The Lumia 520 completes the roll call for Nokia's second generation
of Microsoft-powered smartphones. Statistically, this means that every
step of their product line, from 5** all the way to 9**, has been backed
up by a fresh WP8-rocking alternative.
OK, that's nothing out of the ordinary and actually well on time. The
Lumia 520 was announced at this year's MWC, along with the Lumia 720,
signaling Nokia's intention to focus on the lower tiers of the market.
In terms of budget, it doesn't get any lower than the Lumia 520. With
an estimated retail price of under €150, the 520 is clearly the most
affordable WP8-powered smartphone. Hardly a surprise then that it's a
trimmed down version of the Lumia 720 we recently reviewed.
Nokia Lumia 520 official images
The Lumia 520 has to make do with a smaller, garden variety LCD (no
ClearBlack) and an inferior imaging package. The wide aperture lens of
the Lumia 720 had to go, too, while the LED flash and the front-facer
went with it. The battery is of lesser capacity too but other than that,
we're looking at two very similar packages priced some way apart. And
we do think the actual price cut is well worth the features that got
slashed.
The Nokia Lumia 520 was the fifth Windows Phone 8 handset from the Finnish firm and it slots into the very bottom end of the range, just below the Nokia Lumia 620.
And
we do mean just below – the specs of the 520 and 620 are remarkably
similar, meaning that Nokia's main competition at the bottom end of the
market is itself. There's also the mid-level Lumia 625 that Nokia released last November and the newer Lumia 630 and Lumia 635.
Otherwise, its biggest rival is the Huawei Ascend W1 – a low-end handset that we're rather fond of.
Of course if you look beyond Windows Phone there's a whole host of Android competitors, chief of which is the superb Motorola Moto G – a smartphone that pretty much redefined what a 'budget' handset could be.
There are other options to, of course, such as the ZTE Blade Q Mini or the HTC Desire 610, which was announced at MWC 2014 in Barcelona.
But
here's something that may have a bearing on whether you buy the Lumia
520 – the phone is now the world's top-selling Windows Phone 8 handset,
thanks to its impressive specs and low-end price.
What's
more, it was the third best-selling phone in the UK in December 2013
according to Jim Belfiore, the VP of operating systems at Microsoft.
This
little handset has also just been on the receiving end of Nokia's Lumia
Black system update that adds some extra functionality to the device as
well as some new features to play with. More on that later.
The
Nokia Lumia 520 has a fairly generous 4-inch, 480 x 800 display and is
powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and 512MB of RAM.
That
may not sound like much but the power matches the Lumia 620, and we had
few qualms about the performance of that phone given its price. The
screen is actually slightly bigger than that of the Nokia Lumia 620,
which only has a 3.8-inch display.
You
can now pick the Nokia Lumia 520 up from £99.95 SIM free or from £69.99
if you buy it locked on a PAYG deal, making it incredibly affordable.
That means a decent saving for those who don't mind committing to a network. It's cheaper than the Nokia Lumia 625 too.
At
first glance it's certainly an impressive handset for the price, easily
competing with the similarly priced Ascend W1 and potentially rendering
the Nokia Lumia 620 redundant.
In
fact, given that it has similar specs, a bigger screen and a better
battery, you might be wondering why the Lumia 520 is considered
lower-end than the 620.
Well, there are a few reasons. First off, the Nokia Lumia 520 doesn't have NFC.
It also doesn't have a camera flash or a front-facing camera, plus
there's no compass built into it. And while the screen is slightly
bigger, it still has the same resolution, resulting in a marginally
lower ppi.
But we don't consider any of
them to be deal breakers, and depending on how you plan to use the
phone they may well be things you can happily live with - especially for
£70.
Design
Like
all recent Nokia handsets there's a lot of colour in the Nokia Lumia
520. It shares the look of other Lumia devices, with a single piece of
smooth plastic covering the back and sides of the phone.
That
shell is available in black or white, but the bright shades of yellow,
blue and red on offer will appeal if you like it loud.
If
nothing else, it makes Nokia handsets stand out from the crowd.
Regardless of the colour, it's quite a nice looking phone in other ways,
with an angular, rectangular design more in line with the higher end
Nokia Lumia 920 than the curved edges of its closest relations – the
Nokia Lumia 620 and 625.
It's
certainly a more distinctive (and I'd argue classier) look than that of
the Lumia 620 – which is odd considering the Lumia 520 is supposed to
be the more basic option.
It's also
slimmer and lighter than the Lumia 620, at a fairly sleek 9.9mm and
124g. At 119.9x64mm it is longer and wider than the Lumia 620, but
that's understandable given that it's also got a slightly bigger screen.
I
like the feel of it too. The plastic casing seems almost warm, making
it nice to hold, and it's not as slippery as it might look – so getting a
firm grip on the handset is no problem.
The
almost jagged corners can dig into your hand a little when held in
certain positions, but it's at worst slightly uncomfortable and easily
avoided by adjusting your grip.
The
front of the Nokia Lumia 520 is mostly screen as you'd expect and at
4-inches it's a decent size for a low-price handset. The pixel density
of 233 pixels per inch also isn't bad at all for the money you're
paying. Sure, it's dwarfed by the likes of the 469ppi HTC One, but it's also many times cheaper.
A
huge plus is the ability to use gloves with the screen too – being able
to type in the cold weather is becoming a really common ability on
phones, but I'm impressed Nokia managed it on such a cheap handset.
Unlike
some handsets, the screen here isn't edge-to-edge: there's a black
border running the entire way around it. At the sides this border is
fairly narrow, but it becomes quite wide at the top to make room for the
earpiece and a Nokia logo. It's even wider at the bottom, because
that's where you'll find the start, back and search softkeys.
The
back of the handset is almost featureless, with just a small Nokia logo
in the centre, the 5MP camera lens near the top and a tiny loudspeaker
near the bottom.
The right edge of the
handset houses all of the phone's physical buttons, with a volume rocker
at the top, a power button near the middle and a camera button near the
bottom. The layout works well, with the buttons spaced far enough to
prevent confusion.
The
left edge is devoid of any features, ports or buttons at all. The top
is home only to a 3.5mm headphone port on the left-hand side.
The bottom edge has a micro USB port in the centre, which is used for charging or connecting the Nokia Lumia 520 to a computer.
The
back cover is easy to remove – you simply use your nails to peel it
away at each corner. The cover itself feels reasonably sturdy, so I
don't see it snapping even if you take it on and off a lot.
Once
that has been removed, you'll have access to the 1430 mAh battery
(which interestingly, is bigger than the 1300 mAh battery found in the
Nokia Lumia 620).
Underneath the
battery there are two slots – one for a micro SIM card and one for a
microSD card. The Nokia Lumia 520 supports up to 64GB cards, which comes
in very handy for bulking up the storage from the fairly limiting 8GB
of onboard memory.
Key features
The Windows Phone 8 OS is still a distant third behind Android and iOS, so the consumer deck is already stacked against the Lumia 520, despite its success last year.However, the sheer value to be had here counts very strongly in the Lumia 520's favour, as does the build quality and some of the apps on offer.
Having Microsoft Office and OneNote on board adds some serious value. Both of these apps are fairly feature rich, with Office in particular proving impressive as it lets you create, view and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Doing much more than reading them on a 4-inch screen isn't the most pleasant experience in the world, but it could come in handy in an emergency.
Likewise, I'd have to say that one of the key features of the handset is the way in which social media is handled.
Microsoft has really nailed social media integration with Windows Phone 8. It's all fairly straightforward really: you access them from the People app, which gives you an alphabetical list of all your contacts, complete with thumbnails.
Tapping on someone brings up all the information you have stored on them – from email and phone number right through to office location, birthday and address.
You can then just tap on a phone number or email to call or message them, and it's easy to add new details to a contact at any time by tapping the edit icon at the bottom of the screen.
Swiping right from a contacts page will take you to a 'history' screen, which keeps a record of communications between the two of you as well as their recent posts and updates on social networks.
Swiping to the left brings you to a 'what's new' screen, which combines the likes of Twitter and Facebook into a single feed, giving you an overview of recent happenings without having to use a separate app.
It's simple stuff, but combining contacts and social network feeds is something that no other phone OS does quite as well as Windows Phone 8, and we're big fans.
Nokia has really given its Lumia phones a personality – thanks to the bright colours and interchangeable backs. Anyone tired of the constant black, white or silver options on other handsets will enjoy carrying a bit of colour around with them.
Interface
Operating the Nokia Lumia 520 is a fairly painless experience. Swiping around the various screens is smooth and responsive, while the 4-inch display is plenty big enough to do most things comfortably.While it's only 480 x 800, the display also has a good enough resolution to prevent tiles and menus becoming a blur.
One thing I did notice though is that the screen feels ever so slightly sticky, for lack of a better word. It's responsive but somehow doesn't feel as accurate to the touch as many others do. On top of that it seems more prone to picking up smudges and fingerprints than we'd like – which can make things a bit of a mess.
The interface on the Nokia Lumia 520 is much the same as on any other Windows Phone 8 handset.
You start on the lockscreen, which displays the time and date along with an overview of your latest email, or any pertinent reminders pulled from Facebook or your calendar. Behind that you get wallpaper – or if you'd prefer you can set Facebook to display random images from your account.
With the Lumia Black update, Nokia introduced a feature called Glance 2.0 that displays more notifications on the lock screen. Unfortunately, due to the Lumia 520's limited 512MB of RAM, it misses out on this feature.
Swiping up clears the lockscreen and takes you to the start screen. This has tiles for various apps and menus, and you can scroll through them vertically.
Long-pressing on a tile lets you move it, resize it or unpin it from the screen, while if you dig into the settings menu you can also change the colour scheme. However, there are no custom wallpapers or widgets to play with. That keeps things simple and intuitive, but some may find it limiting.
The tiles themselves are 'live tiles', which means that they're not just a static image. Instead they can display additional information – so for example the People tile will show you thumbnails of contacts images, while the calendar will display upcoming events.
Thanks to the Lumia Black update, you can now organise live tiles in folders on your start screen. This is a feature that's been available for Android and iOS for some time, and it's good to finally see Nokia adding in the functionality.
Once updated, you can download the App Folder app from the Windows Store and use it to create folders that can then be pinned to the Start screen like any other tile. It's a great way of saving space and very useful for lumping similar apps, like games or email, together.
Swiping left from the start screen brings up a list of all your apps in alphabetical order – and again you scroll vertically up and down through these. Long-pressing an app on this screen lets you pin it to the start screen or delete it.
You'll find the settings screen in here (though like everything else it can be pinned to the start screen for easy access if you'd prefer). From here you can change ringtones and other sounds, alter the start screen theme, set up Wi-Fi networks and more.
It's all well laid-out and clearly labelled, though I wish certain options were more easily accessible, such as toggles for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
I'd also love to be able to see how much battery percentage I have left without having to delve into the depths of the settings screen.
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- Quad-band 3G with 21 Mbps HSDPA and 5.7 Mbps HSUPA support
- 4.0" 16M-color IPS LCD display of WVGA resolution
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera with 720p@30fps video recording
- Windows Phone 8 OS
- 1 GHz dual-core Krait CPU, Adreno 305 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8227 chipset, 512MB of RAM
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- GPS receiver with A-GPS and GLONASS support
- Free lifetime voice-guided navigation (with a twist)
- 8GB of inbuilt storage, expandable via a microSD card slot
- Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
- Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- microUSB port
- Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP and EDR, file transfers
- SNS integration
- Xbox Live integration and Xbox management
- Nokia Music
- FM Radio
- Extremely competitive pricing
Main disadvantages
- Common LCD lacks the punch of CBD
- A few prominent apps still missing, some apps incompatible due to 512MB RAM
- No front-facing camera
- No LED flash
- No system-wide file manager
- No lockscreen shortcuts
- Voice-guided SatNav license limited to a single country
Of course there're things missing but if you can live without the front-facing camera, the Lumia 520 is an extremely tempting package. We don't think the 512MB of RAM is as big a disadvantage as it was for the clearly more costly Lumia 720. The screen isn't particularly impressive but the thinking must've been that potential users would care more about being able to use it with gloves on than the actual image quality.
The Nokia Lumia 520 at HQ
Is it worth buying, then? We'll be checking that out, starting with a closer look at the exterior.
Media
Music
Music is handled by the 'Music + Videos' app and it's a solid player. You can filter your music by album, song or artist – which in each case will present you with an alphabetical list of your stored music, complete with album images if you choose to sort by album.
You can also find all of your music from a specific genre and create playlists. It's easy to navigate and use, though does little to stand out from any other music player.
When you play music you'll find that some music controls appear on your lockscreen, letting you easily pause or skip track.
Unfortunately the same controls aren't present on the start screen, so if you leave the player you have to either go back into it or lock and then unlock your phone to actually manipulate the music.
The Nokia Lumia 520 supports a decent range of formats including WAV, MP3, WMA, and eAAC+. It can also pump music out of its tiny speakers at a surprising volume without any distortion, though there's not really any bass.
As well as either copying music across from a computer or loading up a microSD card with it, you can also purchase music from the Xbox music store to get it sent directly to your phone.
There's a solid selection available along with fairly competitive pricing (around 99p a track for new releases).
You can get to the store directly from the player and it's easy to browse – letting you filter results by genre and then check out top tracks, new releases and more.
Though of course you can also just type in a search if you already know what you're after.
On top of buying music the store also offers an unlimited streaming service for a monthly subscription. You also get access to Nokia's Mix radio, which is a real boon for a lot of people – it's free music on a cheap-as-chips phone.
Video
Video is also handled by the 'Music + Videos' app, but it's nowhere near as fleshed out as the music experience. For a start there's no video store, which is a bit of a shame given that both Android and Apple have one.That means that you'll have to get your video content from elsewhere and copy it across to the Nokia Lumia 520 (or to a microSD card).
The 4-inch screen is just about big enough to watch a video on comfortably, while the phone itself is also light and comfortable to hold for extended periods (just as long as you don't let the corners dig into your hands). The resolution and screen quality could certainly be better but in practice it actually didn't seem too bad.
Photos
Photos are housed in the 'Photos' app, which seems logical, and it's not a bad app either. If you tap on 'camera roll' you can see thumbnails of every photo you've taken on the handset, and then tap on one to open it.
At that point you can then scroll through the rest of your photos or tap on the three dots at the bottom of the screen to edit the current photo, delete it, save it to OneDrive or set it as your lockscreen wallpaper.
Editing options take the form of cropping, rotating and auto-fixing and there's also a 'Creative Studio' option which lets you add colour tints to a photo, such as 'ivory' or 'jade'.
Handily it shows you a preview of how all these options will make your photo look before you commit to selecting one.
But the photos app doesn't just house pictures from your camera roll, it also syncs with Facebook and other social networks to pull photos from there.
If you've linked any social network accounts you'll find that all of your photo albums from them are present and correct under the 'albums' heading.
The 'Photos' app will also house any photos that you've copied across to the handset and as well as sorting by album you can filter photos by a specific date or search only for photos with a specific person tagged in them.
PhotoBeamer is an app that forms part of the Lumia Black update and lets you quickly throw a picture from the phone onto any screen connected to the internet through a QR scanner.
Launch the app on the Lumia 520 and navigate to PhotoBeamer.com on a laptop, tablet or desktop. From there, select which photos you want to display and hold the Lumia 520 so the app can read the code.
Your pictures will be displayed on the monitor, providing an excellent way of sharing pictures or taking colleagues through a presentation.
I found the connection occurred within 10 seconds on a laptop running through a Wi-Fi signal but it took significantly longer – up to 25 seconds – when navigating through a hard-wired server connection to a desktop PC.
Another addition courtesy of the Lumia Black update is Nokia Storyteller. This app is still in beta, but nonetheless provides a nice way of organising your images. It will use your location to plot images from a particular trip and add them into their own folder.
You can add captions to each image and it will also plot these photos on a map if you want an alternative way of viewing them.
Battery life
The Nokia Lumia 520 has a 1430mAh battery to keep it going. That's a slight boost over the 1300mAh battery found in the Nokia Lumia 620, but some way short of the 1950mAh battery packed into the Ascend W1.
After TechRadar's patented battery test – running a 90-minute video from a fully charged handset with Wi-Fi on, social networks and emails set to push notifications and the screen turned up to full brightness – we saw the battery drop to 66% by the end.
That's not brilliant performance, but when used in other ways – for example phone calls, playing music, sending texts and so on, the Nokia Lumia 520 performed a lot better and unless you're watching a lot of videos you should easily get a day's use out of it.
Nokia rates the Lumia 520 for up to 360 hours of standby time over 3G, 14.8 hours of talk time over 3G, 9.6 hours of talk time over 2G or 61 hours of music playback, which sounds fair, though it notably doesn't post figures on video time.
If the battery doesn't live up to your expectations there is a battery saver, which prevents apps from syncing in the background. You can also invest in a spare battery, since it's easily removable if you just pop the back off the phone.
However if you'd rather not do that then the Huawei Ascend W1 might be a better bet, as that is one of the few Windows Phone 8 handsets to actually sport good battery life.
Spesification
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| Source | |
|---|---|
| Techradar | Nokia Lumia 520 Review (Design 4/5, Features 3.5/5, Performance 3.5/5, Usability 4/5, Value 5/5) |
| ExpertReview | Nokia Lumia 520 Review (Expert Rating 4/5, User Rating 4/5) |
| Engadget | Nokia Lumia 520 Review (Critic Reviews 7.8/10, User Reviews 8.5/10) |
| GSMArena | Nokia Lumia 520 Review (Design 8.1/10, Features 7.9/10, Performance 8.1/10) |
| Official Website | |
| Where to Buy | |
| $112.77 Amazon | Nokia Lumia 520 8GB Unlocked GSM Windows 8 OS Cell Phone - Black *free shipping |
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