Nokia Lumia 930

Available now
2nd April 2014

When the Lumia 920 was announced a year-and-a-half ago it was the first Nokia for a long time that nobody had to make excuses for in terms of capabilities. Although it was followed up with the Lumia 925, this version simply stripped the 920 down to make it lighter, so the 920 and 925 were beginning to look a little bit stale.

So Nokia fans will be pleased to see the new Nokia Lumia 930, which despite the similar-sounding model number is a huge step up from the 920 and it competes very well with the flagship smartphones of rivals.

The Lumia 930 will be one of the first smartphones to run the new Windows Phone 8.1 operating system, which brings a number of additional features and revisions to the only real alternative to Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Chief among these will be the rollout of a Siri-like assistant under the name Cortana although that won't be available at launch. Nokia also have their own exclusive apps such as Nokia MixRadio and HERE Maps as well.

But this isn't really about software, the hardware specifications of the Lumia 930 are impressive. The display is a 5" full HD 1080 x 1920 pixel ClearBlack OLED panel, on the back is a 20 megapixel PureView camera with optical image stabilisation, plus a 1.2 megapixel one on the front. Inside is a 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of non-expandable flash storage.

Inside is a large 2420 mAh battery, and the Lumia 930 measures 137 x 71 x 9.8mm and weighs 167 grams.. which is less than the Lumia 920, but then some housebricks weigh less than the 920 as well. The Lumia 930 supports the Qi wireless charging standard, NFC, LTE and all the usual smartphone features that you would expect.

Although the Lumia 930 comes in a wide variety of bright colours, the metal edging does look rather cheekily like an iPhone 5S - but then in turn the iPhone 5C looks a lot like a Lumia. It's certainly a nice looking device though.

It seems that the Lumia 930 has all the good bits from the Lumia 920 and 925 plus a lot more. The only real disadvantage it has is it Windows Phone doesn't have the range of quality applications that iOS and Android do, although it is certainly getting better.

Nokia quote a price of $599 before tax and subsidy (even though the 930 will not be sold in the US). This equates to about €520 when you take tax into consideration, which is about two-thirds of the price of a 32GB iPhone 5S for something with a higher spec. Nokia says that the Lumia 930 should be available in most regions outside of the Americas from June onwards.