Nokia Lumia 830 Review
by Brett Howse on November 25, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Lumia
Wi-Fi
The Lumia 830 most likely unitizes the Qualcomm VIVE Wi-Fi available on the Snapdragon 400 SoC. In this particular case, it is nothing special. The 830 has a single stream only, although at least it is dual band. This gives us a maximum connection speed of 150 Mbps, which the Lumia 830 was able to achieve. However connection speeds rarely equate to real world transfer speeds.
I was only able to achieve 38 Mbps transfer speed with the Lumia 830, which is not a stellar result. On a device of this price range, it would be nice to see 802.11ac wireless and possibly a dual-stream solution.
There is one other note about Wi-Fi. On one occasion, the device stopped seeing any access points at all. I had to restart the phone, at which point the Wi-Fi worked normally again. I’ve contacted Microsoft and this is a known issue on some Lumia 830 devices. They have no fix for this yet, so if you do purchase one and have this happen, you may want to exchange it. It happened just the one time to me though.
Cellular
Qualcomm’s MSM8926 SoC supports up to Category 4 LTE which offers a maximum of 150 Mbps download and 50 Mbps Upload.
I was only able to achieve 6 Mbps download and 4 Mbps upload but these numbers have a lot to do with the traffic on the tower, as well as location and obstacles.
Reception is good but this is difficult to test unless you live on the fringe of a cellular signal and I do not.
GNSS
Qualcomm’s IZat Gen8A is the GPS in the Snapdragon 400 SoC, and as with most modern Qualcomm location solutions it is fast and accurate. With location services enabled on the phone, GPS lock happened within a couple of seconds. Going from location services disabled to a GPS lock took around thirty seconds, which is pretty good.
The Lumia 830 supports A-GLONASS, A-GPS, BeiDou, and assist from cellular and Wi-Fi networks to get a quicker location fix.
Speaker and Call Quality
The Lumia 830 has a single speaker on the back of the device, which is never the ideal location for maximum clarity and volume. The tiny speaker does get plenty loud though. I measured 88.7 dBA from the speaker from 3” away.
The Lumia 830 has four microphones for noise cancelling. Below is the audio of a call from the 830 to my personal cell, which I recorded on my PC. There is a bit of whine in the recording from my PC so please ignore that I will try and get that sorted out for the next review.
The 830 does a good job cancelling out the outside noise during a call, with it only struggling when the ambient noise was high enough that it would be difficult to speak face to face. The audio quality of the call was also quite good.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
98 Comments
View All Comments
kspirit - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
I was hoping to get this as an upgrade to my 925, but it offers nothing excellent. The camera and display are underwhelming. This is still an incredibly good-looking phone though, but nothing exceptional besides that. The cutbacks Microsoft is making on Lumias are pretty obvious... They're kind of ruining the solid hardware reputation of Nokia.BMNify - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
what cutbacks? Why were you hoping to upgrade from 925 to an 830?? you should be looking at 930 or 1520 for proper upgrade not downgrade to 8xx series and then complain about cutbacks.retrospooty - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
LOL... It's like saying the 2014 Civic isn't as feature rich as the 2013 Accord. Of course not.PubFiction - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
He has a pretty good point, if this phone wants to be a premium phone alternative it needs to have at least something of the major components that would actually be considered premium. It has nothing. Premium phones are 1920x1080 or better, they have 2GB of ram or more, they have snapdragon 800+ chipsets. This phone doesn't have any of that so the reality is it just isn't a premium phone its an average midrange phone.kspirit - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
THIS! Thank you.cheshirster - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Average midrange phones do not have what Lumia 830 has.OIS and Qi are not widely presented
Not every flagman has HAAC mics
Metal body is nowhere to be seen under 400$ mark.
Laxaa - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Those are very valid points. HAAC mics are a great feature I wish every phone had. I mean, most of the high-end flagships today(iPhone 6 and Nexus 6 in particular) only captures mono sound. It's kind of funny when companies boast their 4K recording capabilities without any decent sound recording to back it up. Not even stereo(Samsung, Sony and HTC does stereo so it's not all lost)garretelder - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
Not one of the top phones (see http://www.topreport.org/phones/ instead) in my opinion.retrospooty - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I am not seeing it... It is not a high end model. It's a low end model. Why would the 830 be "premium", it's a low end phone? What he should be looking for is the (assumed) upcoming model replacement for the 925, which is a higher end model - not the 830.Let me put it another way since the car thing didn't seem to work... It's like saying the 2014 Moto G isnt as nice as the 2013 Moto X. - different model families... Get it?
kspirit - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
I thought it was clear...?They eliminated Glance on almost all the current lineup to save on display cost.
They also removed the camera buttons on all phones below the 830.
In a day where cheaper phones have 1080p displays, they still offer a badly calibrated 720p panel, and a camera with a sensor size that is almost an insult to the name of PureView. This doesn't even touch the upper range, despite being marketed as an 'affordable flagship'...