Nokia Lumia 630 Review
by Brett Howse on July 22, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Mobile
- windows phone
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.
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James5mith - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Glance/Peek does not work on AMOLED screens properly. Either the design of the software is flawed, or the design of the driver (hardware or software) for the screen is flawed.Use the Glance funciton on the 1020 in a pitch black room. For the first fraction of a second, you see just the information displayed, as you would expect to on an AMOLED screen capable of only lighting up the pixels needed. But wait! after that first fraction of a second, the phone turns on the entire display to a dull, low-output greyish black. Why does it do this? No clue, I've asked Nokia several times, and never gotten a response. My guess is that they programmed the Glance function to work with LCD displays, so it's sending information to turn on the entire display, even when it's not needed.
Memristor - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
The screen used on the Lumia 630 lacks ‘display memory’. In order for Glance to work, it needs display memory to maintain the information presented by the program.name99 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"The 630 loses a lot of features over the Lumia 620 in an effort to hit an even lower price point than the 620 did"WTF is this crap? This crazy matrix of products, where nothing is clearly superior to anything else is what killed the Japanese CE companies, and MS-Nokia seems determined to follow their lead.
Have we learned NOTHING from the past 20 years?
You sell ONE product line, with good, better, best exemplars.
If there is a compelling reason to do so (consumer vs pro, for example) you make that split clear, and and again offer good, better, best exemplars.
You certainly don't offer this crazy quilt of better here, worse there crap --- not unless you want half your potential buyers to look at the product matrix, say "fsck this, I'll think about it tomorrow", and never reconsider you again.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
To be fair we're comparing it to last year's offerings. The 620 has more features, but is no longer available.Generally Nokia has done a good job of improving devices from 520->620->7... and up.
It appears they are changing the starting point for this round though with the 630 being lower end than the 620 last year, and having a lower price to match.
xomiuser - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I been using the 630/635 with dual SIM since i bought it in may. I am impressed the way 8.1 fully support dual SIM and very easy let you change what SIM card is the data trafic sim card. Both SIM are active on all time, one card is data gateway. For me it helps traveling and i keep my home SIM on while able to use local 3G CIM card where i am. small complain from me that the phone have preloaded location software, for me it means i have Thailand news and TV apps that i dont use much-- good reviewBMNify - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
You can uninstall any app(even Nokia preinstalled apps) easily on windows phone unlike Android, so just uninstall the apps which you don't use. Just go to App list and long-press on the app you want to uninstall.sprockkets - Friday, July 25, 2014 - link
You can uninstall any app on android as well. That's been the case since 2011 with the debut of 4.0.BMNify - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Don't lie, i am using Galaxy Tab 3 with 4.2.2 and there are many preinstalled apps which can't be uninstalled.Memristor - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"As a successor to the 520". I don't think that's correct. Today an image was shown from a Vietnam retailer that shows a Lumia 530, which seems to be the replacement for the 520. So it looks more like the 630 is an all new model that doesn't replace anything, certainly not the 620.Brett Howse - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Until we see more of the products we can't know for certain, but it appears they are resetting the bar for this round, with the 630 being roughly equivalent to the 520, and it is priced similarly to the 520 when it came out as well.But we need more data to make an analysis.