Durban - If you’ve been obsessed with cellphones for as long as I have – since their arrival in South Africa more than 20 years ago – you’ll remember the phase of cheap and cheerful handsets with brightly coloured, swoppable plastic covers.
Nokia, then the undisputed king of cellphone makers, popularised them with its line of Xpress-on covers for several generations of its budget devices.
So it’s more than a little ironic that I was asked several times in the last fortnight I got to spend with Nokia’s latest entry-level smartphone, the Lumia 630, whether it was an iPhone 5C.
It’s an understandable mistake. Lying face down on a table, the 630 does look at first glance like the more affordable variant of the iPhone introduced by Apple last year with a choice of – wait for it – bright, plastic covers.
One youngster, bless his hipster socks, testily suggested Nokia had copied Apple when I gently corrected his mistake.
I had to suppress a quiet chuckle. It was Apple, after all, whose introduction of the original iPhone in 2007 set in motion the touch-screen smartphone revolution that knocked the then Finnish-owned Nokia from its perch at the top of the cellphone pile.
To be accused of copying Apple in a category it pioneered must really rub salt in the wounds.
Looking on the bright side, though, it’s thanks to top-quality, but affordable devices like the Lumia 630, and its predecessor, the 620, that Nokia’s cellphone division, now owned by Microsoft, is staging a successful comeback.
True to its Xpress-on roots, the 630 comes in a choice of cheerfully luminous, swoppable back covers. But it’s the price tag that will really get you smiling, just R1 999 without a contract.
That’s R4 000 cheaper than its iPhone 5C doppelganger. And you really do get a lot for your money.
Despite its plastic cladding, the 630 feels solid and comfortable in the hand, not at all cheap like its competitors in this price bracket.
With a 4.5-inch screen, it’s small enough to slip into most pockets, but big enough to browse the web and watch videos, although the pixel density of 218 pixels per inch isn’t spectacular.
Although it has been fitted with a rather anaemic 512MB of RAM, using the 630 never felt laggy, thanks no doubt to it running the latest version of the Windows Phone operating system which was specially designed to be snappy and responsive, even on low-end devices.
A recurring complaint about Windows phones has been the lack of choice when it comes to applications and games compared with iOS and Android competitors. Happily, that is becoming less of an issue every day and you’ll now find almost every popular app on those platforms in the Windows Phone app store.
The 5 megapixel camera isn’t bad either, especially for a device in this price range. There’s no flash, so low-light shots are, as you’d expect, terrible. But the daytime snaps I took were surprisingly rich and detailed and, thanks to the recent addition of Instagram and Pinterest to the Windows Phone app stable, really easy to share.
Selfie addicts should be aware there’s no front-facing camera, so you’ll have do them the old-fashioned, twisty wrist way.
Pleasingly for a budget phone, the 630 comes with a built-in GPS which works brilliantly with Nokia’s excellent free maps and voice navigation software.
Also bundled free with the phone is Nokia’s MixRadio music streaming service and Microsoft Office; so you’ll be able to view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
Finally, battery life is good. I generally squeezed a day and a half of moderate mixed use out of it.
If you’re in the market for the best-value, top-quality sub-R2 000 smartphone, stop looking now. You’ve found it.
l Got any questions or comments? E-mail me on [email protected] or follow me on Twitter @alanqcooper.
Sunday Tribune