Nokia Lumia 610 Review

What up guys, Gabe here. Today, I’m going to be reviewing the Nokia Lumia 610.
 

Oh who am I kidding, you probably already left if you don’t want to read

Hardware

The first thing you’ll notice about the phone is its rather simple design. It’s a plastic built phone with a faux metal band around the display with matching buttons on the right side, ala the iPhone 3g, and a 3.7 inch gorilla glass display running at 480 by 800.

On the right of the phone you have your volume rocker, power button and a two position camera button. The lock button takes some getting used to, particularly if you’re coming from a phone with a top mounted power button like I did. After awhile of use however, I’ve found the power button is in the perfect position, if a little too small. On the front of the phone, you have three capacitive buttons, Back, Home and Search, which are back lit in an off white colour.Whilst capacitive buttons are a great idea in theory, I often found myself activating them while playing games, recording video and typing in landscape mode.

On the back of the phone, you’ll find a black plastic panel made of a soft touch plastic,which unfortunately can pick up a fair amount of dust, as well as a plastic overlay for the camera and flash, a grill for the speaker and a small Nokia logo. The back panel can be slid off to change the battery and your micro sim if you want.

 

On the top of the phone, you simply have a Micro USB port for charging and synching with the Zune/windows phone software, a microphone for noise cancelling, a 3.5mm Headphone jack and a slot to attach a lanyard.

The phone itself has a fairly nice weight to it, which helps it feel more like a premium product, unlike some other lighter phones (cough Samsung galaxy ace cough cough), which helps make the phone live up to nokia’s reputation of very tough and durable phones.

The screen on the Lumia is rather nice. It runs at a fairly high pixel density, 252PPI, which while it won’t look that high res next to a retina display, look very high-res and only really looks pixelated when you are specifically looking for pixels. The screen is also very bright, capable of being read in sunlight and outside, however I found it difficult to use when it was dark.

The phonehas a very nice 1300 MaH battery, which can last the day with estimations by the phone of 24 hours or more. The memory management in tango most likely helps here, but I still can't help but this of the Nokia 3310.

Softwareand performance

Thephone, like all of Nokia’s Lumia line, runs windows phone, specifically windows phone 7.5 (and will be upgradable to 7.8) tango, a variant that is design to run on low powered devices (500 MHZ processor, 256 MB ram etc.). The real big difference between mango and tango is that mango has stricter multitasking. Apps using over 90 MB of ram are automatically quit, and not all apps, IE Skype,will install on the phone. That said, a lot of apps will run on the phone withlittle to no lag, particularly compared to some android phones of the same price.

The operating system uses the metro or modern UI, which in short is a really nice UI designed around rotation and sliding of on screen items, minimalism and typography. The phone also has a few useful nokia apps, specifically nokia drive, a GPS app, nokia maps, an online map service, contacts transfer, a way to wirelessly transfer your contacts to your new phone, app highlights and nokia music, music app and wireless streaming service. Additionally, you can download a few more nokia apps, such as camera extras, from the marketplace.

The nokia lumia 610 has 256 MB ram 500 MHZ snapdragon CPU, which sounds like the phone will seriously lag and almost made me decided not to get this phone. I was wrong though, and the lumia ran smoother then my similarly speced iPod touch 4^thgen. This is mostly due to really good tango memory management as well as aless good loading time. You average third party app, including nokia’s own apps, takes about 8 seconds for normal apps, and about 20 seconds for games, however, included apps will load up in a second. Similarly, boot up and shutdown time’s aren’t bad either, at 22 seconds and 3 seconds respectively.

If there’s one negative I have to point out about the OS, it’s the way it handles volume. It combines media, ringtone and notifications through both the head set and speaker in to one volume. This is annoying as you’ll find yourself having to change the volume from loud to soft when you listen to music, play gamesETC. Additionally, unlike iOS, android and web os, windows phone doesn’t have away to aggregate notifications. You get toasts and live tile animations, but no way to read any missed notifications.

The app selection has always been a weird thing with windows phone. Half the users think there isn’t enough apps, half think there is apps for everything. Both are partly correct. Windows phone’s market place has a lot of apps for most things, facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube ETC, but a lot of apps, such as the verge, instagram and a decent youtube app, are third party apps from third party devs. Which are good in the case of some apps, for instance metrotube,but lack vital features, for instance metrogram can’t upload pictures, and the verge can’t display articles in app.

Quality

The nokialumia’s camera is a wide angle CMOS sensor that takes 5 MP stills and VGAvideo. The photos are pretty crisp on the phone’s screen at full zoom, but the video looks pretty meh, and is only really good for a few vlogs or a quick on the go video. The camera can be accessed from any where on the phone, with a simple long press of the shutter button on the lock screen or simply pressing the shutter anywhere else in the OS. The camera takes about 5-8 seconds to load up and takes about a second from pressing the shutter button to finish taking apicture.

Video recording is not the lumia’s strong point. I’m going to say that now. The footage looks very blocky when imported off the phone. Actually, no, they look very blocky on the phone, it looks similar to the original facetime camera. On the good side, the phone doesn’t have a very bad rolling shutter effect.

The phone has very good 3G reception. I got pretty good reception in most places I went. The internet on the phone was rather fast, with speeds according to the quick bandwidth test mobile app of 0.35 MBs up, 1.72 MBs down.

FinalThoughts

In short, the nokia lumia 610 is one of the best phones youcan buy without breaking the bank. It’s lag free, has a nice size screen, afairly good camera all while feeling solid as a tank.