Nokia impressed quite a few people with the Lumia 520, in fact the handset quickly became one of the company’s best-selling Windows Phone devices of ALL TIME. And with very good reason too. In KYM’s review we heaped praise onto the handset for its sharp design, robust build quality and good performance for such a ridiculously low price. Now the successor model is here, the Lumia 530, does it step up to the plate?
That depends.
My initial reaction to the Lumia 530 compared to the Lumia 520 is that it’s lost something. Part of the charm of the Lumia 520 was that you were dealing with a budget phone which totally ignored the budget phone trope of looking and feeling “budget”. The design was distinctive, angular and stylish, while the build quality featured a nice feeling matte finish plastic.
The Lumia 530 is far more generic in its shape and the plastic is scratchier – it’s much more basic. The control keys are in the usual place on the right-hand side and are quite solid with good feedback. As with the Lumia 520, the back panel is removable and interchangeable with other colour variants, which so far include orange, green, white and grey.
Elsewhere things are not too shabby. The handset runs Windows Phone 8.1, the very latest version of Microsoft’s operating system software, which as we’ve discussed in the Lumia 930 review, is a much more capable iteration. On the Lumia 530 it runs nice and smooth via Microsoft’s competent optimisations. The hardware is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 quad-core chip clocked at 1.2GHz with 512MB RAM.
As well as running smoothly, Windows Phone 8.1 provides plenty of welcome new functionality. Well, new for Windows Phone...it’s fair to say Microsoft is playing catch up on a few of these features, such as the drop down notifications and quick settings screen, but better late than never, and they do add something to the usability of the platform.
The drop down quick settings are customisable, but you only have a set of four controls and a limited set of functions you can assign to them. Meanwhile the notifications aggregate nicely into a single app-relevant thread. Users now have more control over customisation, with the ability to set an image background for the Start screen, while the app drawer is now organised alphabetically.
The display is somewhat lacking though. The Lumia 520 used a 4in IPS LCD while the Lumia 530 opts for a 4in TFT. The 530 has a slightly higher resolution but there’s not a tremendous difference in clarity, however, the IPS previously meant the picture on the 520 was at least nice and colourful, with a punchy imagery and good contrast. By comparison, the 530 looks a bit washed out; it does at least have decent viewing angles though.
The Lumia 530 carries the same 1,430mAh battery cell as its predecessor and has a 5MP camera, but as usual in a first look we have not been able to sufficiently test these features to give a clear idea how they perform. More on these in our full review.
The Lumia 530 is again quite competitively priced at just under £100 SIM free, while the overall package is cohesive and a decent set of hardware and software for the price, it is not as compelling a handset as its predecessor.
Reviews 16:53, 27 Aug 2014
by pbriden via Featured Articles
Posts
No comments: