After bagging Nokia into its kitty, Microsoft is launching the first Lumia device under its watch in India and it also becomes the first Lumia device to arrive with Windows Phone 8.1 OS. There is also another first, Lumia 630 also is the first dual-SIM device in Lumia series.
I always feel only in Lumia the vibrant, colorful panels looks very attractive and Lumia 630 is no different coming in bright orange, bright green and bright yellow rear panels alongside the usual white and black colours. The green is my pick of the lot. It looks really cool!
Lumia 630 falls under the budget-phone bracket and is priced a tad higher than the Lumia 525 but well below the Lumia 625. (don’t get confused by the numbering)
The 4.5in IPS display has a 854×480 resolution, a slight improvement on the rest of the budget-Lumia screen’s 800×400-pixels. Still a bit underwhelming pixel count but nevertheless the display packs a color punch and looks pretty good enough. Nokia’s ClearBlack technology boosts the display. Further there is also Corning Glass 3 screen protection.
What lies under the shell? A 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 quad-core chipset powers the Lumia 630 but surprisingly they have opted for 512MB of RAM only. It must be noted that unlike the Android, WP is quiet an efficient OS but when Lumia 525 came with a 1GB of RAM, it should have found a place here too. Still, the quad-core processor proved to be a good leveling force and the device didn’t feel lagging at the brief period I toyed with. I am sure it will handle most of the regular stuffs people do at this segment barring some resource-crunching games.
The device uses a polycarbonate body yet there is nothing of the cheap plasticy feel like most Android devices of this segment contents with. The rectangle block has slight corners on the edges and the Lumia 630 looks cute and feels good on hand. I quiet liked the matte finish of the chassis. No wonder even as the market share shrunk for various other reason, people still rate Nokia high on their device’s build quality. Hope the reputation and the effort continues under Microsoft too.
The power button and volume rocker are found on the right while the left is stripped clean off any buttons and ports. On top and bottom as expectedly are the audio jack and USB port respectively.
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The chassis almost look like an unibody but in real terms, it can be peeled out. The inside looks neat with slot for the dual SIM and memory card. Talking about the external memory card. It can be accommodate up to 128GB.
Windows Phone 8.1 brings forth lots of new features and possibilities and Lumia 630 gets some of the benefits. One noticeable difference is the lack of hardware navigation keys and Lumia 630 uses on-screen capacitive keys. The device also gets in-phone search.
Another introduction is the ability to customize live tiles on the home screen with our own background image. The image seeps down into various tiles as you scroll down. The parallax effect of the background image makes it more interesting and visually appealing. So good bye, the boring block color we have seen on Windows Phone 8 running devices. Go to Start + Theme setting for changing the background.
Also earlier we could only have three coloumns of apps in larger Lumia devices but with the new software update, it is possible to have a third coloumn on Lumia 630.
Yet another refreshing update is the Notifications + Action centre. Like with Android devices, swipe from top for the Action centre.It gives quick access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Camera, brightness. Also you can see the notifications as well as control the notifications settings to allow/restrict notifications from certain apps.
Lumia 630 comes with Microsoft’s new Word Flow keyboard. It is unarguably the best native smartphone keyboard around. This keyboard was officially certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest smartphone keyboard in the world. An interesting titbit the record was set by an Indian, Gaurav Sharma.
You can swipe your finger for accurate text entry and it has great auto-correct features plus there is also a good dose of emoticons to get playful.
Now to the camera. A 5-megapixel shooter is mounted on the rear sans a LED flash. The device lacks a front-shooter. There are quiet a dollops of features and also apps like Nokia Cinemagraph, Nokia Glam Me, Bing Vision are tied up to camera setting.
First impression: verdict
Lumia 630 is cute with a good build quality for a budget-smartphone, the WP 8.1 brings a host of new features that makes the smartphone better at usability. The brief time I toyed with the device, it looks like success of Lumia 520 might continue with this phone too. We will wait for our review device and give a detailed report but I am positive with the brief encounter.
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