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Battery life
We've been pretty impressed with the Nokia Lumia 620 in most areas - for a budget handset there's not much that we could realistically expect it to do any better. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the battery could be its downfall.
Rated at 1300mAh, it was never likely to be great, and going into this review it was our single biggest worry.
Depending on your usage patterns, you might be alright with it, since the drain when the screen is off doesn't seem too great, so if you mostly have the phone on standby, but maybe make a few calls and listen to a bit of music you should easily get through a day, probably more.
If on the other hand you plan to spend a lot of time watching videos, browsing the net or using games and apps, then you can expect it to plummet.
We put the Nokia Lumia 620 through our standard battery test of running a 90 minute video from the handset, with the screen at full brightness, emails and social networks set to send push notifications and the battery starting fully charged.
By the end of the video the phone's charge had dropped to 64%, in other words under those conditions you can expect at most 4.5 hours of video before the battery conks out, which really isn't very good.
You can improve that a bit by turning the brightness down or turning on the battery saver, which stops apps running in the background and turns off automatic email syncing, but we'd still hoped for more from it.
On the other hand, battery life seems to be the bane of Windows Phone 8 in general, because none of the other currently available handsets seem much better, so if you're set on Windows Phone 8 it's a problem that might be unavoidable for now.
Connectivity
The Nokia Lumia 620 has a fairly standard array of connectivity options, specifically dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, HSDPA at 21Mbps and HSUPA at 5.76Mbps.
It also features Bluetooth 3.0, NFC and GPS.
It's all pretty easy to set up, with options in the main settings screen for turning on and configuring connections.
But we do wish there was a quicker way to turn Bluetooth on and off, since it's buried several screens deep.
While acceptably fast for most things, the Wi-Fi proved quite slow at loading desktop pages, sometimes taking up to 30 seconds to fully load a page.
However, when sticking to mobile sites, it was plenty fast enough.
Getting files to and from the phone is pretty easy. There's built-in SkyDrive integration for a start, enabling you to easily upload photos and other files at the touch of a button.
You'll also find some other cloud storage sites are supported by apps available in the store.
If you want to get a lot of things onto your phone then you might be better off plugging it into a PC, which, once done, enables you to use it like a USB flash drive and just copy and paste files to the handset.
The folder system is simple too, with clearly labelled Picture, Music and Video folders.
Finally, if you've already got files on a microSD card you can also just pop that into the phone and get at items that way.
