Nokia Lumia 735 Review
by Brett Howse on February 3, 2015 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Lumia
Display
Smartphone displays are one of the most important features of any device. It is the prime method of interaction, it provides information, and for a lot of people, it is their window into the world. We put a lot of testing into displays because of their importance. The Lumia brand contains both Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) and Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) panels depending on the model, and in the case of the Lumia 735 it has a 1280x720 resolution OLED in an RGBG format. While not as high resolution as many flagships today, the 4.7 inch display still packs in 316 pixels per inch, so based on that number alone it should be fairly sharp.
Lumia displays often pack in extra features as well, and the Lumia 735 is no exception. The protective outer shell is Corning Gorilla Glass 3, which has an “Easy to Clean” coating on top. The lower end Lumia phones lack this coating, and it can give them a surface with too much grip, making it difficult to move your finger around smoothly. Thankfully the Lumia 735 has no such issues. Nokia added ClearBlack to most of their models, and the Lumia 735 does have this polarizer to help with outdoor visibility and improve black levels. Another feature of many Lumia phones is the Super Sensitive Touch which allows the display to be used with gloves on – a boon when you live in colder climates or on Hoth. It also features the same Sunlight Readability Enhancements as other Lumia models such as the 930, which is content-adaptive backlight control software called Assertive Display from Apical. This makes the screen much easier to use outdoors, as this image from our Lumia 930 review shows.
Sunlight Readbility Off (upper picture) vs On (lower picture)
To test the displays characteristics and accuracy, we turn to SpectralCal’s CalMAN 5 software suite with a custom workflow. The X-Rite i1Pro Spectrophotometer is used to test color accuracy, and the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter is used for contrast ratios and brightness. Since this is an OLED display, we generally ignore contrast ratios and black levels due to the black level of OLED being zero, meaning the contrast ratio for OLED displays is infinite. I once tried to graph infinity but it did not go over well.
At about 300 nits, the brightness of the display is on the low end. This is fairly common with OLED displays, and high white levels can be a real strain on the battery. LCD panels can generally have higher brightness levels, although at the expense of true black, so as always, this is a compromise. The Sunlight Readability Enhancements and ClearBlack polarizer do help with outdoor viewing though, and I never had any issues using it outside.
The white point and grayscale accuracy of the Lumia 735 is very good. Greens get a bit high in the middle of the range, but overall a dE value of 3.01 along with a white point close to 6505K makes this panel a lot better to use than older OLED, which tended to have a very blue cast to it.
Moving on to the saturation sweep, we can see the Lumia 735 is not as accurate with colors as it is with grayscale. Measuring to sRGB, you can see that the panel is oversaturated on all of the colors, which once again is a tendency of OLED displays. It does hit the entire sRGB gamut though, which is something that we still do not see on many notebook computers. The saturations are not terrible, but they are far from perfect.
We can see that in our colorchecker test, the good grayscale helps the poor saturation sweep in the overall result. It is a better result than the Lumia 930 gave, but we want to see values under 3 if possible. When I originally tested the Lumia 630, I was pretty amazed at the display accuracy and hoped that it would continue with the other Lumia reviews, but that has not been the case.
The debate about OLED vs LCD may never end, but we have seen some accurate OLED displays in the past year. The Lumia 735 is not a terrible display by any means, and has a good white point and solid grayscale performance. Brightness could be a bit higher for outdoor use, but with the other display features I never found it to be a chore to use it outside. The OLED display shines in any sort of use case where darker subject matter is being displayed, since the LCD has always had poor performance with dark scenes.
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peterfares - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
PenTile screen? Yuck.Paulo Constança - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
Great article as always! I decided to finally create an account just to comment on this one. I have this phone, bought it 3 when it barely came out to replace my old and ageing trustworthy Nokia 5800. I tried several phones before making the decision to buy this one, several androids from several brands, i even glimpsed at the iphone (but that one was is too expensive for my poor pockets), and then i tried windows phone on a low end device. After seeing how fast it was, i decided to search for the lumia phones. Seeing this one had just came out 2 weeks ago back then, i decided to check for the pricing, and it was with a great discount: Unlocked for 189€ (it was, and still is, 249€ in most stores), so I decided "what tha hell, let's jump into the windows phone and see what's it about.", as i pretty much already knew well what android and ios could offer me, and kept hearing how "bad and lacking windows phone was".God damn it's great!
Phone runs super smooth, the hand feel is just right, screen has incredible colous, love the blacks, the entire system just pieces together incredibly well, and the so called "app lacking" problems are not nearly as close as people say it is: actually so far i haven't felt the need for any app that's lacking, even multilayer games a few of my collogues have and want me to play with them, i have them available on the store.
I can't believe i went for 6 years with Nokia 5800 thinking not a single phone could replace it anytime soon, and it seems this one was a heck of a deal for the price i got it (it was back in November, it had just arrived to my country it seemed).
Battery lasts for me 2 full days, and i do use the phone quite a lot during my day. Only thing i found sad to discover this one didn't have is the glance screen, but it's not that much of a big deal breaker.
A few stores have knocked the price down to 199.90€ (unlocked, it's at 168€ in Vodafone right now, locked of course) recently, so this phone should start being a hit, IF people stop being idiots saying Windows Phone isn't any good and actually try it out.
So far I don't have any problems with it, except for one: My wallet is screaming right now, as i just bought a second one to offer my sister for her 38th birthday haha. Got the Orange one for her as well, mine's the dark grey one.
Slap on it a SD card and you wont have any storage issues. 16GB fast mSD cards run so cheap this days (8€), it's a steal really. I got a 64GB card for mine to store all the things and more though :)
faizoff - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
Just to piggyback on your comment, before I bought my first smartphone (iphone 4) in 2010 I had the Nokia 7250i since 2004. I too went with the older nokia phone for 6 years. I bought a cheap lumia 525 and I'm seriously thinking of getting a high end windows phone once my iphone 6 plus dies (probably another 4 yrs).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...AlluringRaja - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Yes I saw that but I think glance screen is not available to download for Lumia 520. There is no download button.atata - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Why you never test audio output quality from jack? Is no one listening to the music anymore?cbf - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Well, I guess this is good review for users outside the US. But why does Microsoft give you a phone to review that's not really available for sale here, or support the common US LTE bands?BMNify - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review Brett, I have bought the dual sim Lumia 730 for $200 factory unlocked version, so its a very good deal when compared to the $375 Lumia 830 in my country. I was sick of carrying two phones and badly needed a dual sim phone and the Lumia 730 announcement got my interest.I don't like huge phones, so the 4.7inch screen is perfect for me, the OLED screen is of good quality, windows phone has the best implementation of MicroSD cards and thus storage is a non-issue, the phone design is nice with light weight and comfortable curves, got the Matte finish dark grey colour as i prefer matte finish and dark colours. The camera quality is actually good and can be bettered only by flagship phones, no other $200 phone can compete with Lumia 730 in this department !!
Now, looking forward to Windows 10 technical preview, i know that the final W10 launch will be in Fall-2015 but its nice of Microsoft to allow direct OS updates via technical preview or preview for developers app.
loimlo - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
The charge time is incredibly long given its battery capacity! Is it possible to charge the Lumia 735 using beefier chargers like 5V/1A or 5V/2A so as to reduce charge time?BMNify - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Definitely, you can charge 730/735 with the beefier chargers, i charge my Lumia 730 Dual Sim with a 2A charger and i haven't timed it but its much much faster than the 0.75A charger i got in the box.