Nokia Lumia 620 review

Key Features: 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 CPU; 512MB RAM; 3.8-inch 480 x 800 pixel ClearBlack LCD screen; Windows Phone 8 OS; 8GB internal memory; 5-megapixel camera with LED flash

Manufacturer: Nokia

Nokia Lumia 620 - Design and Features

Introduction

Since the Windows Phone revolution started in 2010 with Windows Phone 7, things haven’t quite panned out as Microsoft hoped. Poor sales, slightly borked budget models and lack of public recognition didn’t help matters. But things are starting to turn around.

The Nokia Lumia 620 is a sign of this turnabout. A superb range of features, delightful design and excellent price make this not only the best budget Windows phone around, but one of the best budget phones, full stop.

If the 620 still seems a tiny bit pricey for your budget, you should also check out the Lumia 520. It's around £50 cheaper SIM-free and has a larger screen. The catch? It's not as cute, it lacks a few of the 620's flashier features and its screen's a wee bit lower-quality.

For more, check out our Lumia 520 vs 620 comparison.

Nokia Lumia 620 –Video Review

Don't fancy reading through our full review? Take a look at our video review below, which shows you what the phone looks like in-hand, as well as showing off a few of its top features.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Design and Features

The Nokia Lumia range is no stranger to commercial failure, but it has provided us with some of the most recognisable phones of the last few years, like the classic Lumia 800. Previous budget models had none of this flair, but the Nokia Lumia 620 is treated to a spoonful.

There isn't any of the high-end colour-drenched polycarbonate of the top Lumias, but the Nokia Lumia 620 is one of the cheeriest, most carefully-style affordable phones around. Its full-back removable plastic battery cover snakes around to the glass front of the screen, a perfect impression of a unibody phone that leaves the handset with no ugly seams, and palm-hugging smooth curves.

The Nokia Lumia 620 comes in seven colours, and each cover is a cut above the norm. Rather than being made of simple glossy plastic, each has two layers. The bottom is a thin layer of opaque plastic, topped with a secondary translucent layer that gives depth to the finish. It may not feel like a top-end phone exactly, but this makes the Lumia 620 seem classier and more interesting than many other budget blowers, including its comparatively dull predecessor, the Lumia 610.

With a bit of imagination, you could even say that the red case gives the Lumia 620 the impression of being ringed with neon, viewed from the front.

Fun energy and accessibility are what the Nokia Lumia 620 is after, and it gets both in spades. A few years ago, the 3.8-inch screen of this phone would have seemed huge, but now that the high street phone shop is dominated with mammoth mobiles like the Samsung Galaxy S3, the Lumia 620 seems positively kid-friendly. At 11mm thick, it’s certainly not slim, but the ergonomic purity of the phone’s unbroken curves mean you barely notice the chunk factor.

The Nokia Lumia 620’s relatively small size makes reaching the phone’s on-body buttons a cinch, helped by Nokia’s characteristic button placement. Where most phone-makers tend to put power buttons up top and volume rockers on a side edge, the Nokia Lumia 620 lays all its buttons along the right edge. The power button naturally rests under your thumb if you’re right-handed, and the volume controls are only a thumb slide away.

Further down this right edge you’ll find the camera shutter button. It’s rare in phones these days, but is a requirement of every Windows Phone 8 mobile. As this button automatically launches the camera app, we were concerned holding the phone might accidentally set the thing off, but in-use we encountered no such problems.

This shutter button is a symptom of the ways in which Windows Phone is restrictive, but the Nokia Lumia 620 also demonstrates some of the ways Windows Phone 8 has loosened up a few of these. Most important of all, take off the battery cover and you’ll find a microSD memory card slot.

The Nokia Lumia 620 comes with 8GB of internal memory, just under 5GB of which is accessible. This is plenty for a handful of apps and games, but if you want to make this your music player as well as your mobile, you’ll need more storage. Phones of the previous generation - Windows Phone 7 mobiles - didn’t support this handy expandable memory feature.

Another recent improvement is the ease of file transfers. In the previous Nokia Lumia phones, you had to hook up to the Zune desktop software to transfer files - much like the iPhone's relationship with iTunes. There are no such annoying restrictions here. You can just plug the Nokia Lumia 620 into a computer to drag ‘n’ drop, bung in a microSD card or even share files over Bluetooth. Owning a Windows Phone mobile comes with far fewer irritations than it used to.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Wireless Connectivity

There are few sockets on the Nokia Lumia 620 – just a microUSB port on the bottom edge and a 3.5mm headphone jack up top. And, oddly, the headphone input is built into the case rather than the phone itself, connecting with little metal contacts, but functionally it makes no difference.

Wireless connectivity is a different story. It’s excellent for a low-cost phone.

Staples like Bluetooth, HSPA 3G mobile internet and GPS are all expected in a modern smartphone, but including NFC in the Lumia 620 wins Nokia a fistful of tech brownie points. Although the  NFC is in its infancy in terms of mainstream adoption, it’s an important element of the future-proofing of this phone.

NFC stands for Near-Field Communication and lets devices communicate wirelessly over short distances. The most attention-grabbing use of NFC is in making payments on the high street without a credit card, but it can also be used to transmit information between devices. Windows Marketplace even offers a section in its app store showing off NFC-based apps.

All the Nokia Lumia 620 misses out on is 4G. And such a connection won’t be much use in a budget phone for at least a year. Would you really fork out for a contract that gets you a £400 phone and opt for a £150 one?

Nokia Lumia 620 - Screen, Apps and Games

Nokia Lumia 620 – Screen

It may not miss out on many wireless doodads, but the cost-cutting measures of the Nokia Lumia 620 are clear in its screen specs. There’s no problem with the screen’s relatively diminutive 3.8-inch size, but its resolution of 800 x 480 does seem very basic in 2013. To put this into some context, top-end phones of this year like the Samsung Galaxy S4 will offer more than five times the number of pixels.

Technologically the Nokia Lumia 620 screen may appear dated, but in person its image quality is great. This is down to combination of factors, with Nokia’s ClearBlack “technology” at the forefront. In more expensive Lumia phones, ClearBlack essentially means using a high-quality OLED screen. Here, though, a more traditional LCD panel is used. The ClearBlack instead seems to refer to the use of a reflection-reducing polarisation filter and, quite simply, a high-quality screen panel.

Colours are vivid but natural-looking, contrast is excellent for such an affordable phone and top brightness is searingly-bright when required.

Windows Phone 8 doesn’t give you as much control over the backlight’s brightness as, say, an iPhone or Android mobile. There’s an ambient light sensor (again, occasionally missing from low-cost phones) that can set brightness automatically, or you can set it to “low”, “medium” or “high”. It’s far less flexible than a good old brightness slider.

The pixel paucity is also mitigated by the visual optimisation of Windows Phone 8. Text rendering throughout the system’s interface is carefully managed, ensuring that there’s never a jaggedy edge to be seen. Where you will start to notice the lower resolution is in the web browser, and third-party apps and games.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Windows Phone 8 and Performance

The Windows Phone 8 software that’s at the heart of the Nokia Lumia 620 feels positively luxurious in a budget phone like this. Android has come a long way in its last few iterations, but cheaper Android phones are too often spoiled, visually or performance-wise, by poorly-executed custom user interfaces.

As Windows Phone doesn’t allow manufacturers to fiddle with the core software in any dramatic way, there’s no such nonsense here. The Nokia Lumia 620 flies along, with barely any lag whatsoever - aside from unavoidable pauses during app loading.

Its dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon S4 and 512MB of RAM are, like the phone’s screen resolution, far from cutting edge. But they’re more than enough to make Windows Phone 8 run beaitifully. Let’s not forget, the last generation’s flagship Lumia 800 used a far less powerful single-core processor.

Windows Phone 8 adds features and flexibility not seen in Windows Phone 7, but the basic structure of the system hasn’t changed. There’s a scrolling home screen that you populate with Live Tiles that either occupy a quarter the width of the screen, half of it or the whole thing. One of the new features of Windows Phone 8 is being able to use these smaller quarter-width icons.

Flick right-to-left from this screen and you’re taken to the full apps menu, which arranges all your apps – bar games – into a simple list.

Nokia Lumia 620 – People and Kid’s Corner

Windows Phone 8 is a fairly fully-featured OS. It lets you share your mobile internet connection as a Wi-Fi hotspot, can be set to automatically backup your data to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s Cloud storage solution, and offers full integration of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn as well as all the most popular email providers.

All this information is then weaved-into the Nokia Lumia 620’s People hub. In other phones, this might simply hold your contacts, but in Windows Phone 8 it’s where you go for all your social updates. However, you can also install separate Facebook and Twitter apps if the People hub is too crowded for your liking.

Windows Phone 8’s Kid’s Corner is a newer addition. It lets you setup a kid-friendly area on your phone, where you can ban access to things like email clients and violent games. Sensibly, Microsoft has kept this feature hidden in the Settings menu, to stop it from cluttering up the phones of singletons.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Nokia Maps and Drive

One of the best features of the Nokia Lumia 620 is a Nokia staple, though. Nokia Maps is a great mapping and GPS solution that offers a fantastic USP – being able to download maps for use offline, for free. You don’t have to be in the area of the map to download it, either. Just rifle through the Settings menu and you can pick whole zones to grab.

England weighs-in at 238MB, for example. This doesn’t include satellite views, which are available from within the app on the fly, but for those looking for a map that won’t cost them roaming data to access, Nokia Maps is about the best you can get without paying. It works well as an in-car GPS too, using Nokia Drive. Again, this can use pre-downloaded maps to save you a fortune in roaming fees while tearing down a German autobahn.

A slightly more frivolous use of location data is seen in Nokia City Lens. This is an augmented reality app that uses the Nokia Lumia 620’s camera to give you a view of the world overlaid with local restaurants, hotels, transport links and attractions. Never will you look more touristy and mug-able than looking at the world through a phone, but it’s a fun diversion nevertheless.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Microsoft Office

If Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 has a key app-based USP, it has to be Office integration. In the dedicated Office app, you can create Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, as well as edit Powerpoint presentations. Naturally, it’s all linked up to Microsoft’s SkyDrive Cloud storage solution. Embrace SkyDrive and you’ll have a pretty nifty way to read and edit your work documents on-the-go.

Like almost all Windows Phone 8 apps, Microsoft Office is laid out in the house style too, never cramming too much information into a page. It’s not as flexible or powerful as a “full” version of Office, but it’s highly usable, and that’s the main thing.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Apps and Games

For all your other app needs, you’ll have to take a trip down to the Windows Store. This is the umbrella under which you’ll find Windows Phone 8’s apps, games and music portals.

It’s also where we stumble upon what is probably the Nokia Lumia 620’s greatest problem. Although Windows Phone 8 has gained most of the apps found in the previous Windows Phone 7 platform, the selection is far more limited than what you’ll find in an Android phone or iPhone. Microsoft claims there’s an impressive-sounding 120,000 apps aboard, but app fans will soon find holes in its app selection.

On the positive side, pricing of Windows apps seems to be improving, with the bottom-rung price of 79p now inhabited by many games that used to cost well over a pound previously.

The relatively limited selection is a particular shame for games, as the Nokia Lumia 620 offers solid integration with Xbox Live, the online service for Xbox 360. You can earn Xbox Live achievement points through games that have been Xbox-certified. These games live in a separate “Xbox” area within the Windows games store, and generally offer the best gaming experiences available on Windows Phone.

At the time of writing there were 135 of these titles. It's enough to keep you busy for a while, but it's a very small selection. And we found that a couple were disappointingly crash-happy, given the amount of certification that's meant to have taken place.

Nokia Lumia 620 - Music, Video and Battery Life

Nokia Lumia 620 – Music and Video

Both Nokia and Microsoft put their oars in when it comes to the Nokia Lumia 620’s music and video stores. From Microsoft, you’re offered the Xbox Music and the Windows Phone music store, from Nokia the Nokia Music portal.

The standard store fronts of each aren’t desperately interesting, selling albums for around the standard £8, and relayed with the usual Windows Phone 8 gloss. It’s the other parts that are more eye-catching.

Xbox Music is a Spotify-like music streaming service that costs £8.99 a month or £90 for the year, and can be accessed through an Xbox (with an Xbox Live Gold membership) as well as your Lumia 920. That’s a pound cheaper than Spotify.

Nokia Music gives you free access to a series of Mixes, which are effectively playlists of streamed  tracks, filtered by genre, date, popularity and so on. Streaming quality is fairly low, but it offers a musical distraction if you’re bored of your own tunes.

The Nokia Lumia 620 also, of course, offers a media player interface for your own music and video files. It's just as slick and smooth and the rest of the Windows Phone 8 software, but codec support is pretty limited. The most popular music formats – MP3 and AAC – are supported, but FLAC is not, and anyone with a store of MKV videos will have to transcode them before they’ll play natively on the Nokia Lumia 620.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Camera

The Nokia Lumia 620 has two cameras. There’s a 5-megapixel sensor on the rear, supported by a single-LED flash, and a basic VGA user-facing camera for video calling.

Neither is going to trouble any high-end smartphone on image quality, but a lack of serious shutter lag and acceptable focusing speed mean the Nokia Lumia 620’s camera usability is far better than many Android phones at the price. Low-cost smartphones often suffer from shutter lag so severe than their cameras are painful to use.

The Nokia Lumia 620 camera app does not offer a bundle of fun filters and effects off the bat, but Windows Phone 8 does let you use camera modules called Lenses. Smart Shoot and Bing Vision come pre-installed.

Smart Shoot takes a series of photos in reasonably quick succession, letting you pick the one where your subject looks the best (shooting speed is a little slow for this to be truly effective) and Bing Vision is a QR and Barcode scanner.

Useful additional lenses you can download include Nokia exclusives like Panorama and the fun “picture animator” Cinematograph, which captures video and stills simultaneously to let you produce a vid where the majority of the scene stays completely still. Ok, maybe that one is not all that useful, but it is a laugh.

There are bundles off third-party lenses you can grab too, from useless fluff (the majority) to interesting extras.

Image quality is acceptable at the price, with solid focusing and decent detail for a lower-cost 5-megapixel model, but otherwise unremarkable. Colours are a tad under-saturated and in lower-light conditions, noise and chromatic aberration is prolific. Usability is the key here, though, and the Lumia 620 makes photo-taking quick and enjoyable – the main thing for today’s social networking snappers. 


Reliable autofocus makes detailed close-ups possible

Nokia Lumia 620 – Calling Quality and Battery Life

A feature that could potentially go unappreciated by some is the noise cancellation that the Lumia 620 employs while you’re taking a call. Using the signal from the two microphones on the phone – one on the bottom edge and one up top – it attempts to remove ambient noise from the phone signal before it reaches whoever you’re calling.

Call quality on your end is unremarkable, though. It’s quite boxy-sounding, lacking both top-end clarity and the robust body of a bassier speaker. 

Battery life too is another slightly sore point. The Nokia Lumia 620 uses a 1300mAh battery, and in our experience it needed a charge before the day was out with moderate-to-heavy use. If you’re going to be doing much at all in the way of using apps or playing games, you’ll have to charge every day without a doubt.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Value

So-so call quality, mediocre battery life and app support that lags a way behind Android rivals aren’t enough to turn us off the Nokia Lumia 620. At £150, it is simply such good value, crammed into such a well-designed body, that you can’t help but love the little handset.

It sheds virtually all the most serious compromises of its predecessor, the Nokia Lumia 610, to become perhaps the most important Windows Phone 8 device out there. And one of the best budget phones, regardless of platform. 

However, nowadays there's one other contender to consider - the Lumia 520. This is a stripped-fown version of the Lumia 620. It doesn't have NFC, a compass or a high-end anti-reflective screen coating. It is a fair bit cheaper, though. We'd still recommend the Lumia 620 if you can afford the extra cash, but it too is a top budget option. For more, read our Lumia 520 vs 620 comparison.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 620 is a revelation, showing that budget Windows Phone mobiles don’t have to be riddled with compromises and lack any semblance of personality. Top-notch hardware design, plenty of power and a feature list that betters many Android phones at the price should make this the gateway drug for many who have been unconvinced by Windows Phone to date. Only the existing shortcomings app library shortcomings of Windows Phone 8 hold this phone back.