coating wasn’t anything like as good as that found on high-end smartphones.

The 630/635 also omits the camera flash. More surprisingly Nokia has dispensed with the camera button and dedicated button panel (Back, Home, Bing) and integrated these buttons onto the display. This makes it a little more fiddly to use - my first impression is that Microsoft should have made this on-display button strip a little bigger. My guess is that in the cost-sensitive end of the market this will become the norm.

The first Windows Phone with on-screen buttons. It's a bit of a squash.

The display size has been upped to 4.5 inches from 4.3 inches, so it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds - and with both Gorilla Glass 3 and the Clear Black polariser now included, it’s a huge and welcome step up. (For a little more money, you get a better pin-sharp display in the excellent Moto G, but you will be paying 20 to 40 per cent more for a phone without an SD card slot.)

The battery has also been improved: there's a removable 1830 mAh instead of the 1430 mAh. That’s 28 per cent more powerful (or 4,000 per cent more if you’re using the Tech City UK calculator).

Only time will tell whether the new hardware platform and OS are as frugal as the 520, which had two cores but was clocked higher (1.7Ghz vs 1.2Ghz). I found the phone ran fairly smoothly, but did experience a long pause while firing up the camera for the first time.

Build quality is excellent - superior to the 520 (which had a strip of padding holding the battery in place). It comes in black and white, but you'll need sunglasses for this season’s colours Cosmetically I found these pretty unsettling - the green isn’t just green, but "Springfield Power Plant nuclear fuel rod green" - like this. Nokia has bored of red and cyan. I doubt this will bother enterprises, which buy the black or white one anyway, and most consumers will stick a case on it anyway.

On-board storage is unchanged at 8GB but it supports SD cards up to 128GB in size - and storage handling is much more sophisticated and granular in WP8.1.

Like the 520, then, the 630/635 is designed for emerging markets with the bonus of providing pre-pay and other cost-conscious consumers in developed markets like the UK a very decent value device. Apart from the colours, the combination of low-cost Lumia and the vastly improved WP8.1 looks like a winner.

Now to the new “flagship", the Lumia 930.

The people’s flagship?

There are Nokia phones that sell bucketloads, and there are Nokia phones that get lots of press attention - but are hardly ever seen out in the wild. Even where The Reg is located, in hipster-heavy, design and marketing agency land which is economically booming, a high-end Lumia is a very rare sighting. I suspect this because the value of the "ecosystem" is priced into the purchase. For £37 a month, most people don’t want to compromise.

The proliferation of models means Nokia doesn’t put all the wood behind one arrow. Unlike a Navy, Nokia has three “flagships": the 6-inch phondleslab Lumia 1520, the 41MP camera 1020, and one for the mass market, the 925. (You can also pick up the 920, which isn’t that much older, and has more storage, for a song now).

Nokia doesn't expect to sell a lot of 1020s and 1520s – they are really niche devices – but it must be disappointed that the 925 hasn’t caught on. The 930 slots in as a natural upgrade to the 925, and it’s really Nokia’s contender for the bulk of the £30-£40 contract market.

Not since the HTC One has a phone made such a positive impression on me with its design and construction as the Lumia 930. It’s considerably bigger than its predecessor, following the market trend to larger devices with a 5-inch display, although this allows for a bigger battery (2420 mAh vs 2000 mAh) and really impressive full HD resolution (441ppi) and quality. It's blockier – more angular, less curved – and heavier too (and some 28g heavier at 168g). It’s quite beautifully put together with an aluminium chassis and polycarb back – to save a bit of weight.

The 930 has a boxier design than its predecessors, but retains the polycarb back, and curved display

The weight includes QI wireless charging built-in, and Nokia has realised this is an asset. It’s going to bundle a charging plate in every UK sales pack (and for pre-orders, a new wireless speaker, too).

Once you have a couple of charging plates, you don’t really look back. However, even Nokia seemed ambivalent about it. The omission of built-in wireless charging mandated the use of a clip-on sled or plate (in the 1020, 925 and 720), which meant users had to dispense with a protective case. None would fit over the phone+sled. And it added considerably to the bulk and weight of the device. Clip a sled onto a 925 or 1020 and it’s every bit as heavy and unwieldy as a Lumia 1020, nearer the 200g spot than the 130g that the rest of the high-end smartphone market has settled on.

How big is this, in practice? About this big:

Eye-catching display

Mmmm... Springfield Greeen

I’m less enthusiastic about the two colours - again, a radioactive “Springfield Power” green ... and an orange.

All that's missing is an engraved Shamrock.

In addition to the excellent display, two hardware features are worth noting: one good, one bad. The good: Nokia has enhanced the remarkable, best-of-breed HAAC audio recording with 5:1 Dolby output. The HAAC system (found on the 808 PureView and the Lumia1020) is a Nokia invention (white paper PDF) that captures an incredible dynamic range. 5:1 Dolby lets it play this back on a home cinema system. The imaging unit here appears to be the cut-down 21MP oversampling sensor found in the 1520 – it still excels in low light while its best asset in everyday use is wobble-free video recording. Over a year after Nokia introduced this minor miracle, the market still hasn’t caught up.

Amazingly the text is quite legible on the full HD display

The negative is that there’s no room for an SD card. Even HTC found room for one in this year’s One (M8) update, so even in such a bulky device it’s disappointing not to find one here. Especially now that WP can run apps from the SD card, and even the budget Lumia (see above) can support up to cards 128GB in size.

Wrap

Nokia’s high-end WP devices are superb, and the 930 continues the excellence. Yet the traction isn’t there, perhaps because the "app gap" really matters when the manufacturer demands a premium price. Yet slowly, WP is making up some ground here. Many developer refuseniks 15 months ago (Vine, Instagram, MyFitness App, Bloomberg) have produced native WP versions. What’s missing is the “long tail” – the app for the museum, or music festival that you might use once. They’re pretty much guaranteed for iOS, and a fair few have Android counterparts too. Here, the introduction of a common API (Universal Apps) should begin to pay dividends eventually.

One puzzle is why the 930 will take so long to arrive on these shores: late May or early June - when an almost identical device has been on sale through Verizon in the US since January.

Specs

Lumia 630, 630 dual SIM and 635; Lumia 930