Nokia Lumia 830 Review
by Brett Howse on November 25, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Lumia
CPU Performance
Performance is where the “flagship” name falls apart. The internals of the Lumia 830 are essentially identical to that of the Lumia 635, and that model is cheaper. The Lumia 830 does have 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of onboard storage, but the MSM8926 cannot be the SoC in any device labeled as a flagship.
The Lumia 930 with the 2.2 GHz quad-core Krait CPU is very fast, and changes the way you expect Windows Phone to operate. Microsoft has done a great job with the UI and animations of Windows Phone to make them fast and without the jitter of some platforms, even on low end hardware. But that does not help in-app performance, nor the app loading times. The Lumia 930 was a breath of fresh air in regards to performance of a Windows Phone, and unfortunately the Lumia 830 lags behind.
To test CPU performance, we use some standard web based benchmarks as well as BaseMark OSII from Rightware. This gives us a comparison across operating systems. For the graphs, I have tried to get a representation of devices that might be shopped against the Lumia 830 in order to keep the graphs reasonable and meaningful, but if you are curious to see how it compares against any other device we have tested, please check out our benchmark comparison pages in Bench.
Performance is poor across the board. The Snapdragon 400 with quad-core Cortex A7 just cannot compete with many other phones in a similar price range.
Next up, we will take a look at the GPU performance. This is measured with Basemark X 1.1 and GFXBench numbers, and with a caveat – the current GFXBench version is 3.0, but only 2.7 is available on Windows Phone at the moment (3.0 is listed as coming soon) so we do not have as large of a list of comparable devices for the GPU results.
GPU Performance
The Lumia 630 with only 512 MB of RAM is unable to install GFXBench, but we can still compare the 830 to the 930, 1020, and a couple of other devices. The Adreno 305 GPU in the Snapdragon 400 can be compared to the Adreno 225 in the Lumia 1020, but regardless is quite a step down from the Snapdragon 800’s Adreno 330 GPU found in the Nexus 5 and Lumia 930. Apple has consistently pushed for a better GPU in their products and that shows again here even though these are not the current flagship models from Cupertino.
The biggest disappointment with the Lumia 830 is performance. The Lumia 1020 outperforms the 830 in Basemark X 1.1, but both devices fall well short of the Snapdragon 800 Nexus 5. With a device marketed as an “affordable flagship” it would have been nice to see a step up in performance here. The Snapdragon 600 for sure seems like it would have been a perfect fit to fill out the Lumia lineup.
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cheshirster - Saturday, November 29, 2014 - link
Yes. S800 is the only candidate and it is to pricey for the segment whrere 830 is going to play.And S800 with 2200mah battery... Don't think it would be a good deal?
cheshirster - Saturday, November 29, 2014 - link
Why no cyanogen? O P O comment section pretty covers it.http://www.anandtech.com/comments/8242/the-oneplus...
StrangerGuy - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
$400? Even at *mere* $200 that must be some really strong crack Nokia is smoking in a market filled with non-contract $180 Moto Gs and $150 Redmi Notes.cheshirster - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Keep calm and bing galaxy A3 prices.tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Is that Nexus 9 article still happening, or was the preview really the review?Laxaa - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
It's great to see that WinPhone finally is getting the attention it deserves on this site! Keep up the good work.As for the device, it's one of those "this one had potential". I am disappointed by the lack of a true holiday flagship to replace my 920(which still works fine, btw) and it's kind of worrysome that there won't be one coming out anythime soon. The 830 has a lot of features that I want(slim design, better audio capture, SD-card support) but the SOC just doesn't cut it for me. If it was a notch faster, I would have jumped and used it as a stop-gap phone for the next couple of years.
(The 930 is not interessting to me because ot the mediocre battery life and the low internal storage)
Klimax - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Good review and quite matches my experience.I'd have small suggestion: Game "Total Defense" could be used as general gauge how well 3D games will work on WP8.x and W8.x devices. Although it doesn't have FPS meter, it is very visible if game doesn't run fast enough including touch input. (+ main menu itself can provide hint how it will work)
Myrandex - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
The 10MP Pureview camera isn't the smallest pureview camera. The Lumia 920's 8.7MP camera was the first Nokia Pureview windows phone camera and honestly I have been impressed by that camera many times. So people commenting about how this 10MP doesn't deserve the name I feel doesn't know what they are talking about, as that 8.7MP one has taken numerous nice shots in multiple shooting conditions for me.kspirit - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
I believe they were talking about the sensor size, which is far more important. Not the raw MP count.Laxaa - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
They were. The 920 sensor is also larger than the 830 sensor(1/3.2" vs 1/3.4")