Nokia Lumia 620 Review

Introduction:

The Nokia Lumia 620 is an important handset for Nokia. It might not be a flagship device, but it has other significance - it is an affordable entry level device, a type of device that for Nokia was long a main source of income, and a type of mass device that people have associated the brand with.

The Lumia 620 is a Windows Phone 8 smartphone for the masses, yet offering additional value in many aspects and different by design. This time again, Nokia is focusing on vibrant colors as the standout feature and it relies on its own Windows Phone apps like the free Nokia Maps and Drive navigation and Nokia Music to differentiate.

But will this be enough to finally get consumers’ interested in Windows Phone? And if it does, can it stand its ground in its own Windows Phones backyard where HTC has conveniently settled with the similar 8S? Read on to find out.

Design:

As has become common with recent Nokias, the Lumia 620 places its design bets on colors. Coming with a selection of easily interchangeable matte and gloss shells, the device can transform itself from lime green to orange, magenta, yellow, cyan, white and black. The colors are all bold and bright, and Nokia is using a new ‘dual-shot’ technology applying a base color layer as the foundation and a different color layer on top (for example yellow base and cyan on top combines for overall lime green) to achieve those vibrant color complexions.

While the casing that engulfs the handset is all plastic, we liked the soft-touch-like feel of the plastic. You’d never mistake the phone for a premium device, but it doesn’t feel cheap either.



You can compare the Nokia Lumia 620 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Overall, the handset is fun and colorful, usually a thing that speaks well to the younger crowd. It’s got friendly rounded edges, and while it is a bit chubby with its 0.43-inch (11mm) thick body, it’s compact enough not to feel too bulky. Weight comes at the reasonable 4.48oz (127g).

All of the physical buttons of the device are on its right side - the volume rocker on top, the lock key in the middle and the camera shutter button in the bottom. This is a very convenient setup for one handed operation that doesn’t force you into doing unnecessary hand gymnastics to reach the keys.


Screen:

The Lumia 620 features a 3.8-inch ClearBlack LCD display with a WVGA (480 x 800 pixel) resolution. 3.8 inches reads small in comparison to most 4.7 and 5-inch displays on high-end devices, but this smaller size means you can easily operate the phone single-handedly, a luxury those larger phones can’t afford.

Pixel density comes at 246ppi, which in simple terms means that you get plenty of detail and you won’t see any jagged pixels on the screen. It is not just the level of details, though. The ClearBlack technology delivers deep blacks and well saturated colors, and with wide viewing angles the screen is a pleasure to look at. The only slight niggle are the reflections that show up under direct sunlight and make it a bit hard to use the device on a bright sunny day.



Interface and Functionality:

The Lumia 620 is an affordable phone, but still it runs the latest Windows Phone 8. This is good news as WP8 is well polished around the edges. Microsoft doesn’t allow for any modifications to the user interface, so you get the same consistent and smooth experience with the signature Live Tiles across all phones of all brands. In Windows Phone 8, the tiles come in three sizes - small (the new size), medium and large (a screen-wide rectangle). With the arrival of small tiles in Windows Phone 8, you really can fit much more in the home panel, so while you’d still end up with a long list if you have many games and apps, the situation has improved much over previous versions of the platform. The phone performs well throughout with no hiccups, at pleasing lag-free speeds.

And while Nokia cannot differentiate by changing the looks of Windows Phone 8, it does offer some great added value with signature apps like Nokia Maps and Drive with free offline satellite navigation, and a great music player with free Mix Radio music streaming service. All this comes free, while on other platforms you’d need to pay for something similar.

Adding to that the free Microsoft Office that is baked into all Windows Phone devices, you get a fairly solid app package right out of the box.

Basic functionality is also well covered. What makes Windows Phone stand out is the system-wide deep integration of Facebook and Twitter. Following your friends’ last social updates is effortless in the People hub where both telephony and modern social networking come together. If we had to pick the nits, we’d mention the lack of smart dialing in the contact list as one slight downside.

But even with all those advantages Nokia’s Lumia has, we cannot overlook Windows Phone’s app situation. Microsoft’s operating system brags about having 125,000 apps in its catalog, but the reality of the situation is that many essential apps are missing. Google apps like YouTube and Google Maps are absent, popular services like cloud storage Dropbox don’t have Windows Phone apps, and when it comes to games Microsoft’s platform is way behind Android and iOS.

Processor and Memory:

The Lumia 620 features a fairly solid hardware for its affordable price. With a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus processor running at 1GHz, Adreno 305 graphics and 512MB of RAM, performance was buttery smooth throughout.

There is still no easy way to benchmark Windows Phone, so we have to resort to browser testing. The Internet Explorer-favorable SunSpider JavaScript benchmark returned a total score of 1,496ms, which is solid and almost on par with even high-end devices like the Samsung Galaxy S III. Clearly, there is a huge gap between the entry-level Lumia and the high-end Galaxy S III, but in the case of JavaScript performance it’s almost gone. If you care about gaming of course, the Lumia 620 will not be able to run the latest shooters and racing titles as a high-end phone. For casual browsing around in the interface though it works perfectly smoothly.


The device comes with 8GB of internal storage that you can expand via microSD by as much as 64GB. The Windows Phone platform itself is fairly heavy taking up nearly 3GB of space, so you are left with just north of 5GB.

Internet and Connectivity:

When it comes to connectivity, the Lumia 620 is well equipped with support for 3G with HSPA at 21.1Mbps, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS.

The phone ships with Internet Explorer 10 which is a fairly solid browser. We found it loaded most pages quickly, but often traditional for-desktop websites slowed it down. It has the standard pinch and double tap controls to zoom in and out, and both worked well. Still, it might be a bit strange at first to have the address bar in the bottom instead of on top, and some slight downsides like having no forward button make us wish the Windows Phone platform offered more choice for browsers.


Near-field communication (NFC) is also on board and you can use this to easily pair compatible accessories like wireless headsets and external speakers. Also, NFC has limited use as a mobile wallet technology.

The device uses a micro SIM card that is neatly housed in a little tray under the battery.

Camera:

The Lumia 620 features a 5-megapixel rear camera with auto-focus and LED flash, capable of recording 720p HD videos. There is also a front-facing VGA camera for video calls.

Given its affordable price, you shouldn’t expect wonders from the 5-megapixel camera on the device. But while it lacks in fine detail and clarity, it delivers with pleasing and true-to-life saturated colors. That is especially true for well-lit scenes where the device performs on par or better than many of its peers. Images also turn out a bit on the soft side.


The 5-megapixel camera is challenged by environments requiring ample dynamic range, where there is a stark contrast between objects in the picture like say a bright sky and darker buildings. The sensor doesn’t handle that particularly well. It also has troubles with noise in under-lit scenes, but that’s all to be expected from a device in this class.

The camera experience is helped by a variety of lens effects (things like Cinemagraph animating parts of videos as GIFs) and settings to tweak including ISO adjustments, scenes and others for those who want to manually control their shots.

The video recorder can’t brag with such a variety in settings, but the captured footage is definitely decent. Among the limited settings in the camera are white balance and choosing whether or not to have continuous auto-focus, and that’s about it.

Nokia Lumia 620 Sample Video:



Nokia Lumia 620 Indoor Sample Video:



Multimedia:

With such a good looking 3.8-inch display, the Lumia 620 has what it takes to entertain you with videos on the road. The phone supports most popular codecs and plays back Mpeg4, H.264, H.263 and WMV files at 720p with ease.

The built-in music and video hub conveniently stores a history of the content you’ve seen and heard. While there is no built-in YouTube application, MetroTube offers all the functionality of YouTube in an interface that looks native to Windows Phone and is great.

When it comes to music, the Xbox Music Store has pretty much everything you need. Nokia Music is one application that we really love having with its free Mix Radio streaming service. It does pretty much what paid services like Rdio and Pandora do, and it’s a perfect tool for music discovery. We had fun playing songs from the playlists offered, plus you can build your own playlists based on as many as three artists you mention. You can even cache playlists for offline listening. The only downside is that you can only skip not more than 6 songs each hour.


Overall, the music experience on the Lumia 620 is very rich and visual, you get a full-screen background image of the artist in the music player and in Mix Radio you can also see a biography and additional info which we appreciate.

The loudspeaker on the back is really loud which we appreciate but sound gets a bit tinny when you crank it up. The speaker is also strangely positioned in the bottom where usually you hold your hand and can easily accidentally muffle it.

Call quality:

With a dual-mic setup, the handset has noise cancellation and it clears up side noises for an overall pleasing sound quality in calls. Our callers easily recognized the tone of our voice and the only slight complaint was that sounds from the microphone on the Lumia 620 came out a bit tinny. On our side of the line, the earpiece performed well, voices were loud and clear.

Battery life:

Seeing that the Lumia 620 has a paltry 1,300mAh battery we set our expectations for battery life low. Officially, Nokia claims the device’s talk time is 9 h 50 min on 3G or 14 h 40 min on 2G. In reality, the phone easily got us through a day of use and if you tinker less with it, it could be a two-day ride.

We looped a series of videos for 1 hour at medium brightness, starting with a fully charged battery. Push notifications were all active in the background (battery saver mode was off). After an hour, the battery was drained by 17%. If we interpolate this number, the Lumia 620 should be able to play around 5.85 hours of video non-stop which is a fairly good (but not brilliant) achievement.

Conclusion:

The Lumia 620 is a great effort by Nokia all around. It has a standout design that will appeal to many, especially the young, a good (but not perfect) camera for its class supporting 720p HD video capture, and runs on the now more mature Windows Phone 8.

We don’t have any major complaints about the phone and that alone is telling. However, as much as we like Nokia’s effort in the Lumia 620, it faces competition from some equally capable devices.

Even in Nokia’s own Windows Phone backyard, HTC was the first to introduce the Windows Phone 8S, a very, very similar device at the same price of around $320 in the States, £220 in the UK and 270 euro in Europe that has a well-groomed and thinner body, but lacks a front-facing camera.

And in Android land, there are the similarly priced Samsung Galaxy S III mini featuring the easily recognizable pebble design and a larger screen, and the HTC One V with virtually identical specs but outfitted in the typical industrial HTC looks. Both of them have the rock solid Android ecosystem as a backbone.

At this point, it’s a matter of personal preference and measuring up the importance of the ecosystem. If you like Windows Phone’s approach with Live Tiles, deeply integrated social networking and built-in Office, Nokia adds even more value to that with its own apps in a well built device. You wouldn’t regret buying the Lumia 620 in that case. If you care more about the apps and games, though, Android is still much richer. So which one would you take, the red pill or blue pill?

Nokia Lumia 620 Video Review: