Nokia Lumia 830 Review

Battery Life

Battery life, like the display, is one of the most important aspects to any smartphone. The Lumia 830 comes with a removable BV-L4A battery, which is a 2200 mAh, with 3.8-volt chemistry. This gives us a battery with 7.04 Wh of capacity. This is quite a bit smaller than the Lumia 930’s 9.20 Wh battery, but it also powers a lower resolution display which is much less power hungry than the Lumia 930’s OLED unit.

As with the performance comparisons, the graphs below are a subset of all of our devices which I chose to compare the Lumia 830 against other phones which are in the same market. Someone considering the Note 4 is likely not cross shopping with a Lumia 830 for instance. If there is a device that we’ve tested, you can use our online benchmark comparison tool Bench to compare any devices we have tested.

To compare battery life, we set all devices to the same brightness level (200 nits) in order to not penalize displays which have a higher maximum brightness. We then put them through several tests a couple of times each to ensure accurate results.

One note is a change to how I am testing Windows Phone battery life. Historically I have run a battery life test, and then done it again with Battery Saver enabled. Battery Saver on Windows Phone stops all background apps from syncing while it is running, and things like email will not work with push support. On our Android reviews, we already disable background syncing while doing battery life testing to ensure consistent results, so starting with the Lumia 830 I will be only showing battery life with Battery Saver enabled. Feel free to give me your feedback in the comments below, but this should give a more accurate result and a baseline we can work off of.

Our first test is web browsing over Wi-Fi. The Lumia 830 is very good here. When doing the Lumia 930 review, that device would actually get warm to the touch just from displaying a white background, but the Lumia 830 does not suffer any of those issues with its LCD display. The result of almost ten hours of screen on time is very good, and should allow almost anyone to easily get through a day of use before needing to charge. Please note that I have adjusted the Lumia 630 and 930 results in the above graph to show them with Battery Saver enabled so that this is an apples-to-apples comparison.

Although the Lumia 830 does support LTE, it will of course fall back to HSPA if the LTE signal is not strong enough. HSPA battery life is not fantastic. I was unable to test LTE battery life on this phone due to the model shipped to me.

In addition to the web browsing test, we have also started to utilize the Basemark OS II Battery Life test.

The Lumia 830 does well in the battery life for Basemark, but that does not tell the entire story. The overall score is calculated based on the average battery life loss per minute, as well as the standard deviation and CPU usage during the test. Windows Phone is at a disadvantage here somewhat due to the nature of the benchmark. As it cannot get CPU usage information from the OS, it does not factor it into the final score. While the benchmark was running, the CPU usage was only at 10%.

Charge Time

The speed at which a device can charge can be fairly important if you travel a lot and need to top up. Generally devices charge quickly at the beginning and then ease back over time until they hit 100%, so this is more than just about the overall charge time to 100%. I will now include a graph with the charge percentage over time.

The Lumia 830 comes with a 1.5 Amp micro USB charger, which can fill the battery in about 2:40. This is a higher amperage charger than is included with a device such as the Lumia 630, and it makes a difference. The Snapdragon 400 SoC does support quick charge, at up to 9 volts at 1.5 amps, and Windows Phone does support this.

The Lumia 830 charge rate is fairly consistent all the way up until 90% where it starts to taper off.

For those that hate plugging in their phones, the Lumia 830 also supports Qi wireless charging out of the box.