Nokia Lumia 930: Battery Life

If you’re a particularly heavy smartphone smartphone user, the Lumia 930 will probably disappoint you. Moving to a larger battery for a bigger smartphone is a no brainer, so it’s no surprise to see that there’s a 2,420mAh packed into the polycarbonate and metal body. But this is smaller than the 5-inch Galaxy S5 (2,800mAh) and the 5-inch HTC One M8 (2,600mAh). It’s a non-removable battery, too, though it does support the QI wireless charging standard.

Using the Lumia 930 to listen music in the morning, browsing the web, downloading some apps and using the camera throughout the day, the Lumia 930 suffered a massive battery drop off and by 4pm was down to the 25% mark and was dead by 7pm. This was consistent in general testing over a few days. You can get a day’s use, but you will need to charge it every day, unlike the S5, the One M8 and the G3 which show more resolve and can go for longer. The camera seems like a particular culprit here, perhaps due to the amount of extra processing required for the PureView camera.

Like many Android phones, Nokia does include a Battery Saver application where you can see running apps and disable the ones sapping the most power. You can also apply the Battery Saver mode to conserve battery when it gets low, which will stop you from syncing data online to push battery life further and get you closer to more than a day’s use.

When the battery is dead, a 30-minute charge will kick things back up to around the 20% mark and can just over three hours to get back to full power charging from the mains.

Nokia Lumia 930: Call Quality and Sound Quality

Call and speaker phone quality on the Nokia Lumia 930 is reasonable, but not outstanding. While the multi-microphone setup provides good noise cancellation to block out ambient noise at least and we suffered no issues of dropouts or signal issues, calls lacked a little clarity compared to other phones we’ve tested.

It’s at least a good showing from the lone loudspeaker. Despite being situated on the back of the phone, it still manages to produce loud, clear audio for music and video playback. It’s always going to be a tall order to match the warmth and richness in the front-facing HTC Boomsound speakers, but we were pleasantly surprised with what the Lumia 930 can muster up in this department.

Should I buy the Nokia Lumia 930?

If you’re a Windows Phone devotee, the Nokia Lumia 930 is easy to recommend. It’s not a perfect phone, but it’s definitely the best Windows Phone currently on sale. It’s very fast and runs the latest version of Windows Phone 8, which adds some nice extra features.

For everyone else, while it’s an very accomplished phone, we’re not totally convinced this is the phone that will convert people to Windows Phone. That’s mainly down to the chunky design and underwhelming battery life, though the lack of HDR for the camera is another irritating aberration for a top-end phone.

The best things are the slick performance and the very good screen, and some of the changes to Windows Phone also help if you’re switching from Android to Windows Phone. As Nokia’s first flagship under Microsoft ownership, the Lumia 930 is a very good starting point, but we’re looking forward to even more.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 930 is another very good top-end Windows Phone from Nokia, but we’d like it to last a longer and be less chunky.

Credit: Thanks to EE for providing us with the 4G nanoSIM to use in our Nokia Lumia 930 review

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