Nokia Lumia 930 in the flesh, initial review

First announced back in April, the Nokia Lumia 930 became available in the Philippines last week with a price tag of Php29,990.

We got an early review unit and got to try it for a bit and right out of the box, it was pretty obvious that the Lumia 930 took most of its design and construction from the Lumia 925 (see our review here).

The aluminum alloy body is more edgy compared to the rounded corners of the Lumia 925. The outer body has about 2mm of solid metal frame surrounding a slab of thick Gorilla Glass 3 at the front and a soft-matte polycarbonate back cover.

The power button and volume controls are found on the right side of the device along with the dedicated camera shutter button. The nano-SIM cradle is found at the top side together with the 3.5mm audio port while the micro-USB charging port is at the bottom end.

At the back is the 20-megapixel PureView camera with Zeiss optics and a dual flash sitting just beside it. The speakers are also found at the bottom corner at the back and there are two microphones on the opposites sides (perhaps this is a similar implementation as the multi-microphone Nokia had with the Lumia 1520).

The Lumia 930 comes with a 5-inch screen with full HD resolution. Nokia uses an OLED like some of its previous flagships with enhancements from its ClearBlack display technology.

The new Windows Phone 8.1 update allows for more tiles per row and the higher pixel density makes it look better this time.

The Lumia 930 has the same processor and amount of RAM as the 1520 so the main differentiator between the old flagship and this one would be the form factor, materials and the design. Then, there’s the absence of a microSD card expansion slot so you’re left with the 32GB internal storage.

As such, we see no big difference in performance. The Lumia 930 feels very snappy and responsive (it’s an inherent WP advantage that we’ve always liked about the platform).

Camera performance is good but we can still feel that little of of delay when taking shots (a little bit faster than the shutter lag in the Lumia 1520 but we can still feel it).

Here’s the complete specs of the device which is almost the same as the 1520, only smaller.

Nokia Lumia 930 specs:
5-inch ClearBlack, OLED, full HD 1080p display, 441ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 3
2.2GHz Qualcomm Snadragon 800 quad-core CPU
Adreno 330 Graphics
2GB RAM
20-megapixel PureView camera with OIS and ZEISS optics
1.2 megapixel wide-ange front camera
32GB internal storage
Free 7GB OneDrive cloud storage
LTE, HSPA+
NFC
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 4.0 LE
USB 2.0
GPS with aGPS support
Wireless charging support
2,420mAh battery
Windows Phone 8.1 OS
137 x 71 x 9.8mm (dimensions)
167g (weight)
Orange, Black, White

So far, the 2,420mAh battery lasts quite a while on our daily use (about 2 days of moderate to heavy use with internet) but we have yet to test it using our standard battery bench.

The Nokia Lumia 930 is available in stores in the past weeks and sells for a suggested retail price of Php29,990. It’s available in black, white and orange colors (though we have not seen the latter yet). Watch out for our full review next week.