Nokia Lumia 625 review: Big and colorful

Introduction

The Nokia Lumia 625 is one of the last smartphones by Nokia, putting an end to what has been a bumpy ride for the Finns in the modern phone era. Whether the Lumia line will find greener pastures under Microsoft remains to be seen, but one thing's for certain - the Lumia 625 will be one of Nokia's last Lumia releases.

Oh well, the 625 certainly won't qualify as Nokia's loudest bang on its way out - that honor belongs to the Lumia 1020 flagship.Or, if we're lucky, a certain phablet may be the gadget to remember them by.

Back to the point though, the Lumia 625's main attention grabber is the healthy boost in screen size. By going from 3.8" to 4.7", the Lumia 625 gains almost a full inch in screen diagonal over its predecessor. This, along with LTE support, higher clock speed and full-HD video recording, highlights the primary advantages of the Nokia Lumia 625. For a more complete list of specs, you can refer to the following list.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM support
• Tri-band 3G and LTE support with 42 Mbps HSDPA and 5.7 Mbps HSUPA
• 4.7" 16M-color IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen of 480 x 800 pixels with Gorilla Glass 2
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, 1080p video recording @ 30fps
• 0.3MP front-facing camera
• Windows Phone 8 OS
• 1.2GHz dual-core Krait CPU, Adreno 305 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8930 chipset
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band
• GPS receiver with A-GPS and GLONASS support
• Free lifetime voice-guided navigation
• 8GB of inbuilt storage
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• Built-in accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• microUSB port
• Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP and file transfers
• Deep SNS integration
• Xbox Live integration and Xbox management
• Digital compass
• Nokia Music
• FM radio
• 2000mAh battery
• Unparalleled talk time in our battery test

Main disadvantages

• 4.7" quite a stretch for the WVGA resolution
• App catalog falls short of Android and iOS
• Non-user-accessible battery
• Only 512MB of RAM
• No system-wide file manager
• No NFC
• Below average loudspeaker performance

Thanks to the larger screen and resulting larger dimensions, the Lumia 625 feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor. But bigger is not necessarily better, and the Lumia 625 may learn it the hard way. Big screen on a budget sure sounds nice, but WVGA on 4.7" could be too much of a stretch. And it's not a ClearBlack display either, which may as well be the only downgrade compared to the original Lumia 620 - along with the missing NFC chip.

No upgrade to the 512MB of RAM is potentially a minor disappointment, which can quickly be put to rest if the Lumia 625 behaves in our tests. The extra 700mAh of battery capacity is also a welcome addition.

Nokia Lumia 625 studio pics

Up next, we'll get started by unboxing the Lumia 625 and proceed with a closer look at the design and build quality.