Nokia Lumia 930 Review
by Brett Howse on September 8, 2014 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Mobile
- windows phone
- Lumia
Software
Like the Lumia 630, the 930 ships with Lumia Cyan firmware, which adds a few additions to the phone. Unlike Android phones, there is no customization of the operating system itself, so in this section we will take a look at several of the unique Nokia apps as well as improvements to Windows Phone 8.1 since it launched a few months ago.
As with the Lumia 630, Cyan finally brings adjustable display brightness as well as advanced color profiles. In addition, the lock screen timeout can now be set to “never” which was not always possible on older Nokia Windows Phones.
You also get access to the excellent HERE branded navigation apps, with HERE Drive+ for driving, HERE Maps as a general navigation app, and HERE Transit for using public transportation. They are a great alternative to Google Maps, which, as with most Google services, do not exist as a first party app on Windows Phone.
SensorCore, explained in the Lumia 630 review, is a low power portion of the Snapdragon 800 SoC which allows the phone to act like a pedometer. At IFA 2014, Microsoft announced that SensorCore is going to expand its capabilities this fall as well with the addition of "Hey Cortana" passive activation of Windows Phone's digital assitant to bring it parity with "Ok, Google" on the Android platform.
Microsoft is in the middle of transitioning the Nokia branded apps to Lumia apps, which makes sense with the acquisition of Nokia a few months ago. One example is the Nokia Storyteller app, now rebranded Lumia Storyteller. Storyteller collects your photographs and groups them by date and location into videos set to music, similar to HTC’s highlights reel. It is a neat feature and it does a good job with the photos if you like that sort of thing.
Storyteller works in conjunction with the “capture living images” option in the camera settings. This setting makes the camera capture a short amount of video prior to each photo being taken. Then, when scrolling through your camera roll, the images will have a bit of movement to them. It is an interesting, if creepy effect. This setting does not affect the still photo itself and must be stored separate from the image. Here is a video from Nokia showing it in action.
If living images in your camera roll creep you out, you can disable them in the Nokia camera settings.
The latest version of Windows Phone also brought some changes that are worth mentioning. First, the browser has been enhanced to give a better mobile experience. It has certainly helped out with mobile sites, with the caveat that you will often be offered access to the iPhone app for a site. One thing that would still be a great addition to Windows Phone’s browser is a navigation button to jump to the top of the page. Hopefully this will come soon.
IE 11 old (left) IE 11 new (center) Safari (right)
The other major addition since Windows Phone 8.1 was launched is native folder support. Being Windows Phone, these folders would not be much good if they did not support the live tile nature of the operating system, so they are live folders. To create a folder, do a long tap on a live tile and then drag it over another live tile. Tap a folder to expand it, and tap again to close it up. It is fast, simple, and actually works really well.
Live Folder closed
Live Folder Open
In addition, Bluetooth is updated for PAN 1.0 profile, aptX codec support for A2DP, and browsing support for AVRCP are now supported. NTP was for some reason never supported in earlier versions of the OS, with Windows Phone instead relying on carriers providing the time over the cellular network. That is not ideal as not all carriers do this properly, and if you do not have a SIM in your phone your time must be set manually, and then it wipes it out every time you reboot. This obvious addition of NTP support rectifies these shortcomings. For a full list of the changes, please see this page.
It always seems like Windows Phone is behind a bit compared to other mobile platforms, but these incremental updates are a good step to closing that gap. There are quite a few behind the scenes changes as well for this update so if Microsoft wants to have any chance to catch up, this is important.
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milroy - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
"The power button placement is certainly in the right location when compared to a phone with the power button on the top which gets awkward to use especially on a larger phone such as this."This is actually one of my main gripes with Lumia designs. The power button is so easy to access it is difficult to grip the phone without accidentally activating it. I have inadvertently turned my phone off countless times. With the current design you have to be very careful how you hold it by the sides Otherwise you need to hold it glass to back.
I’ve had the 925 and now the 1520 and both have been excellent.
siberstorm - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
It would be great if you added some sort of camera consistency benchmark for future reviews. It's something most reviewers don't do. Actually I don't think I've ever seen it before. Take a dozen pictures of the same scene back to back. Mark off the ones that you consider "good" and give the percentage. Also do the same test when changing scenes quickly. The biggest reason why people like the iPhone's camera is because of its consistency. Nokia's camera's are technically better, but most people aren't looking for max potential. They want the first shot to be the only shot. This is also a problem for camera's that use their inbuilt OIS too liberally. The shutter speed is too slow and a moving subject, which is often the case, will just end up a blur. A noisy shot is much better than a smeared blurry shot.croc123 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
The more I read about the newer phones with good-ish cameras, the more I am tempted to get a new Nokia 808... While I still can. (Maybe two.)saliti - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
The battery life test of Anandtech is horrible and not representative of real life battery life. I don't even use it as reference. GSMArena's battery life test is more balanced.leopard_jumps - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Shoot a video with passing cars (i.e. fast moving objects) , go to some flowers , buildings . We need to know the quality of the video abilities .boostern - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Sorry but this is one of the worst review ever made on anandtech.I really hope that is not the course that anandtech will take with the departure of Anand, because even a week ago a page like that of WiFi tests would be never been published.
boostern - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
The more I read this review the more i found it flawed.Even in the battery life pace I see flaws, the subjective comments at the end where you say that in your tipical day the battery life was OK, what does it mean? How is your tipical day? What kind of activities you do in your tipical day?
Finally, there is too few data in this review compared to the Anandtech's standard...and too few comments on data outcomings.
Brett I don't want to attack you, but please read carefully one of the review made by Anand, Brian or even Joshua...
Brett Howse - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Hi Boostern,First off, I don't take it as an attack. Our readers demand a high level from us which is fantastic. If we don't meet that then we need to get better. Let me address a couple of your points:
The Wi-Fi was clearly a mistake. Without an ac router (which I am working on obtaining now) my options were test 802.11n, or not test. I chose to test n because I'd say the vast majority of people have n anyway, so they aren't going to see the huge speeds from ac. Clearly that was an error, and may people have pointed it out. In the future, I'll likely do both n and ac testing.
As for the battery life, our battery life test is really a worst case for this phone. I had to make the point that even though in the chart it shows < 6 hours, the average person on an average day is not going to need to charge the phone in 6 hours. The white backgrounds really hurt this AMOLED generation. My typical day and your typical day are not the same of course, which is why we can't test a "typical day". Perhaps we can look at doing some sort of different battery life testing and it is something we can discuss internally.
Also, not all of the benchmarking tools we use on other platforms are available on Windows Phone. It's just a reality of 3.5% market share and two dominant players in front. We are working on our own tools, but they take time and they are not available yet.
As for the comments on data, Anand had 17 years of experience and this is my second phone review, so I'll try better next time.
Thanks for reading - we all do appreciate the readers of the site. We know you expect the best and if we don't deliver it, then you have the right to ask for better.
boostern - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Thank you for the response.Regarding the battery life page in the article, I think you should also take into account the differences in Snap 800 vs Snap 801 and the inherently power differences of these two SoCs. If you compare the 930 with other phones you should also explain the differences in the results, the majority of phones you compare against the 930 are based on Snap 801 platform that brings some optimizations in power comsumption. Nonetheless you should also compare the 930 with phones based on the same platform (for example the Nexus 5) and point out that the optimization job done made by Nokia was bad and is not the state of the art. The bad result are not only due to the display adopted (surely this is a reason), but also these results comes from the adoption of the Snap 800 and the not so good job in the optimization. Another advice: are the good result obtained in Basemark battery life a result of the worse performance obtained in this test VS the competitors? As Anand and Brian showed us in the recently past this could be an explanation of the results, in that the CPU stays in lower states for a longer amount of time. Take it only as an advice ;)
snoozemode - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Also, why not use a EU -> US wall plug converter so that you could use the included 1.5A charger? Now the battery charging time is irrelevant.