Nokia 620 Lime Green available @21,000/- Nokia Lumia 620 review Verdict With its colourful, interchangeable cases and extremely reasonable price tag, the Nokia Lumia 620 is an excellent choice for younger phone fanatics or just those wanting to take their first steps into Windows Phone 8. Good Very affordable Colourful, removable cases Enough power for everyday tasks Bright and bold screen Handy bundled Nokia apps Budget mobiles have typically been miserable pieces of tat forcing poor screens and underpowered processors on those not willing to splash the cash on top end devices. The Lumia 620 might be part of the budget lineup but it offers a hell of a lot for an extremely reasonable price For that cash youll get a bright, bold 3.8-inch screen, a host of helpful Nokia apps, a 5-megapixel camera and the ability to swap the case for a rainbow colors. Should I buy the Nokia Lumia 620? With its colourful, interchangeable cases and its very affordable price tag, the Lumia 620 is perhaps the definition of cheap and cheerful. Its a great choice for younger phone fanatics looking for something to carry around thats a bit different to their mates Android or BlackBerry. It doesnt have the screen real estate of phones like the Galaxy S3, but its sharp, bright and has great colours. The People Hub in the Windows Phone 8 software is great for socialites, allowing you to see all your friends social networking activity in one place. Its dual-core processor is more modest than youll find in the Lumia 820 or 920, but I found it handled the same tasks with ease. Is it worth splashing the extra cash on the 920? Yes, but only if you crave the bigger screen and the better camera. The 620 offers the same Windows Phone 8 experience for hundreds of pounds less. If youre after an attractive, pocket-friendly phone thats a bit different from the norm -- or if you simply want to take Windows Phone 8 for a test drive -- then the 620 is a great option. If you want a more well-stocked app store then Huaweis G330 is a similarly affordable Android phone but I found Windows Phone 8 to make better use of more modest hardware than Android is generally capable of. Design and build quality The first thing youre likely to notice about the 620 is its extremely bright colours. Thats courtesy of a number of interchangeable back cases, harking back to Nokias heyday with the swappable fascias on the 3210. There are various colours available, including yellow, white, pink, blue, orange or -- if youre not keen on the dazzling hues -- black. Theyre certainly eye-catching, particularly the green case that has an inner yellow ring, making it look like there are two cases on. If youre after a phone to really stand out amongst your friends black iPhones then the 620 will do the job perfectly. The cases are sold separately but Nokia says that theyll be under priced. Tired of grey phones? No worries, theres a variety of vibrant casings for your 620. Of course having changeable backs isnt just about aesthetics, it also means you dont need to worry as much about scratches and dirty marks. Handily, the headphone jack comes built into each case, not the phone itself. This means that if, like me, you make a habit of destroying the jack by getting your headphone cable caught on a door handle -- as happened to my Galaxy S3 only last week -- you simply need to swap the case to get a new jack. The phone itself is 115mm long and 61mm wide making it smaller than a lot of the top-end smart phones around but perfectly sized for most hands -- at no point do you have to stretch your thumbs to get across the screen. Its made even more comfortable by the pleasant rounded back. Its 11mm thick and weighs 127g, which again isnt super-slim or super-light, but you wont have any difficulty carrying it around in your pocket. Build quality is excellent on the whole. The thick, stiff casing seems ready to protect the more delicate internals from all but the most brutal of attacks and the toughened glass front should shrug off attacks from coins and keys in your pocket. The buttons dont seem unpleasantly rattly either, but theyre all part of the casing which can be replaced anyway if the worst does happen. the 620 fits easily in your hand. On the sides youll find a volume rocker, a power button and a dedicated camera shutter button that allows you to half-press to focus. Theres a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top and a micro-USB port on the bottom for charging and data transfer. Theres only 8GB of storage, which wont last long, but you can pop in microSD cards up to 64GB. Theres a camera on the front and one on the back, both of which Ill come to later. The 620 also boasts near-field communication technology, or NFC to you and me. It lets the phone talk to devices simply by touching them together. I found I was easily able to pair the phone with one of JBLs PlayUP NFC-enabled speakers quickly and simply, without having go to the hassle of pressing and holding buttons and finding the speaker in the phones settings. Screen The 620 packs in a 3.8-inch display, which is undeniably rather small in comparison to the majority of new smart phones. Thats not necessarily a bad thing though -- it makes it easier to stretch your thumbs across and packs in a good amount of pixels, making it sharper than low-end phones with big screens. In fact, it has a resolution of 480x800 pixels, the same as the 4-inch Huawei G330, making the picture slightly sharper overall -- although I doubt youd be able to tell the difference, side by side. Small text and icons are crisp and reading for longer periods is perfectly comfortable -- although its diminutive size does mean youre unlikely to want to read full-length ebooks on it. Colours are great too. Nokias ClearBlack display results in deep black levels, giving good contrast and punchy, vibrant colours. Images and videos in Netflix are very watchable. Display quality is often an area thats skimped on in budget mobiles to keep the price down, but the 620s screen thankfully hasnt seen such cuts. Windows Phone 8 The 620 runs the latest version of Microsofts Windows Phone 8 software. Unlike Android, WP8 isnt tweaked and skinned by phone manufacturers so youll have the same layout and experience on all WP8 phones. Its made up of colourful tiles showing live information in a flowing grid. You can resize and move these tiles around if you want to give a certain feature more prominence. Swiping to the left takes you into a list of all your apps. Its a neat and fairly easy to navigate interface that doesnt take much getting used to, even if youre new to the smart phone world. Theres a dedicated camera shutter button on the side. My favourite aspects of the software are the People and Me hubs. Once youve connected your email, Facebook and Twitter accounts to the phone -- which thankfully is easy to do -- these hubs will show all your contacts information from all networks in one handy place. You can then contact them using any method (email, phone, text, Skype, Facebook etc) without having to jump in and out of different apps. The Me app allows you to instantly share photos or statuses to your various networks from one spot. The biggest problem with Windows Phone 8 is its app store. While you can get certain gems like WhatsApp, Skype and Netflix, its woefully understocked compared to the iOS and Android stores. Apps like Spotify do not yet feature on its shelves, which is a crucial omission for me and many of my friends. Its easy to argue that as long as you can still enjoy the core features of the phone, a well-stocked app store isnt essential. Given that this phone is intended for the likes of younger phone users, who love getting the latest games, sharing high scores and Instagramming their food, the sparse app store is likely to be an issue. Nokia has chucked in a bunch of its own stuff though to help plug some of the gaps. Its maps app is brilliant, showing a wealth of local information about bars, restaurants or points of interest -- you can see these in an augmented reality view around you using Nokias City Lens app too. Its possible to download maps to your phone to save you getting lost in the city without signal, and Nokias Drive app will give you turn-by-turn GPS satellite navigation when youre driving. Nokia Music meanwhile allows you to listen to song mixes from a variety of playlists totally free, without annoying ads, and you can even sync up to 14 hours of songs for offline playing. Youre stuck with the mixes though, rather than being able to just listen to a whole album, but its still a great addition for music lovers and a good way of scoping out new artists. Power and performance The 620 runs on a 1GHz dual-core processor with 512MB of RAM. Those are low-end specs but its an entry-level phone with a price to match so I didnt expect anything more. It might have very modest specs but the 620 is hardly sluggish. Swiping around the WP8 interface is nippy and mostly free of any kind of juddery lag. Opening menus and apps is responsive too -- at no point did I get the impression that I was using a very low-end phone. It also copes well with more demanding tasks. Streaming video using Netflix was fine -- although at times, the stream did take a while longer than usual to render into a decent quality. Editing photos in Fhotoroom was easy too, with edits being applied without delay. I generally found little I could do to really slow it down. The colourful live tiles of Windows 8 are easy to navigate. There isnt, however, much currently available in the store that is particularly challenging. Demanding 3D games like Real Racing 2 arent available, so its gaming prowess cant really be tested in full. Its safe to assume that its competency in handling games will be limited to simpler stuff, such as Angry Birds. The software isnt perfect though. On a couple of occasions it suffered something of a hissy fit, showing numerous duplicate tiles on the homescreen, making it impossible to see properly. Another time, rows of volume icons started flashing up when I switched between windows. They went away after a restart and the problems only occurred on one occasion each, but it does suggest that there may be a few rough edges to watch out for. In spite of this, my experience was perfectly fine and mostly trouble free -- something that I cant say of all low-end phones. Camera Around the back of the 620 youll find a 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash. If youre hoping for the same high quality low-light photography you get with the Lumia 920, youre going to be disappointed. For the money though, the 620 puts in an admirable effort. In our well-lit office, the cameras results were bright and balanced This indoor shot in the office has a balanced exposure, with an even, natural colour tone. It doesnt have the same clarity youd expect to see with a top-end phone, but its a much better effort than Ive seen from similarly priced mobiles. The 620s outdoor shot looked good, but youll get much better clarity from the 920. Heading outside, the 620 again managed to capture a good all-round image. Both the buildings and the sky remain well exposed. Quality isnt great at full screen, but it does a perfectly good job for Facebook and Twitter Photo-editing apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace are pretty limited -- theres no Instagram or Snapseed, for example -- but Nokia has bundled a few of its own tricks in for you to take advantage of. You can download add-ons it calls lenses to allow for you to be more experimental with your photography. These include a panorama mode, a best-shot function, a feature which lets you take numerous images of a group and merges the best faces into one good photo, and a cinemagram function that allows you to selectively animate an area of an image to create a creepy little gif. On the front youll find a VGA camera to let you video call your mates using Skype. Its nothing special either, but will do the job well enough as long as youre in Well lit room. Battery Nokia has shoved a 1,300mAh battery into the 620 which isnt exactly capacious. Still, it manages to put in a good effort, thanks in part to the WP8 software which is designed to be more easy-going on battery life. I found it was easily able to get through a whole working day on a charge. If you call constantly or spend the whole day watching Red Dwarf on Netflix then you wont eke so much juice from it, but if youre mindful of what youre up to then you shouldnt need to keep a plug with you at all times. Conclusion The Lumia 620 provides a lot of the best features from Nokias top-end phones, but with a significantly lower price tag. Its colourful cases not only make it more fun, but help take the worry out of damaging your mobile. Its not only a great option for enjoying your first taste of Windows Phone 8, its a superb choice for younger users wanting a slick phone in your pocket thats a bit different from the swathes of budget grey Android phones their mates are running.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 01:55:24 +0000