Nokia Lumia 625 review

Big screen, low price, but is it any good?

Nokia Lumia 625 review
A big screen isn't everything

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Maps

Nokia Lumia 625

Here Maps

The Nokia Lumia 625 comes with HERE Maps and HERE Drive. The former is mapping software while the latter is a sat-nav and both are pretty good at their respective jobs and free to use.

HERE Maps very quickly locked on to our location every time we used it, and can get directions and highlight local businesses and points of interest.

You can also view a satellite image of an area, see public transport lines and even view traffic information from the map itself.

It's fairly plain, and we're not huge fans of the washed-out colour scheme, but it works well.

HERE Drive works quite well too. You can download maps for use later so that you won't need a data connection when out on the road, you can set up specific commutes allowing the app to warn you of traffic and suggest alternate routes, and it's all round easy to use, giving you a clear display that's simple to follow when driving.

Apps

Nokia Lumia 625

The app selection on the Nokia Lumia 625 is standard Lumia fare. There's an alarm clock, calculator and calendar, all of which work much as you'd expect and in the case of the calendar allows you to import data from linked accounts.

There are also a couple of fairly pointless inclusions in the form of Angry Birds Roost, which basically just gives you access to Angry Birds wallpapers, ringtones and the like and 'World of Red Bull' which has a variety of Red Bull sponsored extreme sports videos and news stories.

The two most interesting apps are OneNote and Office, which are mobile versions of these Microsoft applications.

They're stripped down a little from the desktop versions, but they both work pretty well and could come in handy if you plan to use your phone for work and already use either of them on your computer.

Nokia Lumia 625

It's Office, on a mobile!

One app that wasn't pre-installed on our review handset but which may come with release versions, given that it's advertised on the Nokia Lumia 625 website, is JobLens.

It's a tool for finding jobs, as you might have guessed from the name. You can link your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to it to find jobs in your network, or just do a blanket search.

You can then view job locations on a map, allowing you to look for work in very specific areas. It's definitely a handy tool, but when it comes to actually applying you'll probably want to switch the phone for a computer.

There aren't a huge amount of apps pre-installed on the Nokia Lumia 625 then, but much of what's there is genuinely useful and you can always get more from the Windows Phone Store, though the selection is a little more limited than on the Android or iOS stores.

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.