Nokia Lumia 730/735 hands-on

The latest mid-range smartphone from Microsoft is finally here in the comfort of our office. Meet the Lumia 730/735 and its unmistakable Finnish design. The phone carries all the traits we’ve come to know and love in the Lumia family. In fact, it does look like a shrunken Lumia 1520, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

The Lumia 730/735 is build around a 4.7″ ClearBlack AMOLED screen with 720p resolution. This puts it in the same arena as the excellent Motorola Moto G, so while our review is in the oven, we offer you a quick hands-on of the device.

The phone offers a great feeling in the hand. That’s partly due to its nice shape with rounded sides and partly due to the particular choice of materials. Yes, Nokia is still sticking to the good old polycarbonate plastic, but it’s proven to work.

Additionally, the plastic shell can be removed, revealing a 2,200mAh battery as well as the nano-SIM and microSD card slots. It’s quite hard to open up and requires some struggling, which isn’t ideal.

Nokia Lumia 730/735 live photos

Under the hood, there’s a Snapdragon 400 chipset with a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A7. It promises great performance, even more so when we consider the phone is running the latest Windows Phone 8.1 with the Denim update. It offers some cool updates and new features mainly concerning the camera and Cortana.

Speaking of the camera, the Lumia 730/735 is equipped with a 6.7MP shooter with a 1/3.4” sensor size capable of recording 1080p videos. However, Microsoft’s highlight is the phone’s front-facing camera because of its wide-angle lens. It’s a 5MP camera, which is advertised to make the Lumia 730/735 the phone to have if you’re an avid selfie maker.

The phone shapes up to be a great mix of the right ingredients to make a solid Windows Phone mid-range offering. We’ll probably have the review up by the Sunday and we’ll know by then whether this recipe is going to make for a delicious experience or leave a weird taste in the mouth.