Lumia 930 is 6 months behind the times

[2tomtom]

Some of you disagreeing don't quite seem to have gotten the point - which is that there's nothing about this phone tech-wise that explains why Nokia couldn't have launched it sometime between Dec 2013 (when the 1520 with the same camera went on sale) and Feb 2014 when the Icon went on sale (identical in pretty much all respects). That makes it 6 months late to the party in my view, which comes at a big cost in an industry with a ~12m refresh cycle.

Like foaf I'm really hoping there's a 1030 announcement soon that pushes the boat out with groundbreaking new imaging tech (the whole 41MP thing while still market-leading is getting long in the tooth too).

As to the comments on weight, there is a taste element to this as some people love hefty phones. Personally I want a phone I could forget was in my pocket, and my 920 certainly never managed that, and many people took a similar view. The 930 is a huge improvement on the 920 and the weight might not actually be a problem (won't know until I try), my point was more that it would be nice to see *some* hardware improvement to show for a 6 month lag. As to the relationship between weight and build quality - the HTC One M7 was only 143 grams, and the M8 160 grams, and both of these have been lauded as amongst the highest build quality, so there's room for Nokia to bring the weight down and maintain a premium feel. There's nothing to be gained by having the heaviest flagship phone of the major market players.

In my opinion, the 920/930 may be a bit heavier, but they have wireless charging, which is great once you've tried it.

I have a 920, its been an awesome phone and will update to the 930. Guess the simple answer is, will you be getting a 930? Oh yes, in orange.

 

[camstreet1]

It's not thinner or lighter because they put Qi wireless charging back in. The Icon doesn't have this feature.

The Icon does have Qi wireless charging...

Just to re-iterate, I do think the 930 is/will be a great phone, and clearly a big step up from the 920, but by not releasing it until mid-summer they'll be competing with expectations for e.g. the next iphone and sales will suffer as a consequence. Nokia's problem is not convincing 920 owners to upgrade, they need to convince HTC/Samsung/iPhone users to switch, and relatively small improvements/feature parity with other flagships won't be enough to do it.

I'd love to see WP with close to 20% market share across Europe and the US 12 months from now, but the delay in bringing the same tech from the 1520/Icon into an international flagship makes this virtually impossible imo. Which phone are current high-end android/iOS users going to buy in the next 3 months until the 930 launches? Probably not a Lumia.

​Nokia are definitely improving their pace and together with Apple the most innovative phone company out there, but I think they're still 6 months behind where they need their release schedule to be.

 

[89caps]

I think you're making some good points. I was waiting for that one feature that would blow other phones away. The 920 had that effect, but don't see that with the 930 other than 20MP camera.

 

[PureView]

SoC is not everything in a phone. There are other things like screen, camera, wireless charging, nfc, etc......

It's not everything, but it's an extremely important part none the less.

 

[hasasimo]

The Icon does have Qi wireless charging...

Just to re-iterate, I do think the 930 is/will be a great phone, and clearly a big step up from the 920, but by not releasing it until mid-summer they'll be competing with expectations for e.g. the next iphone and sales will suffer as a consequence. Nokia's problem is not convincing 920 owners to upgrade, they need to convince HTC/Samsung/iPhone users to switch, and relatively small improvements/feature parity with other flagships won't be enough to do it.

I'd love to see WP with close to 20% market share across Europe and the US 12 months from now, but the delay in bringing the same tech from the 1520/Icon into an international flagship makes this virtually impossible imo. Which phone are current high-end android/iOS users going to buy in the next 3 months until the 930 launches? Probably not a Lumia.

​Nokia are definitely improving their pace and together with Apple the most innovative phone company out there, but I think they're still 6 months behind where they need their release schedule to be.

It's also a problem that loads of 920 users (such as myself and plenty of others on this forum) weren't even convinced to upgrade to a 930. When there are compromises you have to make in comparison to your current device (no glance screen for instance), that isn't much of an upgrade. I'm personally going to have to wait for a true flagship, hopefully before the year is out. Either that or go with the 1520. But every time I see it I think "that's just ridiculously big."

Nokia is certainly innovative. Been so for decades. Apple? I'm not sure if that was tongue in cheek. You couldn't even use an MP3 as a ringtone when the iPhone came out. Their rear cameras were 2mp, vs 5mp on the Nokia N95 for instance. Apple was either dead last to adopt or still hasn't even adopted 3G, LTE, NFC, OIS, big screens, the list really does go on and on. Quite possibly the least innovative OEM and the OEM that's consistently furthest behind the competition for my money.

 

[theefman]

So is anyone going to give an actual example why the 930 specs are so bad? Or is this all just the typical ego thing of wanting specs but not actually needing them?

 

[jongthechemist]

I see this more like an international (re)release of the 929/930. Maybe the numbering is off which seems to upset a lot of people. Should they just hold the release of the Icon for June? Probably not, for the WP users on Verizon. Should they make Lumia 1020+Icon for 8.1 but slapping the 930 name? Probably a better marketing stunt for now. But I'm seeing the successor of the 1020 for making two international releases in a short period of time, which can help increase sales. Last year they launched 925 in May and 1020 in July.

You can just buy the Icon, no need to be all emotional since buying other phone now might probably too late in the cycle. The Icon is a great phone in December, it still is now or even in June. Or you can wait till the new cycle arrives and see another Lumia competes with iPhone 6 or the Galaxy S5?

As for me, I'll most probably buy the 1520 since it will be much cheaper by June (and supports glance and SDcard) or just wait to see if my 920 can handle the new update if I decided that having extra storage or photo resolution is unimportant enough. They mentioned during one of the session in Build that an updated 520 is expected to run as fast as current 920, so I'm not going for specs wars.

 

[dby2011]

You would assume maybe Nokia is holding off to release a flagship phone this fall to compete with the iPhone 6- maybe the first Microsoft Surface phone.

 

[Keith Wallace]

In almost every conceivable category on the spec sheet Nokia has made a more significant improvement over one iteration than Samsung has over TWO iterations of their much heralded Galaxy S series, or than Apple has made over the last FOUR iPhones! Not to Mention HTC from the One X to the One to the One M8. The list goes on...

OK, let's get something straight here...you were right on until this paragraphs, which is just silliness. Now, this applies to the Samsung and HTC lines, but I'll stick to saying "Galaxy" for this, because I don't want to type "Galaxy and One" over and over...

The S III came out MONTHS before the 920. The S4 was a few months after it. The 920 was in the middle of the MSM8960's life cycle, so it was positioned awkwardly (Apple does the same thing, but using their own SoCs prevents the mid-life issue, despite releasing in the same time frame). The S4 used the Snapdragon 600, a chunk of the SoC market that Windows Phone ignored (there are a few 400- and 800-powered devices, but none use the 600). Nokia AGAIN waited forever to release new stuff, rolling out MSM8960 phone after MSM8960 phone until the following fall, when the 1520 got the Snapdragon 800. Now, the S5 will run on the slightly-faster Snapdragon 801. SO what I'm getting at is:

1. The performance gap from the S III to the S5 (those "TWO iterations") is actually larger than the 920->930 gap. Yeah, if you consider the camera and speakers, you MIGHT have an argument, but those aren't measurable things. In the measurables (CPU/GPU/RAM quality), the Galaxy line improved more.

2. You're comparing different time frames. It's really tough to compare the improvements of the Galaxy line to the Lumia 9xx line here. If the 930 (or even the Icon) had released last November, and it ran on the 800, it would be better. However, they made their release time WORSE now, with the Icon not coming out until February and the 930 not following until June. So, in reality, they just put 2 releases into 3 release times. They skipped what would have been a 600-powered device in November, but they're also not putting in that extra bit of power in the 801, so they're going to release the 930 later than the S5, and with less power. This means that Nokia is either going to skip a Fall 2014 release, or they're going to get stuck in a dead zone for converting people from Android.

Honestly, Nokia woudl be best-served to skip a Fall 2014 release, though. What they SHOULD do is let the next device (940, I assume) launch right before the S6 comes out. Make sure you have hardware identical to Samsung's, and have your devices releasing when the Android users' contracts are up. Otherwise, they get stuck trying to decide between waiting 6 months for a Nokia device or buying 6-month-old (or worse) hardware when going to Windows Phone.

But for the most part, I agree with you. It's just you're trying to give Windows Phone/Nokia WAY too much credit for what is really just a terrible release cycle.

 

[Squachy]

So is anyone going to give an actual example why the 930 specs are so bad? Or is this all just the typical ego thing of wanting specs but not actually needing them?

Nope, higher numbers are always better.

 

[tipu2185]

Nope, higher numbers are always better.

Personally I don't agree with you. Higher numbers are never always better. Plus WP OS really does not need higher numbers. As far as higher numbers are concerned you might see lag / inconsistent performance in some high number spec android phones. I really depends on coding as well to optimize OS \ app to respond to that hardware. There is nothing wrong with 930's specs as far as screen, CPU and GPU are concerned. Though lack of screen memory is a big turn off. Limited storage is bit of concern as well though 32Gb is not that bad.

In my opinion they need to revamp OS to new level (Email forwarding, attachments management, file manager and many small things that power users require). A lot of improvements are made but MS is not doing their best. Since they are late in race to capture cell phone market they need to make hardware which does not miss things like glance (If they wanted to optimize cost they could have added blinking LED to notify missed calls, msgs, emails). Better storage options should have been there as well. Since they are also trying to take blackberry's corporate market they needed to have a solid battery life time as well. Over nothing bad but small things do matter when you are starting from behind.

 

[Weavers]

Fact: Lumia could've released this phone 2 months earlier. What a travesty, the same release time frame as giants HTC and Samsung = no chance.

 

[Mars2003]

Yeah, whilst this phone is still pretty much up there tech wise, it's still the 1520 internals in a 5" frame. In effect the criticism here is not the level of tech here (SD801 is only marginally better and SD805 is not available yet), it's that this phone should've been out alongside the 1520.

 

[DaT Franchise]

Oh no it doesn't have the 801!!!! The 801 isn't that much better then the 800, the 805 is a different story as its 64bit. The 1520,icon and 930 still sport the best CPU and gpu out, they benchmark better, have better battery life in relation to battery size in there respective competition and best of all you don't need to reboot the damn thing every day to keep the lag away because Google still hasn't learned how to properly set up the LMK and oom. Its not that MS didn't want to use the 805, LG Samsung and HTC wanted to as well but its simply another 6-8 months out. The fact is there's phones with the sd800 are well over powered and have no problems out running the few phones running the 801

 

[MSFTisMIA]

My take on this is with Qualcomm making all the chips that runs most high end and mid range models, it could be a mix of Nokia finishing up its own individual projects before we see the next wave of innovation once MSFT is fully on board, and making sure the current projects are adequately supplied parts wise. Only Apple and Samsung are Status A OEMs, which means parts suppliers fill their orders with higher priority. HTC used to be, but lost that status last year officially, hence why the One M7 was delayed and why the M8's camera isn't better.

If you take the idea that the 930 is an improved 920, not a full upgrade, I agree. For that, folks have to wait for the gestures related stuff to come through. As much as I enjoyed my 920 (my dad has it now) and my 925, I may get the 930 later in the year and retire my 8X and sell my 925.

Nokia is still in the process of streamlining their market offerings. I won't be surprised if MSFT uses the Apple strategy of pushing the old flagships into the mid range and kill off lines like the 8xx and 7xxx series.

So let's see how 8.1 runs on the older hardware first. If you've got the cash and itch for a 930, go for it. But the phone isn't outdated. Plus, I wouldn't be surprised is based on how the contracts were written, VZW offered the most upfront, allowing them to fill those orders before launching the 930 with a higher capacity for production after in a few months. The Chennai plant issue may prove to be a serious short term setback as well...

 

[DaT Franchise]

Well its all relative, the s4 to the s5 isn't a huge jump, the iPhone 4-4s-5-5s isn't a big jump and the m7-m8 isn't a big jump, there have only been a few phones that took a massive jump the optimus g to the g2 and the note 2 to the note 3. So if you look at it as its not much of an upgrade and wait for the next best thing you will always be waiting, mobile technology is slowing down its not what it was 2 to 3 years ago when you had huge leaps in tech, its more incremental now.

 

[davesannie]

Revolution is over, now it's time for evolution...so it will take a lot of time for another revolution. What I'm trying to say is that the performances between the high end phones are so small at this moment that we can not speak about 6 months behind.


Sent from my iPhone 5S using Tapatalk

 

[DaT Franchise]

^^^^^exactly

 

[89caps]

930 really should have been released a year after the 920 and we wouldn't be having the discussion of it being behind the Android competition.

 

[SpareBot]

I agree with the topic 100 %. And that why I feel like a price tag around 499 ?is much more appropriate!