NokiaLumia 630 UK SIM-Free Smartphone - Orange (Windows, 4.5-inch, 8GB)

Having just broke my previous phone, a Moto G 1st gen Sim free smartphone I needed a quick and cheap replacement. Having read numerous reviews about windows phones, I decided to go for this one at a relatively cheap price.First of all the speed of this phone is unreal for the price. My previous phone was quite slow sometimes, often lagging or freezing as i interchanged between each app. This phone performs expertly when changing between each app. The experience is very smooth.Another great feature of this phone is cortana and the voice recognition on this is different class. I am from the Isle of Lewis, I have a very strong scottish accent which means a lot of people not from where I live, do not understand me. However cortana seems to understand every word I speak to her. This function was brilliant, as in my previous phone certain words I say were pronounced differently.Mix radio is also brilliant. The amount of songs and different mixes you can listen to is excellent. Whether you boogie to some 80s classics, or lose your nut to some dance floorfillers, it's great.Now you're probably wondering why I speak so excellently about this phone but yet I have only given it 4 stars. Well here I am about to explain.First of all the sound is not the greatest, although I wasn't expecting much, there seemed to be an absence of bass when listening to music. Who knows? Maybe I have messed around with the controls. I'm not sure how to change it back. And that brings me onto my next point, learning the functions of this phone is a lot more complicated, especially if you are a newcomer to windows phone. In the box there was some start up instructions but nothing actually about the functions of the phone. Hey I could just look it up online. But I'm one of those stubborn men who like a set of instructions in front of me to read.Next of all there's no front facing camera. This would be a bit disappointing if I wasn't a real man, but real men don't take selfies, so alas this does not bother me so much. It is worth a mention though, as other users may want a front facing camera.Last but not least, apps. The apps you get on this phone are somewhat limited, but not as bad as people say it is. One thing I was disappointed about was the absence of snapchat. For many people including myself, snapchat is a major tool these days for keeping in touch with people. Hey you could use what's app or facebook or many other tools. But I personally liked snapchat the most.I think 4 stars out of 5 is well justified for this phone.

Good solid windows phone. Brought for my wife (I already have a work one) to replace an aging android phone. Uses the Microsoft windows operating system which is intuitive and in my opinion much underrated. I wont describe what it can and can't do as that is dealt with by the product info and in my opinion it does not make any false claims.The windows app store is tiny in comparison to Google's and Apple's and this is the only real drawback with windows phones in general. App wise it has all the basic offerings but if there is a specific app that you cannot live without (do you really really need it ?!!) and it (or a comparable app) is not available on windows then this or any other windows phone may not be the one for you. Its a relatively low cost phone and as such will not set the world alight but it does the basics well plus moreAll in all a good buy

Well quite a few months in and here is my review.Good points:Cheap to buyNice build qualityNice expandable memoryGeneric USB connectionRemovable batteryLooks goodBad points:Windows Phone software. Updates once a blue moon, and when they do come no short-comings appear to be addressed, just bugs that I've never heard or seen that make no tangible difference to me.No manual or proper instructions for the phone unless you want to watch videos or scour websites all day long trying out different search terms to figure out how to do simple tasks. How about a start to finish manual for me to read?No included USB cable.No sync to local machine for full phone backup. Only cloud backup for full phone recovery is possible. Great if you trust it, and have the bandwidth. iTunes manage to offer full phone backup/recovery on a local machine. MS seem to only allow cloud backup. Useless.Crashes for no reason over-night sometimes. Twice since I've had the phone = twice late up in the morning. Once a month failures like this are not acceptable. My old iPhone 3GS did this twice in several years, not twice in several months.Clock doesn't appear to auto-set time/date here.Seems to use battery overnight for no reason, despite turning all apps to low-power settings/no background usage. 50% > sub 20% in 8hrs?Alarm is terrible, if it goes off at all because the phone has reset/crashed/run out of battery for no raisin. Dismiss mere centimetres from snooze with no lock-out or password request is just stupid! No way to set a snooze or no snooze before the alarm goes off, or snooze duration etc.Fixed brightness is useless if you had it set to dark the evening before, and don't use the phone again till you're outside. You can't even SEE the screen to turn it up!A cost-saving too far.General UI seems a bit sluggish sometimes. Ie, the date/time screen toggles, or airplane mode toggles seem to take 5-10s to take effect, or even apparently crash the phone with no response for minutes.No way to watch/listen to my media centre assets. No DLNA or equivalent built into the phone.Seems to be a weird behaviour on the back button that is confusing, back/close/home seem to arbitrarily occur depending on what you just did... if you remember that far back. It just makes no sense to me. Maybe it does to some but everything else I've ever used doesn't work like this so why re-invent the round wheel as a square? Just to be different? It doesn't work. It's stupid.No clock on the screen unless you go to the home screen or drag down the update screen. So if you're watching a film for example, it has to stop/close just so you can check the time. Yet you have a back/home/search button ALWAYS visible, even during a film. The time is more important to me than super quick access to search or a global back button.Store is full of junk-ware software or apps I wouldn't trust further than I could throw them. MS need to support the app market somehow. Trying to break into this market big time when your apps are so limited/dodgy isn't a good move.All in this is a nice piece of hardware, with a terribly designed and maintained piece of software.I've given the phone several months and many updates and it just seems to get worse rather than better.Microsoft want to expand into this market but they're doing a terrible job of it. How can it takes months to add simple functionality to an alarm clock for example, or add a way to do a local phone backup ala iTunes with the iPhone?I hate to go back to Apple and their iPhone, but at least they can make the important bits of the phone work. Ie, alarms that work, not crashing or freezing up on simple tasks, backing up locally, things that make it a dependable PDA, phone for making calls, decent apps, iMessage or other ways to use WiFi to keep the phone in touch without using 3rd party apps.Microsoft, sort your act out!Nokia, nice work. A shame that Microsoft can't make software as good as you make phones.