Nokia Lumia 520 ~ Smartphone Archive

price : $ 60

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Key Features: 4-inch 480 x 800 pixel IPS screen; Windows Phone 8; 8GB internal memory, microSD; Dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU; 5-megapixel main camera, no front camera

Manufacturer: Nokia

What is the Nokia Lumia 520?

The Nokia Lumia 520 is Nokia’s most entry-level Windows Phone 8 mobile. You can get it free on even the cheapest contracts but it's also worth considering as a ouright purchase. You can find it for less than £100 and, if you shop around, you can get it for even less on a pay-as-you-go deal. While it lacks some of the neat touches you'll find on the more expensive Lumia 620, it proves that Windows Phone 8 is a great platform for budget phones.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Design

Entry-level phones tend to feel cheap and, quite often, tacky. Less stylish and a good deal chunkier than mid or high-end phones, they also tend to suffer from build quality issues.

Nokia has managed to buck this with the Lumia 520. It is among the best phones in its class in this respect and while it uses a plastic battery cover, like virtually all budget phones, the backplate manages to cover the whole phone aside from the screen.

This gives the Lumia 520 a more unibody look that is comparable to high-end Nokia phones, even though this is certainly not a unibody mobile. The plastic cover is reasonably thick which helps it feel sturdy and tough. It also comes with a matt, textured finish which helps it avoid the pitfall of tacky glossy plastic that plagues many cheaper mobiles.

While it's not as cute or pretty as the 620 the Nokia Lumia 520 manages to both look and feel like a classy phone. The 620's cover has a translucent layer that gives its finish an appearance of depth. On the 520 the plastic is quite basic and opaque. From an ergonomics perspective it works very well, though. The textured finish means it's grippy and the carefully curved rear helps it sit in your hand comfortably. You even get a few neat style touches. for example the Lumia-staple trio of physical buttons on the right edge of the phone are stark black to contrast punchily with the phone’s hue. There’s no labelling of what these buttons do either – another aesthetic blunder common to cheap phones.

You get five colours to choose from; red, blue and yellow, as well as the more sober white and black. Both the microSD memory card slot and SIM slot live under the battery cover to help keep the Lumia 520’s exterior looking simple and slick.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Screen

The display on the Nokia Lumia 520 is a little bit bigger than on the Lumia 620. It is four inches across, which is quite generous for a phone priced this low. As well as being a shade larger than its more expensive brother, it’s also larger than the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2’s screen and Sony Xperia E’s display. And both of those tend to cost more. However, it’s pretty basic in a number of different ways. Its viewing angles are fine, but the display quality is otherwise limited. There’s a reddish tint to the display, ensuring colour accuracy is average and the lack of any sort of reflection-battling layer reduces the impression of contrast. This means that the Lumia 520 a bit of a pain to use outdoors in sunlight — it's seriously reflective. The glass covering the display isn’t robustly toughened, either. It has some scratch resistance, but will flex under the pressure of a firm thumb prod.

However, it’s far from the worst case we’ve seen, and any normal of pressure does not cause any screen distortion. Screen resolution is 800 x 480 pixels, resulting in pixel density of 233ppi. Sharpness is well below the top phones out there, but for a low-end phone it’s perfectly good. Plus top brightness is impressively uncomfortable to gaze upon in most situation, and the screen size is large enough to happily read websites and play games on.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Software

One area where the Nokia Lumia 520 hasn’t had to scrimp much is software. It runs Windows Phone 8, an operating system that looks and feels similar on a low-end phone to a top one. It’s this consistent level of performance in Windows Phone 8 that makes the Lumia 520 such a top device. It may be cheap, but it is as quick and slick as you like.The phone’s core specs aren’t too shabby, either. It has a dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8227 CPU and 512MB of RAM. That’s the same innards found in the Lumia 720, which is a significantly more expensive phone. Day-to-day performance is great. And it glitched out fewer times than most Windows phones. This grade of overall experience is better than we’d expect from a low-end Android phone – especially from a company that aggressively goes for the entry-level market like Huawei or ZTE.

However, we did notice some more slow-down than higher-end Lumias when playing games. The Sunspider Javascript benchmark, too, shows that the Lumia 520 isn’t quite as speedy as the more expensive Lumias, coming out with a score of 1400ms when the just-unveiled Lumia 625 scored around 1100ms (lower scores are better in this test).If gaming is a priority, the Lumia 520 isn’t the greatest phone in town, but not because of any performance issue. It’s down to Windows Phone 8. The games selection available on Windows Phone 8 is poor compared with Android or iOS. And, as is common with new phones, it’s even worse on the Lumia 520. There are just 20 games (at the time of writing) in the Xbox games section of the Windows Marketplace, which is where the highest-profile Windows Phone games live.

The apps selection is pretty limited too, and Windows versions of apps tend to receive fewer updates than their iOS and Android cousins. The basics are covered, but - as with games - if you're an apps freak look for a budget Android.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Browsing and Social Networking

Windows Phone 8 does come with a solid array of integrated features, though. Its People app not only acts as your phone book, but also hooks into Facebook and Twitter to bring you your latest social updates from your friends. Real social networkers will want to use separate apps for each, but Windows Phone 8 does manage to weave together social networks, email accounts and more traditional phone features like SMS with ease. Whether writing a message or tapping out a web address, the Lumia 520’s excellent keyboard makes doing so easy. Windows Phone’s virtual keyboard is excellent, with careful design and very accurate, reliable input.

The 4-inch screen is large enough for comfortable typing with most keyboards, but somehow the Windows one feels routinely more reliable than the majority of Android keyboards. It’s quite stylish too, with a sharp, minimal look. However, it does not offer any form of gesture typing - where you draw a wiggly line over the letters in a word rather than tapping - and no way to install such a feature. Some of you may not like this, as gesture typing is generally much quicker than old fashioned tapping, once you get used to it.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Camera

Nokia makes some of the most interesting phone cameras in the world. The Nokia Lumia 1020 is perhaps the best phone camera ever made and the Lumia 925 has the best low-light photo performance of any phone we’ve tried this year. As you might expect, the Lumia 520 is nowhere near these lofty heights. It has a 5-megapixel rear camera and no front camera at all. There’s no way to shoot easy selfies or to video chat with this phone – for that you’ll need to upgrade to the Lumia 620.

However, photo performance in good lighting conditions is actually fairly good. The 5-megapixel sensor captures limited detail next to the big boys, but focusing is reasonably fast and the photos are a lot less glum-looking than most cameras at this bargain basement price.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Battery Life

The Lumia 520 mostly misses out of things compared to its more expensive brother the Lumia 620. No NFC, no compass, no front camera. However, it does have a slightly larger battery. It has a 1,430mAh 5.2Wh unit, where the Lumia 620 has a 1,300mAh battery. This is to compensate for the slightly larger screen of the Lumia 520, but we were generally quietly impressed with the phone’s stamina in real-time use.

We easily coasted through a day’s use between charges. And while those wanting to use smartphone features like browsing and always-on email checking will generally still have to charge once a day, forgetting to charge overnight generally won’t leave you with a dead phone come mid-day.

price : $ 60