A selfie machine and much more
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The Lumia 830 from Nokia is a great camera-phone for customising
Nokia Lumia 830 is a sleek, no-nonsense smartphone that has good performance and comes with a 10-megapixel camera with good image quality.
Lumia 830 is beautifully crafted in a blend of metal and polycarbonate. The metal rims in silver look in nice contrast with the polycarbonate back cover in choices of eye-catching colours, like neon green, bright orange and slate black. And it’s only 8.5mm thin.
It comes with a five-inch ClearBlack IPS touch display with 1,280x720-pixel resolution and the screen is protected by Gorilla 3.0 glass.
Lumia 830 is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and it comes with one gigabyte of working memory or RAM and 16GB of storage, which is expandable with a microSD card of up to 128GB.
Lumia 830 runs on Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 with the Lumia Denim user interface. Windows Phone 8.1 is a no-nonsense operating system. Its home screen does not display nice photo or animation, but it has tiles of apps pinned to the Start screen in the so-called Live Tile.
The Start screen is customisable, allowing you to pin your favourite apps on the screen. Best of all, the Live Tiles will fetch related information to update you in real time while you are on the go. So you can glance at the screen for social notifications, weather updates and health and fitness info.
For example, the MSN News app will alert you about breaking news and will display small photos of the news highlight as well as the headlines, while the Outlook app will let you how know new email has arrived.
Among other updates, Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 lets you create Live folders for organising your apps and games. You simply press and hold and drag an app over another to create a new folder on the Start screen. Each folder can be easily renamed.
The new update also lets you create a customised Start screen, where only specific apps or games are accessible.
Lumia Denim provides more features to the camera in separate apps, including Lumia Selfie, Panorama, Cinemagraph and Refocus.
Lumia Selfie is fun to use, especially for our female staff members who like to take self-portraits and enhance the shots with filters. The filters can enhance facial details, like enlarging eyes and making the skin look soft and younger. The fun filters for applying to your self-portraits include magazine covers, black and white, retro, vintage and lomo.
To make it more convenient for selfies, Lumia 830 provides a dedicated shutter button on its side so you can easily press it with one hand.
Lumia 830 captures good-quality photos thanks to Nokia’s PureView technology, Zeiss lens and optical image stabilisation. Best of all, now Instagram is available for Windows Phone systems, so you can download and install it to share your shots on network after applying fun Instagram filters.
During the test I found that Lumia 830’s main camera captures good-quality photos – especially when there’s enough light. It has a night mode, but I found that the camera tried to brighten up the scene and ended up with shots with too much noise. Unfortunately, it does not have a feature for taking multiple shots at different exposures to create a composite photo.
Lumia 830 supports both LTE 4G and HSPA+ 3G connection and it uses a Nano SIM. I tested it on TrueMove H’s HSPA+ 850MHz 3G connection. I had no problem downloading and installing apps. Uploading shots to my Facebook page and checking mail was fast, as well as reading news apps and monitoring the social networks.
The smartphone also has good performance, although it does not use a top processor. The touch screen and app tiles were very responsive and the scrolling of the screen was fast and smooth.
Lumia 830 plays video clips smoothly and it played good-quality music when I tested the sound with my in-ear Razer headphones.
And it’s very good that Lumia 830 comes with Microsoft Office that lets you work on Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents while on the go. Office also automatically links to your OneDrive account to show your Office documents stored in the cloud. Lumia 830 user will also get an additional 15GB of OneDrive storage.
Nokia Lumia 830 retails for Bt13,990.
KEY SPECS
Operating System: Windows Phone 8.1 with Lumia Denim
Data network: LTE network bands: 1, 3, 7, 8, 20, WCDMA network: 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1900 MHz, 2100 MHz, GSM network: 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 1900 MHz
Display: 5-inch ClearBlack IPS-LCD 1280*720p screen, Sunlight Readability, Gorilla 3.0 glass
Processor: 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor
Main Camera: PureView 10 MP with Optical Image Stabilization, LED flash, ZEISS optics
Front Facing Camera:0.9 MP, 720p video
Memory: 16GB + 15GB free OneDrive, micro SD up to 128GB
Battery: Removable 2200 mAh battery, Integrated Qi wireless charging
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, 3.5 mm audio connector, NFC, BT4.0, MicroUSB
Dimension: 139.4 x 70.7 x 8.5 mm
Weight: 150g
