Nokia Lumia 630 Review
by Brett Howse on July 22, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Mobile
- windows phone
Final Words
Designing an affordable phone is always going to have compromises. In this case, Nokia has hit on some reasonable compromises but gone too far in others. The lack of a proximity sensor was something that I didn’t miss at all, and the phone has no issue relying on the touch screen to know if it’s against your face for a phone call. This worked flawlessly in my experience, so it was the right call. The lack of an ambient light sensor was too much for me though, as I’ve come to count on it for using a device outdoors.
Another such compromise was the 512 MB of RAM, which is definitely one that went too far. It limits a good chunk of the app store’s game library from being able to be installed at all, which is just not acceptable in 2014. But again the storage of only 8 GB is no problem at all due to the included microSD card being able to add another 128 GB if needed, and Windows Phone 8.1 supports SD cards better than any other mobile OS.
The display is yet another compromise. Here we have a display which is almost at the top of our charts for accuracy, yet has a lowly resolution of 854x480. The lack of Glance screen support is another knock against it especially when the 620 of last year did include this feature.
One thing that Nokia nailed though is both the size and design. A 4.5” phone is a nice fit in the hand, and doesn’t run into any of the issues larger screened devices do with one handed use or being able to fit in your pocket. The phone is also nice and light, and with a great feel to it. I love the texture of the polycarbonate for this model with its matte finish. It never felt like it was going to slip out of my hand. The colors, as usual with Lumia phones, have a great range from pedestrian black to eye popping orange.
Using the 630 as a daily driver for a couple of weeks wasn’t a bad experience, and that says a lot about a phone with a retail price of around $160. Unfortunately for me, I found the phone had compromises in certain areas that were just too painful and would be issues for everyone. The first is the display resolution, which is just too low for 2014 and a device of this size. The second is the lack of RAM, which compromises the Windows Phone experience by limiting the number of apps available in the store.
I’ll admit my expectations were high when I received this phone after a good experience with the 620, and they were not quite met. Going forward in time, we generally expect progress and there’s not a clear case of progress here. As a successor to the 520, it does fairly well, and with the price of the 630 it’s much closer to the initial price of the 520 than the 620. The device is certainly faster than last year’s model and that’s a good thing, but the loss of features like the ambient light sensor and dedicated camera button make for a phone that’s not always a pleasure to use. If you don’t do a lot of gaming on your mobile device, you can get by with the 630. It’s always difficult to get the compromise just right, and in this case I think it’s very close but comes up a bit short in a few key areas. Price isn’t one of them though, and once again you get a decent smartphone experience for not a lot of money, but it’s just not the clear upgrade I was hoping it would be.
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kspirit - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Incredibly detailed and excellent as usual. Thanks for all the info. I'm glad you clarified why the 930 doesn't have Glance. It confused me, because I thought it was something MS was killing off with WP8.1. Good to know that's not the case.kspirit - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Another thing I'd like to add is that the 630's display is not "real" ClearBlack. I have seen and owned devices with those, and my father has a 630, and this is most certainly NOT a CBD. It's marketed as such but there is no polarizer.DanNeely - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"But again the storage of only 8 GB is no problem at all due to the included microSD card being able to add another 128 GB if needed, and Windows Phone 8.1 supports SD cards better than any other mobile OS."Having ran into one major performance problem with using the SD slot on my WP8/8.1 phone, I don't know how true this is in general. Earlier this year I bought a 520 to play around with WP8 and to use as a music player when the risk of breaking it was high enough that I didn't want anything expensive.
My music collection is currently ~60GB/11,000 tracks so I figured that with a 64GB uSD card (class 10) I'd be able to load everything on the sdcard and be good to go. Unfortunately I found that wasn't the case. I often shuffle over my entire music collection instead of drilling down to a specific artist/album. This turned out to be a major problem on my 520.
With the original WP8.0 install attempting to do so froze the phone completely for between 5 and 15 minutes before returning to normal operation mode (at this point everything worked perfectly unless I restarted the phone or changed to a short playlist and then tried to go back to the long one). This problem affected XBox Music, Nokia Music and a few free players I found so it appears to be OS related. I tried upgrading to the developer preview build of WP8.1. This fixed the total phone lockup, but gave a new problem. With the giant playlist there is an ~30s delay between pressing next/previous song and the song being played changing.
With both OS versions this wasn't a problem with small play lists on the SD card or when playing back from internal flash (limited to shorter play lists due to lack of space).
I don't know if this is a problem with the SD implementation in particular, I'm using a class10 card so my card itself shouldn't be the problem, or due to the total size of the playlist swamping the CPU somewhere. I haven't tried filling the card up most of the way with images or video to see how well those apps behave; but this has left me rather skeptical of WP8's ability to effectively use a large SD card to replace internal storage.
silverblue - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I'm not sure but it may be scanning all your music upon starting the app.DanNeely - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I don't think so. The app launches as quickly as anything else on the phone does, and WP8 refuses to identify music/etc unless synced using an official app (vs just copied via explorer); and lists everything in the various category based lists (artist/genre/etc). The genre/etc based lists aren't possible without a full index already existing since (unlike artist) they can't be inferred from the file system.In 8.0, it was clearly doing some sort of pre-processing step before starting playback (but completely freezing the phone to the point of even hardware buttons being non-responsive is totally unacceptable); 8.1 doesn't do that, but has a major runtime performance problem as a result.
Kit Y - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
DanNeely is definitely right on this issue, Windows Phone 8.1 removed the on board music and videos to Xbox Music/Video that is separated from the core platform to allow more timely updates to the music player.However, the current music player do suffer from a lot of bugs and slowdown as reported on r/WindowsPhone quite often and major compliant of many uses.
If I had the choice to make decision to balance cost and the features, I would forgo 4GBs of on board storage in exchange of ambient light sensor and 1GB of RAM, GG3 for Glance Screen and perhaps rename it to 530 as it seems to be a lot more appropriate given it's limitations and the similar launch price of 520 which we should see it to be drop to under $100 in many markets.
DanNeely - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I haven't tried any 3rd party players with 8.1; do you know if the architectural changes provide any scope for 3rd party players to preform better than Microsoft's?althaz - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
The music app is currently being updated pretty regularly and is a LOT better today than it was a month ago.That said, there's plenty of scope for a developer to make a much faster app - I'm working on one at the moment. My plan is to make something pretty limited, but I would personally prefer a very basic app that's fast over one that is fully featured but slower.
skiboysteve - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
the latest version of xbox music on WP8.1 resolves this exact issue. it now no longer scans for entire folders for music file changes every start up... it must use some indexing thing now. It also does scanning and updating in background if you're on wifi and plugged inAlexvrb - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Yeah they've been making some improvements on the latest updates. Overall the memory card support in WP 8.1 is great.As far as "Class 10" goes... it's almost a meaningless label. Even having a UHS-I rated card doesn't really tell you much. Unless you have read/write and IOPs figures for the memory card in question, it might as well be labeled "random flash card that I hope doesn't blow". I have an ADATA UHS-I microSD card that is rated at 1400/100 IOPs random read/write. Most card manufacturers don't even release those specs because they are so bad.
I really hope UHS-II picks up steam and they start releasing mSD variants and devices that support it. I've seen some UHS-II SD cards with IOPs twice as high as my card or better.