Nokia Lumia 735 Review

CPU Performance

This is the third Lumia smartphone that I have reviewed in the past year with the same SoC inside, so there should be no surprises as far as performance. The 1 GB of RAM is important, as some Windows Store apps are only available to devices with at least 1 GB of memory. The Snapdragon 400 MSM8926 provides plenty of power for navigating the OS, but lacks the grunt of devices like the Lumia 930 and HTC One M8. It is more forgivable in a device at this price point than the Lumia 830, even though there are other devices that may have higher specification SoCs for at or around this price point.

As this is the third device we have tested with the same SoC, there is not much to discuss about performance, but if you would like to compare this device to any other phone we have tested, you can use our online benchmark comparison database, Bench.

Quad-core Cortex A7 is not going to light the world on fire, and the Lumia 735 performs very similarly to the Lumia 630 and 830 that we have tested previously.

GPU Performance

Although the GPU powering the Lumia 735 is the same as the 630 and 830, we can now compare the Adreno 305 graphics in Windows Phone with the same GFXBench version as is available on iOS and Android. Kishonti, who are the developers of GFXBench, recently updated the Windows Phone version to 3.0.4, up from the old version 2.7. BaseMark X 1.1 is our other GPU benchmark for mobile phones, but it would not launch on this phone, and seems to have some compatibility issues with Windows Phone as I have seen this before with the Lumia 930. Performance should be the same as the Lumia 830 for BaseMark X 1.1.

Having GFXBench 3.0 now on the platform, we can now analyse the performance degradation over time.

There is no throttling at all on the Lumia 735, with the first and last set of runs for GFXBench at exactly the same frames per second.

Compared to the Snapdragon 800, performance is not even close, but with the pricing of the Lumia 735, and other advantages of the Snapdragon 400 such as battery life, the performance is not too bad for basic apps. The Lumia 930 can open apps quite a bit quicker, but with Windows Phone, animations are always smooth and fluid.