Review: Nokia Lumia 930

We’re also delighted to see the controls haven’t changed much, with the power button, volume rocker, and camera button all still located on the right edge, the same as previous Nokia Lumia phones, and that’s a good thing, making it easy to grip the 5 inch handset and not just switch it on, but also control the sound and open the camera up (simply by holding the camera button down, even when off).

Power the phone on using the middle button — power — and the screen comes to life, a lovely Full HD AMOLED panel where the colours are vibrant, the edges crisp, and the blacks really black.

It helps that Windows Phone has a solid level of contrast working for it with how the operating system looks, especially in sunlight, which is contrast heavy and easy to look at.

There’s also a slight difference to the operating system, Windows Phone, and that can affect operation.

Often, new phones don’t mean new operating systems. We see a new phone every three or four days, and most of them run the same operating system (Android, and lately, Android 4.4 “KitKat”).

But that’s not exactly true of the Lumia 930, with a new version of Windows Phone ready for action in this handset.

Now, there’s a point one, or dot one, whichever you prefer to say, with Windows Phone 8.1 present on this handset, and it’s a little different and all the more better.

There are things about Windows Phone that have stayed the same, such as the live tile home screen and simple swipe to the right to bring up the main menu of apps, and you can still hold down on the back button to bring up the multi-tasking to switch to or shut down apps.

The keyboard is still monochromatic and easy to look at, much like other parts of the phone, such as the phone dialer, and SMS screen, and of course reading emails which only have a spot of colour for a few things like titles and links inside the email.

But there are also new things that really bring Windows Phone into the next generation, making it feel more like a complete operating system than ever before, such as a drop down menu that feels straight out of Android, with shortcuts for power controls at the top and notifications being pulled up as they come in.

It’s the sort of thing Android users have had for ages, and that Apple’s iOS users received a couple of generations ago, and while it’s a tad late to Windows Phone, it helps you get around your phone so much more quickly, informing you all the time of what’s going on in your digital world.

We’re also keen to see a gesture based keyboard working here, providing the already solid Windows Phone keyboard with a faster way of writing, and it works quite well.

Like Swype and SwiftKey, simply drag your finger from letter to letter in a word, as fast as you want, and it — or a word close to it — will appear on the screen. We spent most of the time writing on the Lumia 930 with this, and it helped a great deal, improving our typing speed considerably, much like it does on Android.

Also high on our favourites list is a third column of tiles on screen sizes lower than 6 inches, because just like on the Lumia 1520, you now have three columns of live tile goodness, fitting more on your Windows Phone screen at once. Awesome.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s voice activated assistant Cortana isn’t totally here for you throughout this, at least not in a completed sense, with the Cortana app only working in beta if you sign up through the Windows Developer system, but it’ll be here soon for everyone we’re told. Eventually.

Move past the basics and over to performance, and that same solid experience we had on the Lumia 1520 — arguably Nokia’s best smartphone to date and its first phablet to boot — is recreated here on a 5 inch screen.

For the most part, apps run smoothly and efficiently, with menus and app jumps speedy, though you may find the odd app taking a few extra seconds to load here and there.

As far as a Windows Phone goes, it’s about the best of the bunch that we’ve seen, or rather on par with Nokia’s 1520, since it shares identical hardware outside of the screen.

Mobile broadband performance is pretty solid, too, cementing that Windows Phone experience in a way that will make browsing the mobile web effortless when you’re in a place where 4G is no problem whatsoever.

In our testing, we found speeds ranging from 30Mbps all the way up to a little past 80Mbps, and since this is a Category 4 LTE device, that means as much as 150Mbps speeds are possible here, too, network dependent of course.