Nokia Lumia 630 Review
by Brett Howse on July 22, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Mobile
- windows phone
Battery Life
For the battery life tests, we have a standard workload that the phone performs while connected over Wi-Fi, or Cellular data. The display is calibrated at 200 nits for consistent comparison data for the charts. The device is run under this standard load until it shuts down.
Windows Phone added a battery saver mode last year, so these tests were done twice. Once with battery saver disabled, and another with it enabled which stops all background events from being run.
The Lumia 630 contains an 1830 mAh battery, which is 3.7 V. This works out to a 6.77 Wh battery which is quite a bit lower than the 7.9 Wh of the Moto G. People often wonder why manufacturers have moved to sealed batteries and this is a great example of why. In the same size chassis, with the same screen size, Motorola has packed a much larger battery inside. Still, there are those that prefer to be able to swap batteries on the go, and you can do that on the 630.
Lumia 620 Battery (left) vs Lumia 630 Battery (right)
Battery life is actually pretty good, with the Wi-Fi test just squeaking over seven hours of battery life. It’s just far lower than the Moto G which has exceptional battery life. Seven hours of screen on time though is generally plenty for most people to get through a day, and my time with the phone I easily got well over a day’s worth of use out of the phone on each charge.
Cellular data time is a decent six hours, which once again is generally enough to get you through a day even when you don’t have access to Wi-Fi. With a battery that’s not very large, the phone does all right.
Battery Saver can change the situation somewhat. It disables most apps from being able to run in the background, so tasks such as email will require manual synchronization when Battery Saver is enabled. The behavior of apps can be controlled from within the Battery Saver usage screen, where you can pick and choose which apps can run with Battery Saver enabled. It can lead to some pretty large gains in battery life especially with the phone in standby.
You can enable Battery Saver in a couple of ways. First, you can just leave it on at the default, which will automatically enable battery saver when the charge drops to 10%. A second option, is to enable it from now until the next charge, which is a great idea if you know you’ll be away from the mains for a while, and the third option is to enable Battery Saver always, which it warns you will limit functionality.
With Battery Saver enabled, I was able to squeeze more than an additional two hours out of a charge. That’s two more hours of screen on time, so it’s a big bonus. It moves the Lumia 630 from good battery life to quite good, but with only 6.77 Wh of power, it still won’t break any records. The big bonus with Battery Saver is with standby time, since practically all idle functions are halted. As an example, I charged a Lumia 620 to full and then enabled Battery Saver and just left the device to its own for a couple of days. The results were pretty amazing, but this is with practically no screen-on time for the duration.
Next up we’ll look at the charging times.
Charging
The Lumia 630 comes with a 750 mA charger in the box, and with that charger you can go from 0-100% in just under three hours. It’s not spectacular, but since I’ve compared the phone so much with the Moto G, I have to applaud Nokia for still including the charger in the box since Motorola has deemed the charger to be optional. It’s true that many of us have several, but for many who would be after a low cost smartphone, it may be that this is their first and they might not have one.
One other note about the charging times – the device goes from 0-99% charge in only 2:10, with the last 1% taking 40 minutes. It’s not unheard of for phones to do this, so just take note that if you need to get a quick charge in, two hours will pretty much fill it.
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kspirit - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Incredibly detailed and excellent as usual. Thanks for all the info. I'm glad you clarified why the 930 doesn't have Glance. It confused me, because I thought it was something MS was killing off with WP8.1. Good to know that's not the case.kspirit - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Another thing I'd like to add is that the 630's display is not "real" ClearBlack. I have seen and owned devices with those, and my father has a 630, and this is most certainly NOT a CBD. It's marketed as such but there is no polarizer.DanNeely - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"But again the storage of only 8 GB is no problem at all due to the included microSD card being able to add another 128 GB if needed, and Windows Phone 8.1 supports SD cards better than any other mobile OS."Having ran into one major performance problem with using the SD slot on my WP8/8.1 phone, I don't know how true this is in general. Earlier this year I bought a 520 to play around with WP8 and to use as a music player when the risk of breaking it was high enough that I didn't want anything expensive.
My music collection is currently ~60GB/11,000 tracks so I figured that with a 64GB uSD card (class 10) I'd be able to load everything on the sdcard and be good to go. Unfortunately I found that wasn't the case. I often shuffle over my entire music collection instead of drilling down to a specific artist/album. This turned out to be a major problem on my 520.
With the original WP8.0 install attempting to do so froze the phone completely for between 5 and 15 minutes before returning to normal operation mode (at this point everything worked perfectly unless I restarted the phone or changed to a short playlist and then tried to go back to the long one). This problem affected XBox Music, Nokia Music and a few free players I found so it appears to be OS related. I tried upgrading to the developer preview build of WP8.1. This fixed the total phone lockup, but gave a new problem. With the giant playlist there is an ~30s delay between pressing next/previous song and the song being played changing.
With both OS versions this wasn't a problem with small play lists on the SD card or when playing back from internal flash (limited to shorter play lists due to lack of space).
I don't know if this is a problem with the SD implementation in particular, I'm using a class10 card so my card itself shouldn't be the problem, or due to the total size of the playlist swamping the CPU somewhere. I haven't tried filling the card up most of the way with images or video to see how well those apps behave; but this has left me rather skeptical of WP8's ability to effectively use a large SD card to replace internal storage.
silverblue - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I'm not sure but it may be scanning all your music upon starting the app.DanNeely - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I don't think so. The app launches as quickly as anything else on the phone does, and WP8 refuses to identify music/etc unless synced using an official app (vs just copied via explorer); and lists everything in the various category based lists (artist/genre/etc). The genre/etc based lists aren't possible without a full index already existing since (unlike artist) they can't be inferred from the file system.In 8.0, it was clearly doing some sort of pre-processing step before starting playback (but completely freezing the phone to the point of even hardware buttons being non-responsive is totally unacceptable); 8.1 doesn't do that, but has a major runtime performance problem as a result.
Kit Y - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
DanNeely is definitely right on this issue, Windows Phone 8.1 removed the on board music and videos to Xbox Music/Video that is separated from the core platform to allow more timely updates to the music player.However, the current music player do suffer from a lot of bugs and slowdown as reported on r/WindowsPhone quite often and major compliant of many uses.
If I had the choice to make decision to balance cost and the features, I would forgo 4GBs of on board storage in exchange of ambient light sensor and 1GB of RAM, GG3 for Glance Screen and perhaps rename it to 530 as it seems to be a lot more appropriate given it's limitations and the similar launch price of 520 which we should see it to be drop to under $100 in many markets.
DanNeely - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I haven't tried any 3rd party players with 8.1; do you know if the architectural changes provide any scope for 3rd party players to preform better than Microsoft's?althaz - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
The music app is currently being updated pretty regularly and is a LOT better today than it was a month ago.That said, there's plenty of scope for a developer to make a much faster app - I'm working on one at the moment. My plan is to make something pretty limited, but I would personally prefer a very basic app that's fast over one that is fully featured but slower.
skiboysteve - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
the latest version of xbox music on WP8.1 resolves this exact issue. it now no longer scans for entire folders for music file changes every start up... it must use some indexing thing now. It also does scanning and updating in background if you're on wifi and plugged inAlexvrb - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Yeah they've been making some improvements on the latest updates. Overall the memory card support in WP 8.1 is great.As far as "Class 10" goes... it's almost a meaningless label. Even having a UHS-I rated card doesn't really tell you much. Unless you have read/write and IOPs figures for the memory card in question, it might as well be labeled "random flash card that I hope doesn't blow". I have an ADATA UHS-I microSD card that is rated at 1400/100 IOPs random read/write. Most card manufacturers don't even release those specs because they are so bad.
I really hope UHS-II picks up steam and they start releasing mSD variants and devices that support it. I've seen some UHS-II SD cards with IOPs twice as high as my card or better.