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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James5mith - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Glance/Peek does not work on AMOLED screens properly. Either the design of the software is flawed, or the design of the driver (hardware or software) for the screen is flawed.Use the Glance funciton on the 1020 in a pitch black room. For the first fraction of a second, you see just the information displayed, as you would expect to on an AMOLED screen capable of only lighting up the pixels needed. But wait! after that first fraction of a second, the phone turns on the entire display to a dull, low-output greyish black. Why does it do this? No clue, I've asked Nokia several times, and never gotten a response. My guess is that they programmed the Glance function to work with LCD displays, so it's sending information to turn on the entire display, even when it's not needed.
Memristor - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
The screen used on the Lumia 630 lacks ‘display memory’. In order for Glance to work, it needs display memory to maintain the information presented by the program.name99 - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"The 630 loses a lot of features over the Lumia 620 in an effort to hit an even lower price point than the 620 did"WTF is this crap? This crazy matrix of products, where nothing is clearly superior to anything else is what killed the Japanese CE companies, and MS-Nokia seems determined to follow their lead.
Have we learned NOTHING from the past 20 years?
You sell ONE product line, with good, better, best exemplars.
If there is a compelling reason to do so (consumer vs pro, for example) you make that split clear, and and again offer good, better, best exemplars.
You certainly don't offer this crazy quilt of better here, worse there crap --- not unless you want half your potential buyers to look at the product matrix, say "fsck this, I'll think about it tomorrow", and never reconsider you again.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
To be fair we're comparing it to last year's offerings. The 620 has more features, but is no longer available.Generally Nokia has done a good job of improving devices from 520->620->7... and up.
It appears they are changing the starting point for this round though with the 630 being lower end than the 620 last year, and having a lower price to match.
xomiuser - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
I been using the 630/635 with dual SIM since i bought it in may. I am impressed the way 8.1 fully support dual SIM and very easy let you change what SIM card is the data trafic sim card. Both SIM are active on all time, one card is data gateway. For me it helps traveling and i keep my home SIM on while able to use local 3G CIM card where i am. small complain from me that the phone have preloaded location software, for me it means i have Thailand news and TV apps that i dont use much-- good reviewBMNify - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
You can uninstall any app(even Nokia preinstalled apps) easily on windows phone unlike Android, so just uninstall the apps which you don't use. Just go to App list and long-press on the app you want to uninstall.sprockkets - Friday, July 25, 2014 - link
You can uninstall any app on android as well. That's been the case since 2011 with the debut of 4.0.BMNify - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Don't lie, i am using Galaxy Tab 3 with 4.2.2 and there are many preinstalled apps which can't be uninstalled.Memristor - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
"As a successor to the 520". I don't think that's correct. Today an image was shown from a Vietnam retailer that shows a Lumia 530, which seems to be the replacement for the 520. So it looks more like the 630 is an all new model that doesn't replace anything, certainly not the 620.Brett Howse - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
Until we see more of the products we can't know for certain, but it appears they are resetting the bar for this round, with the 630 being roughly equivalent to the 520, and it is priced similarly to the 520 when it came out as well.But we need more data to make an analysis.