Nokia Lumia 830 Review
by Brett Howse on November 25, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Lumia
Wi-Fi
The Lumia 830 most likely unitizes the Qualcomm VIVE Wi-Fi available on the Snapdragon 400 SoC. In this particular case, it is nothing special. The 830 has a single stream only, although at least it is dual band. This gives us a maximum connection speed of 150 Mbps, which the Lumia 830 was able to achieve. However connection speeds rarely equate to real world transfer speeds.
I was only able to achieve 38 Mbps transfer speed with the Lumia 830, which is not a stellar result. On a device of this price range, it would be nice to see 802.11ac wireless and possibly a dual-stream solution.
There is one other note about Wi-Fi. On one occasion, the device stopped seeing any access points at all. I had to restart the phone, at which point the Wi-Fi worked normally again. I’ve contacted Microsoft and this is a known issue on some Lumia 830 devices. They have no fix for this yet, so if you do purchase one and have this happen, you may want to exchange it. It happened just the one time to me though.
Cellular
Qualcomm’s MSM8926 SoC supports up to Category 4 LTE which offers a maximum of 150 Mbps download and 50 Mbps Upload.
I was only able to achieve 6 Mbps download and 4 Mbps upload but these numbers have a lot to do with the traffic on the tower, as well as location and obstacles.
Reception is good but this is difficult to test unless you live on the fringe of a cellular signal and I do not.
GNSS
Qualcomm’s IZat Gen8A is the GPS in the Snapdragon 400 SoC, and as with most modern Qualcomm location solutions it is fast and accurate. With location services enabled on the phone, GPS lock happened within a couple of seconds. Going from location services disabled to a GPS lock took around thirty seconds, which is pretty good.
The Lumia 830 supports A-GLONASS, A-GPS, BeiDou, and assist from cellular and Wi-Fi networks to get a quicker location fix.
Speaker and Call Quality
The Lumia 830 has a single speaker on the back of the device, which is never the ideal location for maximum clarity and volume. The tiny speaker does get plenty loud though. I measured 88.7 dBA from the speaker from 3” away.
The Lumia 830 has four microphones for noise cancelling. Below is the audio of a call from the 830 to my personal cell, which I recorded on my PC. There is a bit of whine in the recording from my PC so please ignore that I will try and get that sorted out for the next review.
The 830 does a good job cancelling out the outside noise during a call, with it only struggling when the ambient noise was high enough that it would be difficult to speak face to face. The audio quality of the call was also quite good.
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kspirit - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
In addition: I am aware that the design of the 830 probably hadn't started at the time of the acquisition. But I can't believe the same Nokia who put glance and camera buttons on even the 620 two years ago wouldn't do it in the x30 refreshes. Especially considering that those were unique, signature capabilities that competing manufacturers don't offer. MS must have had some input in this phone. I'm sure they would have cared about cost cutting on the company they were just on the brink of acquiring. No?cheshirster - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Glance and camera button obviously presented on L830 :)You should be really high on something to blame it for having features that 730 and 630 are missing.
retrospooty - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Yeah, I dont think he is grasping the Tiered model#'s and the concept of price points. He seems to be assuming newer is always higher end, even on a lower end model.Now if the 925 replacement came out and was lesser than the 925 he would have a great point. But the 830 is NOT the 925 replacement model.
Sabresiberian - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Keep in mind that Microsoft/Nokia hasn't released anything intended to be more than a midrange or low-end phone since the Icon/930. It may look like they are cutting back to those of us interested in flagship devices - but it isn't really the case. :)close - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Well... they are using the same low-end SoC on 4 of their product lines which is disappointing (5xx, 6xx, 7xx, 8xx). And for a smart phone some CPU performance is a must otherwise the experience is really frustrating. More so than not having some niche features like glance. I'm not talking about intensive 3D games, but it should allow the user to comfortably run applications without feeling the performance hit. I was expecting the 830, maybe even the 730, to have the 600 series SoC. MS/Nokia have skipped the mid-range and went from low-end to high-end. Although the premium build and other features don't really compensate for the distinct lack of snappiness in applications.It's like building a premium sedan with a 1l engine.
melgross - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
I imagine they're trying to save money. Considering g how small sales are, they need to buy fewer parts in larger quantity to have any hope of a profit, which, from looking at Microsoft's financials shows isn't likely happening.They are also concentrating on lower priced models in order to attempt to get sales in China, where they've fallen to 0.6%, and India, where sales are down as well. Samsung seems to be working on the same strategy, from their last announcement.
PubFiction - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
They need to stop thinking about making money and start thinking about releasing an attractive product and actually getting people to buy their stuff. Nickel and diming right now is not going to work.cheshirster - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Their sales are two-three times larger then HTC and larger then Moto for many quarters (if you think moto g's and e's are selling in BIG quantities you a wrong)Alexvrb - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Doesn't sound like you've really used one. :/ Don't get me wrong, I do game and I wouldn't buy one as a result. But you specifically said "I'm not talking about intensive 3D games". So, taking those out of the equation... even with the "slow" CPU, it does everything you're talking about just fine. They really run great, and the OS has superb SD card support - which negates the only major drawback I could hurl at this phone, the lack of storage.But again, since I do game occasionally on my phone, I would want a flagship. The Icon and M8 are both very nice models. However even those are going to need replacement in the not-so-distant future, and I hope Verizon stops being a Big Red Baby and works hand in hand with MS on future phone releases and updates alike.
close - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Actually I did get the chance to test drive one of these (I do some hardware compliance so I get to test drive most relevant devices on the market, at least to get a rough idea about them). The OS itself is more than snappy on this CPU. But try to use it as any normal person would use a smartphone and it starts to choke. Loading applications or switching between application takes a long time. It's just not the experience I was expecting. Don't get me wrong, the device doesn't become unusable. It's just that at this price point at given the 8xx series position in MS's product lineup I have some higher expectations when using the phone.MS was careful to create an OS that runs great on low-end hardware but this isn't the case for software makers. And your smartphone is defined by the applications it runs and how it runs them.
Bottom line, it's a nice phone but given the competition it's too expensive for its worth.