Nokia Lumia 630 Review

WiFi

The Wi-Fi department is decidedly lacking, with the Lumia 630 only supporting 802.11b/g/n, and only on the 2.4 GHz bands. While I personally prefer the range 2.4 GHz gives me, people in more congested areas have come to rely on 5 GHz for quality connections. It’s not surprising that this is cut it seems to be one of the first things to go once budgets are looked at. For the budget, I can understand why it was done.

Once again we’re bumping into the easy to cull features on an affordable smartphone. While the Lumia 630 is 802.11n, it has a single 2.4 GHz antennae which results in connection speeds that max out at 65 Mbps. With overhead, I have yet to see sustained speeds of over around 27 Mbps, though I’ve seen the occasional peak speeds of around 40 Mbps. Certainly not great but it gets the job done I suppose.

Cellular

The Lumia 630 utilizes the Qualcomm MSM8226 SoC, and is therefore limited to 21.1 Mbps HSPA+ speeds. If you want LTE, you need to go with the Lumia 635 which uses the MSM8926. The 8226 is definitely a known part at this point, with it being the heart of quite a few smartphones including the Moto G. Download speeds are right what you’d expect for a HSPA+ device. As always, these numbers are skewed by the current load on whatever cell site you are attached to, so keep that in mind. The theoretical maximum speed is never going to be reached.

GNSS

Again, with the Qualcomm silicon at the heart of this device, we’re working with well known, and well tested parts such as the GNSS. The Lumia 630 supports Cellular and Wi-Fi assist and supports GPS, GLONASS, and BeiDou for location, and it locks quickly. Hopefully the days of poor location tracking are over.

Speaker

With just a single speaker on the back of the device, the Lumia 630 is not great for playing music. The quality of the sound is typical of most smartphones – tinny and very low dynamic range. The overall volume is decent though, assuming the speaker isn’t covered by your hand, which it normally would not be with the placement of the speaker grille.

For notifications, the speaker is adequate and provides ample volume so that you won’t miss a call or notification. The same can’t be said of the vibration mechanism. It’s too weak, and if the phone is on vibrate and in your pocket, it is very easy to miss a notification.