A view on the Lumia 630 from Oz - save your pennies

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Fresh from his guest review of the Nokia Treasure Tag here on AAWP, Adrian Hughes has also spent considerable time with the new budget Lumia 630. Below, I link to his full review - I may have moaned a bit about some of Nokia's cost-cutting omissions in my own review, but Adrian goes one step further and actively recommends people don't buy Nokia's latest bottom end device....

From Adrian's lengthy review:

Lumia 630

Sadly, this part of the review will outweigh the good sides of the Lumia 630. We begin with the sales package, where a separate USB cable is not included. Only the Lumia 520 in the past has not included this, and we feel that many users would feel this was handy, even though they may have a spare microUSB cable lying around the house... 

...Next we have the display. Although the move up to a 4.5 inch display is more than welcome with its packaging into a slim-line and lightweight frame, the omissions made cannot be overseen. Although the device claims to have ClearBlack technology, we cannot see evidence of this at all as the background can still be seen to have grey traces rather than the pitch-blackness we have seen on devices like the Lumia 620 and above. Colour accuracy and viewing angles are also sacrificed, and we did notice some yellowish tinting, backlight bleed and banding. Due to there being no proximity sensor and the display technology used, Glance screen is not present. Neither is double-tap-to-wake, or super-sensitive touch (both still present on the Lumia 520). We have come to find all of these quite handy in day to day usage to either check the time or if there have been any missed notifications. Finally, the lack of an ambient light sensor makes viewing the display especially hard when moving indoors to outdoors; we took the phone out to view in bed at the end of a long day and were greeted by a blinding white light while web browsing, had an ambient light sensor been present this wouldn’t have happened. We cannot understand this simplest of omissions...

....We wanted so badly to like the Lumia 630. Unfortunately, we are hesitant to recommend this device, and would rather a new user to the Windows Phone fold to buy either a Lumia 520 or even a second-hand Lumia 620/625/720/820. These older devices will all be upgraded to Windows Phone 8.1 with Lumia Cyan in the coming months, and the performance gains in day to day usage are negligible between them and the Snapdragon 400 devices like the Lumia 630. You will get more convenience and bang for your buck. We can commend Nokia however on the strengths that it has always had, and that is as a phone itself, it works exceptionally well. Reception strength and quality, calling, WiFi, web browsing, simple gaming….have no faults here.

For the targeted user demographic, a lot of users won’t care about the negative points that we have bought up about the device. Others used to a higher experience, and also used to the competition at the same price point, will notice the lack of features. The Lumia 630 has simply cut out too much to be a worthwhile purchase. Save those pennies for another day.

All fair points and also mentioned in my own review. Adrian hits the nail on the head though at the end when he says that "For the targeted user demographic, a lot of users won’t care about the negative points". However, as an AAWP reader, you're more informed and I too would recommend a second hand 620 or 625 perhaps, as providing better value for money once Cyan's on board.

You can read Adrian's full review here.

Source / Credit: Nokia Journeys