Nokia Lumia 735 Review
by Brett Howse on February 3, 2015 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Lumia
CPU Performance
This is the third Lumia smartphone that I have reviewed in the past year with the same SoC inside, so there should be no surprises as far as performance. The 1 GB of RAM is important, as some Windows Store apps are only available to devices with at least 1 GB of memory. The Snapdragon 400 MSM8926 provides plenty of power for navigating the OS, but lacks the grunt of devices like the Lumia 930 and HTC One M8. It is more forgivable in a device at this price point than the Lumia 830, even though there are other devices that may have higher specification SoCs for at or around this price point.
As this is the third device we have tested with the same SoC, there is not much to discuss about performance, but if you would like to compare this device to any other phone we have tested, you can use our online benchmark comparison database, Bench.
Quad-core Cortex A7 is not going to light the world on fire, and the Lumia 735 performs very similarly to the Lumia 630 and 830 that we have tested previously.
GPU Performance
Although the GPU powering the Lumia 735 is the same as the 630 and 830, we can now compare the Adreno 305 graphics in Windows Phone with the same GFXBench version as is available on iOS and Android. Kishonti, who are the developers of GFXBench, recently updated the Windows Phone version to 3.0.4, up from the old version 2.7. BaseMark X 1.1 is our other GPU benchmark for mobile phones, but it would not launch on this phone, and seems to have some compatibility issues with Windows Phone as I have seen this before with the Lumia 930. Performance should be the same as the Lumia 830 for BaseMark X 1.1.
Having GFXBench 3.0 now on the platform, we can now analyse the performance degradation over time.
There is no throttling at all on the Lumia 735, with the first and last set of runs for GFXBench at exactly the same frames per second.
Compared to the Snapdragon 800, performance is not even close, but with the pricing of the Lumia 735, and other advantages of the Snapdragon 400 such as battery life, the performance is not too bad for basic apps. The Lumia 930 can open apps quite a bit quicker, but with Windows Phone, animations are always smooth and fluid.
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maximumGPU - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
i don't believe glance is just software, it actually requires a special type of display with "memory". Apparently none of the amoled lumia's have that, therefore glance is missing from even the top end phones like the 930. It is however present on lcd displays like the 1520 and 830.It still baffles me that Nokia/microsoft agreed to ship all those new phones without the required displays for Glance to work. It is afterall one of the best lumia featurs. As if they didn't need all the help they can get flogging phones.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
It's true that none of the AMOLED phones this year have Glance, but they all did last year, so it seems to be more of an issue with Nokia not being able to find displays with memory, but that's not going to excuse the feature missing in my review because I love Glance.melgross - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
Price. These are not expensive phones. And when you sell as few as they do, likely losing money on every sale, you try to keep cost down as much as possible.Thermogenic - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
Lumia 930 is not a cheap phone and does not have Glance.melgross - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
That's true, but it's more of an exception, isn't it? Or else, Microsoft is going to eliminate it entirely over time.Brett Howse - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
The just launched Lumia 532 has Glance. So it's not price, and it's not getting phased out. I'm sure it's more to do with sourcing the correct components, but now that Lumia falls under Microsoft this will hopefully end.http://www.anandtech.com/show/8893/microsoft-launc...
Daniel Egger - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
The 620 supports Glance with an LCD (thus being highly inefficient because it needs the backlighting permanently on). I don't think that display memory makes such a huge different in power consumption especially in "peek" mode. So it's really more a matter of software rather than hardware.Dorek - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
I have a 920, which is an IPS LCD screen, and the battery hit from Glance is miniscule.Brett Howse - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
It's only slightly larger, which may bother some people, but not all. And the 830 is only 15 grams heavier. Noticeable with both in your hand, but not huge.Cpt. Obvious - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
The Glance Screen is available as a download from the app-store. See: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/glance...