Review – Nokia Lumia 520 – A Low Budget Windows Phone 8 smartphone

Nokia Lumia 520 is the jump taken from Lumia 510 with the old Windows Phone 7 series to adopt new range of Lumia series offering Windows Phone 8 platform with even lower grade hardware specifications. Lumia 520 is the low-budget smartphone from Nokia getting even beneath the Lumia 620.

Not including Lumia 620, we have reviewed all of the Windows Phone 8 devices from Nokia up to the Lumia 920 followed by Lumia 820 and the recent Lumia 720. Now this is about the lowest budget Windows Phone 8 Lumia 520 from Nokia. If you were looking even deeper to get some more budget Windows Phone 8, then it’s the lowest you can get. Lumia 520 was globally launched at starting price of €139 (EUR) excluding taxes and subsidies. Here in Pakistan it’s priced at Rs.18,900/- (PKR)

That’s late when we got our hands on Lumia 520 when it was also first announced along with the big brother Lumia 720 at MWC back in February. Both launched in Pakistan a little later in April. Thanks to Nokia Pakistan for sending us a review unit. And here we are, after using/testing the Lumia 520 as an all-day primary device turning none of the features off.

Take a look at the key features and official profile pictures of Lumia 520 before we move forward.

Nokia Lumia 520 Features/Specifications:

  • Windows Phone 8 OS
  • 1.0 GHz Dual Core Krait CPU (Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8227) with dedicated graphics with Adreno 305, 512MB of RAM
  • 119.9 x 64 x 9.9 mm in volume, weighs 124 grams.
  • 4” IPS LCD display with WVGA resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. Super Sensitive Touch
  • 8GB Internal Storage + Extendable via microSD card + 7GB cloud storage space on SkyDrive.
  • 5.0 Megapixels Camera
    • Resolutions: 2592 x 1936 pixels
    • Aperture opening: f/2.4 , Focus Range: 10cm to infinity
    • 720p video recording at 30 frames per second.
  • Wireless LAN (WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n), Bluetooth 3.0.
  • GPS/AGPS and GLONASS – Digital Compass, 3D Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity Sensor, Ambient Light Sensor.
  • Networks & Data: GSM/3G GPRS/EDGE/HSPDA/HSUPA/WCDMA

    

Nokia Lumia 520 does miss the features like Secondary front facing camera, LED flash with main camera module, wireless charging, NFC. But of course it’s low-budget phone with less features. There is Lumia 620 available with a few of these features at a bit a higher price tag of Rs. 24,000/- in Pakistan. You need those features? you need to compare them first. We guess other missing things in Lumia 520 are not as much important as the front-facing camera is, in a smartphone for making voice calls with video feed e.g. on Skype So it’s simple. If one doesn’t need that, Lumia 520 is healthy deal in its price for what it serves with.

The Lumia 520 comes in the five gorgeous colors what Nokia always have used in their most of the mobiles/smartphones, yellow, cyan, red, white and black. We got our hands on the Cyan variant. We did like the color but I always have preferred the black or white from Nokia.

Unboxing the Lumia 520

Lumia 520 came in the Nokia’s standard slot-in blue box with the stacked compartments inside it having the top tray serving with the device Lumia 520 itself.

  

The break down of the box is not anything different than the shown below. A user manual is added like always. The retail package contains the stereo headset and the fast travel charger with micro USB connector. A USB connectivity/charging cable is in the box but it’s in fact a piece of the cable – 6 inches almost.

 

Build and Design

Nokia Lumia 520 is a smart fit in most of the hands. Focusing on the target market, a low-budget phone of course would have cost lower but it ends up in making just a 119.9 x 64 x 9.9 mm smartphone  that weighs as reasonable as 124 grams.

When talking about weight or thickness, we never found Nokia following the footsteps of other manufacturers to make it slimmest or lowest in weight but yes making it large sure is according to the market demand. However being an entry level contender Nokia Lumia 520 is in the smaller league. Enough to fit in the hands, Lumia 520 indeed looks nice.

  

Nokia Lumia 520 is not having a slick looking curved Gorilla Glass, neither it has the unibody premium look but considering the low-budget device, Lumia 520 is sturdy unloosen letting you feel that you own a healthy device instead of a lousy feeling. To make the good looks even better, Nokia did a good job to add curved edges on the back cover.

  

A pull-out from top to open the back cover design is impressive in operation. As easy as just putting a thumb nail in the top-mid between the front glass and the back cover while pushing the other thumb down ahead on the bottom of the device.

  

Opening back cover is always required whenever you want to remove or replace the battery, SIM card and micro SD memory card. Let’s pack it back and review the outfit of the Lumia 520.

First thing first, plain straight glass on the front is not even the Gorilla Glass, let alone the Gorilla Glass 2 came on Lumia 720. But very frankly, as specified being a scratch resistant glass, it is indeed scratch resistant. Impressively after full primary use of the this device without any add-on protection, the screen is as smooth as it was arrived. However it’s more friendly with your fingers than you. You will be bothered of seeing smudge every few minutes after you completely clean it. On the top there is an earpiece with the proximity and ambient light sensor but no front-facing camera.

 

Back cover is matte plastic with curved edges and a camera module on the back. Loud speaker is also hosted on the bottom right.

 

Bottom on the front, there standard Windows Phone 8 soft keys. In Lumia 520, these keys do not lighten up with input and ambient light requirements. That’s what, I think, should have been added.

 

Top of the Nokia Lumia 520 hosts the 3.5mm audio jack. The microUSB port is provided on the bottom side of the phone.

Left side of the phone is completely free from any jobs.

 

Right side of the phone serves with the 3 keys. Volume rocker with up and down buttons. Power/Lock unlock key. The camera shutter key.

Long pressing the camera shutter key 2-step down, awakes the phone and directly takes into the native camera application for quick access to the camera UI. Even when the lock-screen password is activated, the procedure will give access to the camera UI but will not give access to the interfaces without giving a correct password. A “lock icon” will be provided in the camera UI in such a case.

Nokia Lumia 520 is lying down with the Lumia720.

Nokia Lumia 720 & Lumia 520 Nokia Lumia 720 & Lumia 520 Nokia Lumia 720 & Lumia 520 Nokia Lumia 720 & Lumia 520

Screen & Display

When personally talking, the 4 inch screen is my best one to have in front pockets. For me it’s the normal size of a phone and not the mini one. Bigger than this are, for me, unusual being a phone. Putting the advantages of bigger screens aside, I am talking about a phone in itself. For the budget we are talking, 4” screen of Lumia 520 is none less than the perfect deal. With the WVGA resolution of 480×800 pixels, Lumia 520 serves the pixel density of 235 PPI which of course is better than the Lumia 720. Ok! that’s the best thing we have talked about Nokia Lumia 520’s display/screen.

It’s good indoors with less options of angle of view. There is no ClearBlack technology on the display of Nokia Lumia 520 and contrast ratio is no good. We missed the ClearBlack display on Lumia 520 a lot specially when used besides the Lumia 720.

Due to the reflection on the glass, in outdoors, the visibility level difficult for readability.

Nokia Lumia 720 vs Lumia 520 - Display Nokia Lumia 720 vs Lumia 520 - Display

Camera & Photography:

Nokia Lumia 520 equips with a 5 megapixels camera which takes photos up to the resolution of 2592×1936 pixels. Image quality in still photos are good in its class details is better while dynamic range is good as well. High noise level is present and colors were not what was seen by the eyes. A little cold feel is overcast.

  

We really felt the missing of a Flash in Nokia Lumia 520 when taking pictures indoor. Following were the shots taken on manual ISO settings with different lightening conditions.

Left (ISO-100, Spot on Light Bulb), Right (ISO-800, Fully covered with a shade under a spot light bulb)

 

Focus range was little impressive as Nokia Lumia 520 took shots from much closer to the object.

Camera UI & Software Add-ons (lenses)

Camera interface in Windows Phone 8 is one of the basic interfaces out there. Android is undoubtedly way ahead when talking about the camera user interface. In Lumia 520 or any Windows Phone 8, you will find very straight forward options to handle white balance, ISO settings, scene modes, exposure values and aspect ratio. The good thing is that these settings at least can be set at vast variations e.g. the ISO sensitivity can be set from the base ISO-100, 200, 400 and 800. The resolution however is limited to the two maximum resolutions, 4:3 aspect ratio (5MP) and 16:9 aspect ratio (3.8MP). Focus assist light can be turned off. A switch icon for toggling the viewfinder to capture still photos or to record video.

On the view viewfinder the swipe gesture is supported for bringing the “Images” the gallery application interface in front with the images taken. A little left arrow icon is also provided to do the same. Swiping back from the “Images” takes you to the camera interface. A pinch-to-zoom feature is available on both still and video mode. Lumia 520 won’t allow zooming in/out once the recording has been started in the video mode.

Nokia Lumia 920 - PureView Camera Review with Optical Image Stabilization

What we liked in the Camera User Interface of Windows Phone 8 is that it’s well integrated with the third party camera plugins as well as the extra camera features provided by the manufacturer. Within the Windows Phone platform, they are called “Lenses”. Lumia 520 (or any other Windows Phone from Nokia) can be preferred with it’s camera hardware and software bundle pack over any Windows Phone from other manufacturers. However other manufacturers also provide their own collection of software/plugins.

The lenses we must mention here, are the “Smart Shoot” and “Cinemagraph”. “Smart Shoot” comes with the stock lenses in Lumia 520. The later  one along with many others including “Panorama” can be downloaded from Windows Phone Market under “Nokia Collection” of apps.

Remember the “Scalado acquired by Nokia”? Smart Shoot is the new born after the acquisition. Scalado, before acquisition, had announced its “Remove” app for Android to remove unwanted objects from the photos after taking a series of shots and evaluating the differences. “Smart Shoot” in Lumia 520 does the same. Additionally it brings another option to merge multiple shots into one to make it a perfect. Simple, it takes 5 shots of the scene and provides you the interface where you can choose auto-identified differences/spots on the image. e.g. you can pick best faces from 5 different shots in a case of closed eyes of one or two persons in a group.

Cinemagraph on the other hand generates the moving stills. What’s it? It examines a scene for specific duration of time (e.g. a few seconds) and then offers you a picture with highlighted areas identified as moving objects. You have to keep the camera steady, or you can use a tripod. You select from the highlighted areas or add or trim as per your choice. What you see in the final picture, is an image with most of the objects being still having parts of them animated. It produces a GIF image for ease of use.

Panorama lens creates the regular panoramas by pointing the camera forward and moving side wise until the Panorama app finishes taking shots and process to make a final wider shot by combining the images.

Windows Phone and Productivity:

In our opinion, considering its price value, Lumia 520 is good for office and productivity consumption. If you are a technical guy working in some IT or telecom sector, who has to stay online all the time for quick responses, you got a good deal with quick Email arrival on a Windows Phone like Lumia 520 with the well maintained integration of connected accounts and online text chat.

Microsoft Office in Windows Phone 8 is always appreciated for being too good for a consumer on Windows Phone. Provides access to Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents with writeable functions. Email Solutions on the other hand cover the Mail for Exchange for your private/public networks and additional IMAP4, POP3 and SMTP support.

Personal email accounts are also supported including Outlook/Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail.

Conclusions and Remarks:

During 3 weeks with regular usage as primary smartphone, Nokia Lumia 520 went smoother with its 512MB of RAM. 1GHz Dual Core processor with dedicated GPU keeps the things running with no issues. While during the usage, an issue was spotted on the web and so it did to us. The RAM limitation was found to be restrictive on the Windows Phone store when the popular game title the Temple Run could not be download and installed on the device we were testing. Let alone the tricks to get the hands on such limitations. Upon spotting the issue, the developer of the game reviewed and made the game available to the devices with 512MB RAM. We couldn’t find any issue with running such a game on Lumia 520 after all. It was all smooth as it was on any high end device.

But the problem does exist on the store. Applications are set to be visible or downloaded as per the device hardware requirements matched. So one should expect the limited entries of the apps/games in the store for the devices with lower hardware specs.

Battery life is also fine for being a smartphone. A day minimum, must be a requirement of a mobile phone to be passed for power consumption. You would sure charge up your phone after getting back home in regular days. Nokia Lumia 520 spent more than a day with all that regular usage.

Having some reservations about the display and visibility, we can tell that it’s a entry-level package Nokia gave to the customers. So if you want to get on to the Windows Phone metro and not want to spend a huge amount on the devices like Lumia 920, Lumia 820 or even Lumia 720, we sure do recommend to get a Lumia 520 which is for around Rs. 18,900/- Pakistani Rupees which is the lowest in budget Windows Phone 8 smartphone.

We do listen to our readers and try to reply the queries we are asked. So do write below what do you think about this entry-level Windows Phone 8 smartphone from Nokia.