Nokia Lumia 520 is the most affordable, most attractive, lightest and smartest windows phone ever launched. Even with such a low price it is surprising to see that so many lucrative qualities can be packed into a hood so well at such a reasonable rate. Nokia lumia 520 is worth your cash.
Overview
The Lumia 520 is cheap without looking it. The curved shape and soft rubbery finish around back make for a handset that’s got plenty of grip and style. For people concerned about looks and appearances and who are obsessed about phones, Nokia Lumia 520 is the best deal for you.The front contains the display,speaker, hardware button and Nokia written on a sleek shiny glossy black screen.The back is fitted with a camera and a small speaker hole. Nokia 520 is blessed with best looks by Nokia designers despite of its low price. This phone is just wonderful to see. It can hold anyone mesmerized with the charm and gloss it possesses. Nokia Lumia is 9.9 mm thick with tapered sides. It is so cozy and comfortable to hold. It feels like heaven to touch the soft buttery skin of this phone. Featuring a 4 inch screen display and 400*800 pixels resolution, it can attract anyone’s attention.
This phone is of a very high quality. This statement can be substantiated by the fact that Nokia Lumia 520 possesses exceeding stiffness and pressure resistance. The back cover is made with strong polycarbonate and can be removed and changed as and when required.The switches at the side are inserted within the cover. That means they can be changed when the cover is changed. So whenever your eyes get bored of watching the same colour then go get a new back cover to please your eyes. A micro SIM slot and a SD card slot is placed beneath the cover. Nokia Lumia 520 is capable of holding upto 8 GB of data. The memory can be easily expanded with a micro SD card.
Nokia Lumia 520 has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support, quad-band 3G with HSPA but lacks LTE connectivity. HSDPA still offers reasonably good speeds at 21Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink.
That said the local connectivity is covered by dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n with DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot and stereo Bluetooth 3.0. Bluetooth is no longer limited as to what it can do – there’s file transfer support .There is also a micro USB port embedded in the cover on the bottom centre for charging the phone or connecting it to pc for data transfer.
In addition to the phone storage, you also get at least 7GB of SkyDrive cloud space. NFC is also missing but that doesn’t take away much from the device.
Nokia Lumia 520 comes with Windows Phone 8 just like any other recently released Nokia Lumia device. Microsoft has added a lot of flexibility and functionality to the lockscreen – the Live Apps service allows apps to add notifications and images on the lockscreen. You can set one app to display big notifications (“detailed status”) and up to five more apps get to show more limited info (“quick status”).
The lockscreen wallpaper can also be controlled by apps – one of the installed apps can be set to choose the image (e.g. Bing’s beautiful background images or photos from your Facebook account) or you can let the music player change the lockscreen image to the album art of the currently playing track.
Modern UI is composed of vertical grid of Live tiles, which can be reordered the way you like. Almost anything can be pinned to the homescreen – apps, contacts, web pages and more.
When you tap and hold on a tile, you’ll get additional resize button to the unpin one. You can opt between quarter, normal and double size. If you select the smallest one though, the tile will be just a static icon.
The Modern Metro UI has been liked by many as it takes you away from the boring icons you see on the iOS and Android. Also the ability to auto-update and display information at a glance makes Live Tiles a win.
Camera is unable to display both zones and homogeneous brightness effects. In extreme sunlight the phone captures a half quality picture.
But the camera app on Windows Phone offers extensive settings, ranging from scenes and effects to white balance, contrast, saturation, sharpness and ISO among others which somewhat covers up for this missing hardware. You have a dedicated Macro focus mode but no face detection.
In dark light, the quality of the captured pictures are worth giving a miss. We would like to advice you to keep a camera handy if you are going for an outing at night.
As far as video is concerned the Nokia Lumia 520 captures 720p videos, which are pretty smooth, but lack in detail. Colors are again off and the higher than needed saturation doesn’t help either.
Camera Add-ons:
Lenses are an interesting take at feature add-ons, enhancing the camera functionality without making a mess of third party apps each with its own UI. Lenses are accessible directly from the native camera app (they show up in the list of installed apps too if you want to pin a Lens to the start screen).
Nokia has preloaded the Smart Shoot lens, which is by far the most powerful, and you can also download the Panorama and Cinemagraph lenses.
Smart Shoot uses Scalado technology – it shoots multiple photos and lets you pick which one to save (a sort of burst mode). You can also pick the best face and cycle through each facial expression a person made while the camera was snapping photos. The third option is Erase, which will remove moving objects.
Accessories and Warranty
The phone is guarded with a 24 month warranty. A shorter warranty period of 12 months is given on other accessories but the battery is given only a 6 month warranty.
You could buy a spare battery at the time of purchasing the phone if you want to use it for a very very long period.Audio Quality
The Nokia Lumia 520 has a 1430 mAh battery to keep it going.
The slight bump in battery size equated to a slight bump in performance over the Nokia Lumia 620, but it’s an important improvement as while the Lumia 620 would sometimes struggle to make it through a day the Lumia 520 generally seemed fine – though you’d still normally need to charge it overnight.
Phone calls, playing music, sending texts etc 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.
If the battery doesn’t live up to your expectations there is a battery saver, which prevents apps from syncing in the background, plus you can also invest in a spare battery, since it’s easily removable if you just pop the back off the phone.
Display
The screen measuring 4 inches has a commendable resolution of 800 x 400 pixels and uses IPS. The pixel density of the screen is 233 ppi. That’s higher than the Lumia 720, which has a bigger 4.3″ screen.
Nokia Lumia 520’s screen doesn’t use the ClearBlack tech and contrast is the biggest casualty. The display clearly lacks the punch of a CBD like the one on the Lumia 720.
On a positive note, the viewing angles are quite good.
Even though it has great contrast ratio the glass above the Lumia 520’s screen is quite reflective, which means the phone is barely usable when outdoor on a bright sunny day.
The Unbiased Verdict:
The Lumia 620 was already easy to like, and the Lumia 520, which is essentially the same package at a lower price point, is even harder to resist. Such features packed into the hood at such a low price is a great job. If you are a windows phone’s lover then Nokia Lumia 520 is a must buy phone. It’s a package combining voice-guided navigation, Nokia’s Music app, digital lenses and a display that can be used with gloves on. Nokia has put its best efforts to create the Lumia 520 which is economically the best phone around beating the mediocre Android devices available at this price.
The most striking feature that will please you rather stun you about is its low cost and also availability of so many features at this price straight out of the box.
This phone is a must buy specially at unbelievable price of under Rs.9500
