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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cheshirster - Saturday, November 29, 2014 - link
Yes. S800 is the only candidate and it is to pricey for the segment whrere 830 is going to play.And S800 with 2200mah battery... Don't think it would be a good deal?
cheshirster - Saturday, November 29, 2014 - link
Why no cyanogen? O P O comment section pretty covers it.http://www.anandtech.com/comments/8242/the-oneplus...
StrangerGuy - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
$400? Even at *mere* $200 that must be some really strong crack Nokia is smoking in a market filled with non-contract $180 Moto Gs and $150 Redmi Notes.cheshirster - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Keep calm and bing galaxy A3 prices.tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Is that Nexus 9 article still happening, or was the preview really the review?Laxaa - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
It's great to see that WinPhone finally is getting the attention it deserves on this site! Keep up the good work.As for the device, it's one of those "this one had potential". I am disappointed by the lack of a true holiday flagship to replace my 920(which still works fine, btw) and it's kind of worrysome that there won't be one coming out anythime soon. The 830 has a lot of features that I want(slim design, better audio capture, SD-card support) but the SOC just doesn't cut it for me. If it was a notch faster, I would have jumped and used it as a stop-gap phone for the next couple of years.
(The 930 is not interessting to me because ot the mediocre battery life and the low internal storage)
Klimax - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Good review and quite matches my experience.I'd have small suggestion: Game "Total Defense" could be used as general gauge how well 3D games will work on WP8.x and W8.x devices. Although it doesn't have FPS meter, it is very visible if game doesn't run fast enough including touch input. (+ main menu itself can provide hint how it will work)
Myrandex - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
The 10MP Pureview camera isn't the smallest pureview camera. The Lumia 920's 8.7MP camera was the first Nokia Pureview windows phone camera and honestly I have been impressed by that camera many times. So people commenting about how this 10MP doesn't deserve the name I feel doesn't know what they are talking about, as that 8.7MP one has taken numerous nice shots in multiple shooting conditions for me.kspirit - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
I believe they were talking about the sensor size, which is far more important. Not the raw MP count.Laxaa - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
They were. The 920 sensor is also larger than the 830 sensor(1/3.2" vs 1/3.4")