Nokia Lumia 930 review – the last great Nokia smartphone?

Windows Phone 8.1

Of course, a great screen, excellent performance and a decent battery life would be desirable on any handset, but the Lumia 930 ties it all together with Microsoft’s latest mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8.1. With its greater focus on personalisation, it’s never been easier to make the jump from Android and iOS.

Live Tiles still occupy the main home page, but you can now set a background image that scrolls down the home screen underneath. You can also swipe down from the top of the screen to bring up the Android-esque Action Centre notification bar. Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant, has also finally arrived, and you can read all about it in our Lumia 830 review.

^ Windows Phone 8.1 is a huge improvement over Windows Phone 7, as you can now set your own background images and have up to three columns of Live Tiles

The Windows Phone Store still has plenty of decent apps, including BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD, Demand 5, Netflix, Spotify, TV CatchUp and DailyMotion for your entertainment needs, personal finance apps from all the major banks, social networking apps, Synology’s SD apps for anyone with a NAS device, and travel apps such as Waze, TripAdvisor and TheTrainLine.

Dropbox has also finally made an appearance on the Windows Phone Store, but we’re still waiting for Sky Go, Amazon Prime Instant Video and Google’s various services apart from Search, but there are plenty of other WP8.1 exclusive apps that help elevate the phone above older Windows Phone 8 devices.

^ Cortana works well for the most part, but it’s still got a long way to go before it can beat Apple’s Siri for best digital assistant

The first and newest of these is Video Tuner. This is Microsoft’s exclusive video editing and sharing app for Lumia WP8.1 devices, giving you the chance to add filters and non-DRM protected music tracks straight from your phone to any videos you shoot, and adjust the length, frame rate, contrast, exposure, and saturation effects. All videos are saved to your OneDrive account, of which you get 7GB of free storage with the Lumia 930, but you can also share them instantly to other social networks.

Old favourites such as Nokia Storyteller and Nokia Creative Studio are also present. Storyteller groups your photos together based on where and when they were taken, while Creative Studio is effectively the Video Tuner for your photos, letting you add filters, make collages, adjust the focus and blur of certain objects and change the colour balance, brightness, clarity and vibrancy of each shot.