Review: Nokia Lumia 625

Take a good look at the Nokia Lumia 625. It's about to become an endangered species.

The news that Microsoft is to buy Nokia's handset division spells the end for the Nokia branded smartphone, as the company phases it out for Lumia and Asha phones.

It won’t be the first time Nokia has fundamentally changed its business. Did you know, for example, that Nokia started out as a paper mill? Or that before the 1990s, it also made rubber boots and tyres?

Then came the mobile phone revolution and it seemed everyone had - or wanted - a Nokia handset. They were the old reliables; the phone that lasted for days on a single charge and could be battered around without fear of smashing the delicate screen or denting its beautifully detailed casing. The excitement when they introduced things like Xpress On covers and polyphonic ring tones.

They were practically bulletproof.

These days, things have changed slightly. Touchscreens are almost essential, which inevitably means poorer battery life. And phones can be expensive, particularly when you take into account how quickly they become obsolete.

The Lumia 625 is one of Nokia’s cheaper Windows 8 Phones, falling into the mid- range box. It’s trying to be several different things at once: stylish in a more fun way, a multimedia centred phone, and a bit more affordable for the average consumer. It’s big without being unmanageable, but a bit on the weighty side at 159g.

What’s in the box?

Nokia is still including chargers in the box, unlike other phone makers. The Lumia 625 not only comes with the USB cable, but the charger is actually a proper one, which Nokiasays is high efficiency, and not the traditional USB plug you usually get with phones. This is probably why the USB cable is tiny, but despite its minute size, you can still use it to charge the phone directly.

The handsfree kit is the rigid earbud type, which doesn’t suit everyone (myself included).

It also comes with a quick set up guide, which you’ll likely need to figure out how to get the case off in the first place.

How it looks:

The familiar polycarbonate casing is in full effect here, and in a few colour options other than white or black.

It fits snugly to the rest of the device, which in one way is a good thing. But getting the case open requires witchcraft, or at the very least the knack to prying it off and a good set of nails. While it’s an absolute pain to remove, the good thing is that it won’t fall apart should you drop it (and I did. Verdict: it survived).

Once you pry it off, you can get at the sim slot. Be careful here: the sim card and micro SD card slots sit close together, which can be a little confusing.

The battery is built in, so there’s no easy swap for users if they feel the battery is past its best. That’s disappointing but not entirely unexpected.

Performance:

Under the hood it comes with a 1.2 Ghz dual core Snapdragon S4 processor and 512 MB of RAM, with 8GB of built in storage that can be expanded with a 64GB memory card. There’s cloud storage through Windows SkyDRive too, offering you an additional 7GB of space off the phone. So it’s not mindblowing, but for a mid-range phone, you can’t really expect a lot more.

Apps start up quickly, and moving between applications isn’t painful at all.

The Lumia 625 also supports 4G LTE networks, which will be useful when they eventually launch here.

The screen:

The Lumia 625 comes with a highly sensitive 4.7 inch display. It doesn’t feel that big when you’re holding it, but it comes into its own when you try to watch video or view photos. The size is big enough that you aren’t peering at the screen, but not so large that it gets mistaken for tablet.

The colour reproduction is decent for the most part, but Nokia has skipped the Clear Black Technology that has made it into some of its pricier Lumia handsets. That means darker colours can look a little off at times.

The pixel density is a lowly 201 pixels per inch - the iPhone 4S had 326, for comparison - but you won’t notice this the majority of the time. It does lose a bit of detail though.

The display, crucially, has the same super sensitive properties that Nokia has put into its other handsets. It may not sound like much but it has one important result: if you wear gloves, you can still use the touch screen perfectly well. In fact, it will work through several layers of material (I ran through a few tests) so the chances of you losing a few fingers to frostbite this winter are slim.

Camera

The camera in the Lumia 625 is a five megapixel one with an LED flash. At five megapixels, it’s probably a little behind some of its rivals at the top end of the market - Sony recently announced a 20.1 megapixel camera for its Z1 smartphone, and the norm seems to be around eight megapixels - but truth be told, five is adequate for what most people will use this camera for.

The Lumia 625 has Nokia’s smart camera app too, which allows you to take a series of photos and then edit them so you can create all different kinds of shots from your images. You can remove moving objects, swap faces between shots to ensure everyone is looking their best, add a bit of motion blur or create action shots from a series of photos. It will also choose the best shot for you from the series of images it snapped.

The LED flash will provide you with a bit of extra light just when you need it, but don’t expect DSLR quality overall; it’s still a mobile phone after all.

What’s the battery life like?

Battery life varies according to how much of a pounding you give the phone. On standby, it will last up to 23 days according to Nokia. But more people are actually going to want to use the phone so the claimed talk time of 15 hours on 3G networks is a bit more realistic. Throw in some web browsing and you’ll cut it further - you get about 7 hours of continuous browsing. Overall though, it managed to last most of the day, beating some of the other mobile phones I’ve tested recently.

Overall:

The spec reflects the lower price, with some of Nokai’s key technologies missing from the device. But if you want a decent phone that will cover most of your bases at an acceptable level, without burning a hole in your pocket, the Lumia 625 will fit the bill.

Nokia.com