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Sunday, August 24, 2014

Lumia 635 review: Could this be the low-priced future of Windows Phone?

Microsoft Lumia 635 $168.00 The Lumia 635 from Microsoft is a budget Windows Phone that sacrifices some features, but generally meets the basic requirements of a modern smartphone.

I initially wanted to dislike the Lumia 635, only because I feel Microsoft’s Lumia phones can aspire to something better. But the phone delivers the basics, with one inexplicable omission: a front-facing camera.

Microsoft’s new Lumia 635 may be marketed as one of the first Windows Phones to be sold to customers with the amazing features of Windows Phone 8.1, but that doesn’t mean much: the “Cyan” update will soon roll out Windows Phone 8.1 to all Nokia Windows Phone 8 handsets. No, it’s the price that matters: $168 at T-Mobile, or $7 per month over 24 months. (The Lumia 635 is also available via AT&T for $139.)

Why is the price so important? Because Microsoft said this week that the midrange is the company’s new focus. In July 18 report, analyst firm Chitika revealed that the Lumia 520 and Lumia 521 delivered more than 54 percent of the ad impressions to the Windows Phone platform. The new chief of Microsoft’s device business, Stephen Elop sealed the deal.

“In the near term, we plan to drive Windows Phone volume by targeting the more affordable smartphone segments, which are the fastest growing segments of the market, with Lumia,” Elop wrote in a memo this week.

The Lumia 635 (right) alongside the Lumia Icon.

That puts new pressure on the Lumia 635.

The Lumia 635 is an inherently basic phone; the 4.5-inch, 854x480 display even has something I’d forgotten about: visible pixels. The display is viewable in bright sunlight, but you’ll need to maximize the brightness, and there’s no adaptive brightness control to facilitate that. In general, it looks a little dull.

Viewed outdoors, the Lumia 635 screen is barely legible.

Inside is a 1.2-GHz Snapdragon 400 quad-core chip, which is no slouch. Still, don’t expect to run high-performance apps. Our SunSpider test averaged 1.47 seconds, about three times slower than the flagship Lumia Icon. (Our Peacekeeper test failed to run.) But the 512 MB of RAM the phone includes means that you’ll be seeing the “Resuming...” message quite a bit as you switch between apps that the Windows Phone OS has suspended. I also noted several instances where the phone would simply lock up briefly, such as after entering the PIN to unlock it.

Mark Hachman

The Bing Health & Fitness app can now pull information on how many steps you’ve taken, directly from the phone.

But this phone has one feature other Windows Phones don’t: motion-data collection. This enables it to act as a pedometer in addition to tracking your distance traveled via GPS. That feature ties into the Bing Health & Fitness app, as well as other apps you allow. Personally, knowing I walked a mile or so is good enough for me; but for those obsessed with accomplishing 10,000 steps or more, it might eliminate the need for a separate fitness tracker.

The Lumia phones' other selling point has traditionally been the camera, so I was surprised to find the experience with those phone rather middling. Lumia fans will be disappointed to find out that the camera hardware button on the side of the phone has been removed; in fact, the home, back, and search buttons on the phone are also screen icons now. (Only the power and volume rocker switches remain.)

As I mentioned up top, the front-facing camera is gone as well. You can forget about taking selfies with this phone. For me, that's almost unforgiveable in this day and age. Sure, there's trimming the fat to save a few bucks. But this is trimming the fun.

The rear camera, meanwhile, is just 5 megapixels—that's a far cry from the 41MP the Lumia 1020 offers. The one unexpected plus is that the notorious shutter lag—the time from when you touch the camera shutter icon to when it takes a picture—has disappeared almost entirely. And I found nothing to complain about save for the fact the photos looked a bit washed out, as the Nokia Camera app (not the other stock “Camera” app) includes all the lovely manual controls.

Nokia has removed the hardware camera button from the Lumia 635.

I discovered numerous other oddities and bugs, too. Although the T-Mobile version of the device supports its LTE bands and Wi-Fi calling, it failed to connect to T-Mobile to register it, popping up a “REG90 Failed to Connect” warning over and over and over. Apps loaded slowly, and although the phone shipped with a Hulu+ live tile, the app wasn’t actually installed.

These latter glitches could have been just the vagaries of a test phone. I hope so. Fortunately, the Lumia 635 handles the basics pretty well. Calls were fairly clear, and they connected quickly. My only complaint while surfing the Web was that the low display resolution made pages like SFGate.com difficult to read when the desktop page was preferred. And the camera, while basic, did the job.

I wonder, though, how many Lumia 635s will be returned when consumers discover the lack of a front-facing camera. That’s a real blow to the platform, especially when you factor in the lack of first-party apps in the Windows Store. Phones like the Lumia 1020, Lumia Icon, and Lumia 1520 have given Lumia owners something to brag about. Phones like the Lumia 635 will straddle the narrow line between value and mediocrity.

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Sunday, March 2, 2014

Nokia Lumia Icon review: The best Windows Phone so far

Nokia Lumia Icon $200.00 While the Nokia Lumia Icon for Verizon remains the best Windows Phone we've tested in 2014, noticeable shutter lag and a nagging lack of applications still hold it back.

Simply put, Nokia’s latest Windows Phone, the $200 Lumia Icon for Verizon, is solid. It's solidly built, and sits solidly atop all other available Windows Phones. And, yes, it even ships with a solid app lineup, with most of its software bearing the Nokia name.

Nevertheless, for a phone whose legacy includes the 41-megapixel Lumia 1020, the Icon suffers one flaw that should give you pause: noticeable shutter lag of more than a second from the phone’s 20-megapixel sensor. Although the Lumia Icon includes a wealth of manual settings within the Nokia Camera app—along with a nice mix of associated creative software—none of it matters if you can’t capture the original shot.

The Lumia 1520 (left) towers above the Lumia Icon.

Aside from the terrible shutter lag, people with smaller hands will find the Icon a noticeable step down from the Lumia 1520, Nokia’s 2013 phablet, but in the best possible way. While the Icon shares the 1920x1080 resolution of the Lumia 1520, it’s much smaller: 5.39 inches by 2.79 inches by just 9.9 mm (0.39 inches). The 1520, meanwhile, is a 6-inch device. Shrinking the display size produces a corresponding increase in pixel density to 441 pixels per square inch—that's 35 percent more pixel density than the iPhone 5s’ “retina display." The Icon is small enough for most people to traverse one-handed with just a thumb, tracing the phone's Gorilla Glass 3 from edge to edge.

As noted above, the Icon feels solid. It's a mix of polycarbonate and metal that weighs 5.86 ounces, or 20 percent less than the 1520. I would recommend a case, however, as even the matte finish still won’t stop the Icon from slipping from a careless palm.

A combination of metal and polycarbonate gives the Icon a solid feel./

The Icon’s 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon CPU is identical to what you’ll find in the Lumia 1520. In the newer phone, it launches and runs apps in a snap. It’s a sealed phone, so there's no slot for removable storage, but the 32GB of internal storage is supplemented by 7GB of free OneDrive cloud storage. As far as battery performance goes, the Icon survived 7 hours and 50 minutes of continuous video playback during our homegrown rundown test.

Besides the size, the other noticeable difference between the 1520 and the Icon is the newer phone's OLED display, which offers deep blacks and high contrast ratio. Outside, you shouldn’t have any problem reading the Icon’s display, even in full sunlight. And like earlier Nokia phones, the Icon’s display includes Sunlight Readability Enhancement and High Brightness Mode, two features specifically designed for outdoor use. The difference may be slight, but web pages and other white backgrounds do look better rendered on the OLED screen.

Shutter lag has long been a bane of smartphone cameras, but the most recent handsets from Apple and Android manufacturers have licked the problem. But not Nokia. The Icon suffers serious shutter lag that's painfully out of step with modern standards.

Nokia’s Lumia Icon Camera app.

In fact, I noticed lag of up to 1.5 seconds while shooting. (I took pictures of a stopwatch app on another phone, timing the shutter to increments of 10 seconds, then recording the results.) From focus to shot with the flash off, I noticed lag of 1.3 to 1.5 seconds. That's on par with a Lumia 928 that I tested against. An HTC 8X Windows Phone produced lag of about 0.5 seconds.

Much of the Icon's lag can be eliminated by pre-focusing the camera. You simply depress the camera button half-way—though this forces you to anticipate you next shot. Otherwise, the Zeiss optics (f/2.4, wide angle lens, with optical stabilization) generally performed well in terms of image quality, although with a bluish cast to some of the photos. Naturally, the phone records 1080p video at 30 fps. A front-facing selfie camera grabs 1.2-megapixel photos.

I've included some sample photos below, which you can click to view in detail. In each case, I've compared the Icon's camera output to the output of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (when you click, note that Samsung images appear on top; Nokia images appear on the bottom). In every case, I used default camera apps, and all settings were left at “auto."

Inside, no flash

Inside, with flash

Plus some other shots:

Note 3 vs Nokia Lumia Icon outside evening

Outside, evening shot

Inside, natural light

From a productivity standpoint, Windows Phones win bonus points simply by including the suite of mobile Office apps, although editing and especially creating documents can be next to impossible on a small, mobile vehicle.

Nokia, however, has filled in some of the gaps on the consumer side with apps like HERE+, a real-time traffic app that ships free with the phone. Apps like Nokia’s screen-sharing Beamer app and the Nokia MixRadio Pandora clone complement the Camera app itself, with its limited (but welcome) manual refocusing and other options, including a whole submenu that crops up when the “smart sequence” burst mode is launched. There’s also Nokia Storyteller, which creates albums or stories based on where photos were taken; Cinemagraph, an animated GIF creator; and Creative Studio for on-app photo editing.

Mark Hachman

A manual focus mode allows Lumia Icon owners to craft shots using bokeh.

You’ll be able to connect globally, as the phone uses GSM (850MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz, 1900MHz) and UMTS (850MHz, 900MHz, 1900MHz, 2100MHz). Otherwise, you can use the 802.11 a/b/g/n/a radio for Wi-Fi connectivity, or Bluetooth 4.0 LE.

Call quality will obviously vary by location, depending on your proximity to Verizon’s cell-phone network. I noticed little difference in call quality between the Icon and the Galaxy Note 3, based on a voice mail I left myself. Other callers who I spoke to didn’t prefer one phone over the other. I did think that a call connected through the Icon’s speakerphone sounded noticeably warmer than calls through the Note 3's speakerphone.

Nokia has also designed in four mics on all sides of the phone, both as a built-in noise reduction system as well as to provide a sense of direction to sounds recorded by the phone. This did a serviceable job both in cutting noise and improving video, somewhat eliminating the monotone effect of most smartphone video.

For any Windows Phone fan considering a move to Verizon, buying the Icon is a no-brainer. And Nokia’s apps provide justification for ditching an older phone like the HTC 8X (which I’ve personally owned and enjoyed), and moving to the Icon.

Owning a Windows Phone, however, still feels like living a year or so behind the rest of the market. If you’re an app fiend, you’d still be better off buying an iPhone or Android phone, which dependably receive third-party apps. But the Icon and Lumia 1520 are clearly the best Windows Phones on the market. Deciding between them simply depends on which size you prefer.

Updated at 5:35 p.m. PT with a video review.

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