Three Reasons Which Make Lumia 730 A Terrific Mid-Range Smartphone
The ?10,000-?20,000 price band is the hottest smartphone segment in India. While the OEMs have the challenge of trading off features and specifications that go in their flagship devices, they have to squeeze in enough value additions than typical budget devices. Consumers, as diverse as college going students to young professionals to senior smartphone adopters, on the other hand, look for unique differentiators that add to the basic platform experience.
Lumia 730, one of the latest generation of Windows Phone 8.1 devices, is available for ?15,299 and as I noted in our review few weeks back, it is a solid, affordable smartphone for a diverse audience. The successor to the very popular Nokia Lumia 720, the Lumia 730 fills in those big shoes very nicely, and impresses in the following departments.
Display
While camera and hardware specifications usually make for the sales pitch, a gorgeous display impresses right away. The Lumia 730 sports a 4.7-inch OLED screen with 720p resolution and a pixel density of 316ppi. It’s not HD, but the display looks great with vivid colors without any oversaturation. There’s also Gorilla Glass 3 for best in class protection.
The viewing angles are pretty solid, and only at extreme angle you’d notice a minor shift in the contrast. Nokia’s ClearBlack technology offers deep blacks and helps minimize reflectivity. The display is very bright, and even at low brightness setting the outdoor performance is great. Sunlight readability on the Lumia 730 is arguably amongst the best.
Hardware
The Lumia 730 is powered by a quad-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor with 1GB of RAM. Interestingly, the mid-range Lumia 730 shares the same internals as the more expensive ‘affordable flagship’ Lumia 830.
That’s good enough to have a breezy Windows Phone experience, especially since the operating system is definitely lighter on resources. It doesn’t top the charts in benchmark tests against Android smartphones at similar price point, but the real word performance is lag-free and pretty smooth.
You might see a few frame drops while playing graphic-intensive games or a few seconds of the loading/resume screen while switching between apps, but it’s not much significant and would work for most non-power users.
Camera
While the marketing folks for Lumia 730 prefer to flaunt the front camera, the rear camera on the 730 is pretty good as well. The phone boasts of a 6.7-megapixel rear camera with Carl Zeiss optics and the photos captured are pretty good, easily better than most other smartphones in this price range. It doesn’t match the brilliance of the PureView camera on the Lumia 830 or the Lumia 930 obviously, but the color reproduction is great and the photos are nicely saturated.