Very much first world flaws though...
I think one could survive.
Nokia’s cheap-as-chips Windows Phone the Lumia 520 finally gave it a hit after years of decline, and the new 630 is itching to take the baton. The timing and the price of the Lumia 520 were spot on. BlackBerry had failed to update its BB7 phones for almost two years, and had nothing new to offer the budget segment of the …
Entry right in to the cheap end of the market. This might do more to get people into windows phone than anything else. I wonder if the screen still burns in like the more expensive models?
Will be interesting to see how this sells compared to low end Driod handsets. I suspect the sales stats will be the most sort after things when it comes to this phone. If I am in town over the weekend I think I will try to see if there are any in the earphone whorehouse.
MS have relaxed the rules recently, this and allowing an absence of hard nav buttons were two of the bigger changes. They also made WinPho free for phones below a certain size.
The only gripe I have with that review is that the Live Tiles haven't been deprecated, they're just no longer the only way to get information to the user. These two things are not the same. In certain scenarios, Live Tiles work better than the Notification pulldown and vice versa, so having both is the best of both worlds in my opinion.
My GS3 slowed down a lot with 4.2. After about a year the phone took around 10 seconds to get from the home screen to mail or contacts and about the same to get back to the home screen. We have 3 of them at work, all bought at around the same time and all suffered the same problems.
Rooted them and Cyanogen Mod Android 4.4 installed and they are fast again. But I still prefer my Lumia.
"SII is slightly smaller and faster "
Running Android I seriously doubt it is faster in general use.
"Add in the camera though and the 630 will be quite a long way behind"
And you mean a long way ahead surely when you add-in the 630 camera - the pictures are clearly much better on the Nokia.
No, I'm afraid not. The SII has a far better cameras. There is no contest for the SII front camera given it's missing on the Lumia 630. On paper the SII main camera is better, with higher resolution, LED flash and the ability to record 1080p video. The SII also has less noise and more accurate color reproduction than the Lumia 630. Nokia knew how to make amazing cameras, but they didn't put one in the Lumia 630.
Having used both phones, I can tell you that - as the picture on this review also clearly show - the camera and image quality on the 630 are vastly superior.
As you would know had you bothered to read the article:
"But it turns in a handsome effort beating the imagery returned by the Motos G and E, even though the G sports an LED flash. That said, the flash is so spludgy, you don’t really want to use it.
Unlike the Moto E, the Nokia Lumia 630 camera does have the benefit of autofocus and higher resolution video capture – 720p at 30fps."
Pretty well. The SII would seem a bit of a dinosaur in comparison - we have an SII here and my other half has the Lumia 620 (last years model) and it runs rings around the SII.
It depends on what you want to do with the phone / how deeply buried you are in the Google universe. If you have invested heavily in apps for Android or you are a dedicate GMail user, then the Moto E or G would be a better bet.
If you aren't so tightly bought into the Sauron's kingdom, then the Lumias are a nice alternative.
I have a SGIII and a Lumia 1020 (company phone and private respectively). The SGIII is now relegated to just being the company phone and company email device, all my apps are on the Lumia.
I put the developer preview on the 1020 and 8.1 is very nice. I feel it is a nice move forward. The live tiles are still there, the Facebook integration never bothered me, as I don't have an account, so I can't comment on how that has changed in 8.1, although I believe there is now a separate Facebook app.
Not sure why you got a downvote for that question - It's perfectly valid.
I also have a Galaxy SII which I replaced with a Lumia 1020. The main problem I was having with the GSII was the speed of the OS. Just moving from home screen to SMS messages took a few seconds, and it seemed to get slower with every update to the OS and Apps. Of course Jellybean was a long way from Gingerbread, and brought many great features but really demanded higher performing hardware. I would have said stay on Gingerbread to avoid the slow-down but you must stay up-to-date if you want to be able to install and update many apps.
So this brings onto your question. How does this perform against a GSII? Probably on par with the GSII when both were new. WinPhone seems to get away with much lower hardware and remain zippy. Comparing to the Fully patched GSII I think you would find the Lumia noticeably faster.
Best plan is to run the 'can I help you Sir' gauntlet and go and try them for yourself alongside your current fondleable, and ignore all the advice here - especially this one.
Or Slimbean - my old SII has trickled down to my wife, and SlimBean has vastly improved battery life and seen a considerable performance boost as well, over the stock Sammy bloated software. That, and it also runs JellyBean, and has enabled connection of Bluetooth 4.0 LE devices as well!
I reckon we'd be pleasantly surprised with either the Moto or Nokia budget phones, but I have 2 SGS2s with extended batteries and I'm inheriting another soon hopefully.
Should last me 6 years with any luck, before the buttons all wear out on them.
Meh, I have kit kat which is pretty useless for Skype too.
No. Zune went over a year ago, with Win Pho 8.
I had the Zune software for my WP7 Lumia 710. And it was buggy, slow, ugly, really confusing, didn't look anything like a standard Windoes Vista / 7 app - and generally made iTunes look like the best piece of software in the world. I hope someone at MS danced on its grave.
Fortunately, no. My daughter has on old Nokia on WinPho 7.x and we both hate Zune. With WinPho 8.x, you can do pretty much everything through a file browser if you want, though the newer Windows phone software is OK (The Windows 7/8 software will talk to iTunes if you want to enter that level of hell).
My 820 wouldn't even connect to Zone. You needed the Windows Phone application to do a phone back up. However, for pictures you just open File Explorer and drag and drop...
My biggest gripes with the 820 were the screen resolution, the fact that I could not have different volumes for the ringer and music and the fact that my thermostat doesn't have a windows phone app, and they are not planning on making one. And the last is hardly the fault of the phone ;-)
It's a good phone though, best overall interface of the three main platforms for me. Shame about the above issues I had...
(typed on a Z1 compact though because of them...)
Andrew,
I'm sure that the Lumia 710 (old WP7) didn't have auto display brightness. The 800 had OLED, so it didn't matter, but the 710 was crap outside without setting brightness to full.
If it did, it wasn't changing things enough, becasue I remember setting mine to full brightness after 2 days. You couldn't put a link to the brightness setting on the main screen like Android, and I couldn't see the menu to do it manually once outside otherwise. Wasn't great for battery life, and was too bright of my reading glasses indoors. But it was £120, and at the time there wasn't an Android to touch it for under £250.
As for your comment on muting the phone, don't you still just tap the bar at the top of the screen with the battery and signal indicators, then tap on the volume to mute it? And I thought 8.1 was supposed to allow you to pin any setting to the homescreen?
The 710 was from medieval times (well, 2011 anyway). More recent models - including the dirt-cheap Lumia 520 - have excellent automatic display brightness adjustment.
That's what makes this decision so strange - for no apparent reason, a feature that was popular and working well has been taken out...
So from this, and the Moto E review, I get the feeling that all mobes are pretty much good enough for most people - given the only things identified in the reviews are pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things (slow, low, powered, crap screen, etc that plagued last year's landfill).