The Build, Design and Display
The Build, Design and Display
Well of course, today’s smart phones have taken the place of the older feature phones, they also have been more fragile than before. Nokia has a tradition of making good and solid phones. Their products are meant to be relied on. They are still better in that factor and the Lumia 930 is no different. With the Windows Phone 8.1 and the Lumia Cyan software, it’s even good for its job.
Build and the Design
Getting over to the build, the Lumia 930 impressed us with its aluminium frame at the sides of the phone while the back panel is made of polycarbonate and that’s where the phone serves the options to choose from different colors. The color options include black, white, orange and green. We got the orange one.
I’ve personally preferred the black or the white in a smartphone to use as my primary device but this orange color actually impressed me and didn’t give any fancy impression.
Full aluminium frame is really beautifully crafted on the sides and connect flat to the front screen and the back panel. The frame is flat enough on each sides that the Lumia 930 can stand on it easily on a plain surface. Of course not at the side where the control keys are present.
The back panel is completely fixed into the frame curving at the edges and joining to frame but you can easily feel the offset between the back panel and the frame where they join. It really feels odd and I literally felt at the first impression that if the Lumia 930 features a removable back panel, Well it’s not. It seems that Nokia made it intentionally as the offsets is perfectly matched at each side and equally elevated alongside the frame.
On the front, the screen is obviously protected by the Gorilla Glass 3 and it’s curved at the edges giving a really pleasant feel in hands. The front glass also joins the aluminium frame at the very edges covering the whole front screen from top to bottom, left to right.
Most importantly the Gorilla Glass 3 on Lumia 930 really impressed us to touch just like previous high-end Lumia devices or may be more.
At top of the screen there is an earpiece and right besides it there is 1.2 MP front-facing camera for video calling and selfies now a days. Next to it there is proximity and ambient light sensors right above the NOKIA branding.
At the bottom you can easily see the standard Windows Phone navigation keys, “Back”, “Start” and the “Search”. They are capacitive touch keys.
Left side of the frame hosts nothing and is completely free of any component or control while the right side of the frame hosts the dedicated camera shutter key which is two-stage obviously for auto focus. Next there is the power/lock key and a volume rocker. These are impressively made of the same aluminium parts as of the frame.
At the bottom side of the frame there is simply a micro USB port for connectivity and charging purposes. The top of the phone hosts a 3.5 mm audio jack and a micro SIM card tray. There is also a little attraction on the frame with the strips on each side of the audio jack. The same strips can be found at the bottom around the micro USB port
Micro SIM card tray fits just inside the frame leaving a space for you to pick and extract the tray out. It’s really easy to remove and push back in the tray.
Coming to back panel again to get a glimpse of the main 20 MP PureView camera. It’s Carl ZEISS optics with the Optical Image Stabilization inside along with a larger sensor – we’ll sure going to take an in-depth care of the camera later in this review. Along side the camera there is dual LED flash.
On the bottom part of the back panel you can see a big speaker grill. The two dots in both pictures above on the top and the bottom of back panel, are the mics to record stereo sound while recording videos with Lumia 930.
Once again, note that the back panel is not user-removable.
Display
Lumia 930 features a 5 inch AMOLED display with full HD resolution of 1080p (1920×1080). Nokia’s proprietary ClearBlack technology provides better outdoor visibility and of course better black levels with reduced reflections in display.
Before we go into some deep investigation, the point to mention is that the Lumia 930’s display is brilliant outdoors and contrast ratio is very good. With the initial stock Lumia 930’s display had got into trouble with purple tint in blacks, which of course was possible to be fixed with the adjustment in color profile (Settings > display > color profile), but later was fixed via a software update 1 to Windows Phone 8.1.
On the top “Lumia Cyan” firmware brings more customization for display settings than before. It gives you full control to the adjust brightness, gives you the ability to adjust color temperature, tint and saturation. You can just configure to your personal viewing needs.
Checkout some comparison shots along with the iPhone 5C, Nexus 5 and Galaxy Note 3.
Checkout on the next page the Benchmark performance of Lumia 930 in comparison with the other flagship devices.
