Nokia Lumia 930 hands-on

Nokia’s latest Lumia offering has hit our offices, and we’ll be giving you a quick tour of the Nokia Lumia 930 before it gets whisked away for our comprehensive review.

The Lumia 930 is the international variant of the Nokia Lumia Icon released in the US for Verizon earlier this year, and is one of the first devices to sport Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8.1 update out of box.

The Lumia 930 sports a 5-inch 1080p AMOLED of Nokia’s ClearBlack variety, which we unfortunately found to color shift severely towards red/blue when viewed from different angles – a problem that we’ve also seen in past Nokia AMOLEDs. The chipset is of the MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 variety, with four 2.2GHz Krait 400 cores, and an Adreno 330 GPU. There’s 2GB of RAM on board alongside 32GB of non-expandable storage, all powered by a 2420mAh battery.

Although Nokia has since released other robust Lumia devices like the Lumia 1020, the Lumia 930′s spiritual predecessor is the Lumia 925. In terms of build quality the 930 is slightly inferior to the 925, as on the latter there was an aluminum unibody, while on the new flagship an aluminum ring can only be found along the sides. The rear panel is made of polycarbonate, which looks as though it may be removable, but in reality isn’t.

The retail package comes jam-packed with a boatload of accessories, most notably Nokia’s Wireless Charging Plate, at least in our region. It also included is a regular AC/adapter and USB cable combo, but oddly no headphones are supplied.

Nokia Lumia 930

But while the build quality isn’t the best we’ve seen from Nokia, it’s certainly much better than that of many competing flagships. The squarish, angular design is typical Nokia-esque, and the Gorilla Glass 3 display is crisp and pleasant to the touch. The 4 built-in microphones allow for high quality sound recording with both directional stereo and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound options, while the 20MP PureView camera with Carl Zeiss optics and optical image stabilization allows for quality stills and video.

‘Auto mode’ camera samples

Widescreen “Close-up” mode samples

The Windows Phone 8.1 release brings some much-needed improvements to the WP interface, and the inclusion of transparent Live tiles with custom background images and new Action center notification area were much requested features. The new Cortana virtual assistant is only available in certain regions but if you are not lucky enough to reside in any of them, you can easily enable it by selecting any of those regions as your own in the phone’s settings menu.

Here’s a quick look at the user interface in action:

Be sure to check back with us next week for our full review of the Nokia Lumia 930.