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| Nokia Lumia 520 |
Today we continue on our review of Budget Smartphones that have made their way into the Nigerian Market. Our subject for today is the Nokia Lumia 520. This is the baby of the Nokia Lumia series, its hard to find fault with this device at all because it has set out to do exactly what it was intended to do. without much ado let me take you down a Lumia coloured rainbow and show you that there might be a rising sun after Nokia's recent stormy Nights. Its no news that Nokia has lost its position as the numero uno smartphone manufacturer in the world to Samsung/Apple, The Lumia series is an attempt to regain that crown and they have a strong contender in the Lumia 520.
OVERVIEW
Nokia has not failed to impress us with their impeccable design language and world-class build quality. The Lumia 520 is an epitome of Nokia's craftsmanship.When most manufacturers make budget smartphones they usually sacrifice a lot of specifications just to make the budget cut but Nokia has put enough under the hood of this phone to give any high-end phone a run for its money. The Lumia 520 is a Monoblock touchscreen device with a 4.0" WVGA display on the front, a 5.0MP rear camera and the loudspeaker cleverly placed at the bottom right corner on the back, while the power, camera button and the volume rocker are on the right flank of the phone. The phone is made of Polycarbonate Plastic and has dimensions of 119.9 x 64 x 9.9mm. it weighs 124g and comes in an array of 5 different colors. it also ships with Nokia's Custom Purity Headset designed by Monster.
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| the Lumia 520 comes in array of 5 different colours, yellow, cyan, red, white and black |
it has a 4.0" WVGA display with a resolution of 800 x 480 and a pixel density of 235 ppi this gives the screen its brightness and vibrant colours.The whole front end of the device is covered entirely with a sheet of protective so u dont have to worry about scratching the display.Using the Lumia 520 we found the display to be responsive even when we used a gloved hand. The interface is pretty much same as you will find on any Windows Phone 8 device, you swipe up to unlock the phone, this brings you to the home screen where you get windows signature "live tiles", swiping to the left from here gets you to the app tray where you get to see all the apps you have installed.
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| The 4.0" capacitive touch display provides crisp imagery & its ultra sensitivity makes it usable even with a gloved hand |
CAMERA
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| 5.0MP camera |
SPECIAL FEATURES
Nokia has really outdone themselves with this phone, it has features that would give even the iphone 5 running on IOS 7 a run for its money. Starting with the Nokia's proprietary Here Maps, this has been proven by industry analyst all over the world to be the best mapping application available for Mobile devices and it comes pre-installed on this phone.The most important feature of this application is the fact that you can download maps of any specific areas, cities,states or countries to your device and access it at anytime even without 3G or WiFi so it saves you the expenses of consuming your data allocation everytime you try to use the map and helps on those Road trips where you find yourself in an area of the country without any form of internet connectivity.Speaking about Road trips the Here Drive App present on this phone gives you turn by turn navigation when driving around the country. if you can look past the washed out color schemes on this map and the lack of certain features such as CityLens which shows you the same information but in an augmented reality view not so different from Google's StreetView.
APPS/USER EXPERIENCE
I like the fact that Nokia has kept the map basic without so much overlapping unnecessary features that would result in Lags when u need them most. However things are not so bright on the Apps side of things, this is a windows Phone 8 device so it suffers from the lack of Apps that afflicts the Windows Phone Ecosystem.The Lumia 520 comes equipped with standard apps like Calculator, Calendar, phone book, etc and you can download even more apps from the Windows Phone Marketplace like spotify, Whatsapp, Skype(for messaging only), Facebook, Twitter, ItsDagram(Instagram client for posting pictures on instagram).You still get quality applications especially productivity/business Applications such as Microsoft Office suite(Excel, Powerpoint, Word and .OneNote), Adobe Acrobat Reader pre-installed on the phone. it also has the Xbox-Live Hub where you can download a variety of high profile proprietary gaming applications peculiar to the windows ecosystem that you can't find on either the Google PlayStore or Apple's App Store.
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| Nokia Here Maps |
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| Lumia 520 app tray |
PROCESSORS/STORAGE
the Lumia 520 runs on a dual-core 1Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. the Snapdragon S4 is a highly integrated system-on-chip processor that is designed to maximize battery power as well as enable extra performance when you need it. The processor is optimized for exceptional performance on mobile devices and enables you to run applications faster, in we experienced no lag(hanging) at all while using this phone we had no qualms at all playing games like Asphalt 7 HD on this phone despite the fact that it has a 512MB RAM. It has 8GB of Internal memory which is expandable to 64GB by using a MicroSD card. Nokia also added 7Gb of cloud storage on their SkyDrive Cloud Storage system.Yeah before you crucify me i know i have lamented about the 512mb RAM in some budget smartphones such as the Infinix Race Eagle but this poses no threat because this is a Windows phone 8 device and not an Android device so it requires little of the RAM space for the OS to run smoothly coupled with the fact that this phone runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 no matter the assortment of apps you install on this phone its will be very rare to experience any Lag in the OS.The phone had a benchmark score of 6,595 on AnTuTu which is not so far from what other high end Windows Phone 8 devices score.
BATTERY
Nokia has been known to provide amazing battery life on their phones, the Lumia 520 isn't left out, it comes equipped with a 3.7 Volts 1430 mAh removable battery that gives up to 61 hrs of continuous music playback time, 14.8 hrs talk time on 2G and 9.8 hrs on 3G. it has an amazing 360 hours standby time on 3G and 6 hrs of continuous browsing on WiFi. This is absolutely possible because of the Snapdragon S4 processor on board which saves battery life because each of the chips in this dual core processor powers up/down independently coupled with the fact that Windows Phone 8 unlike Android is a very Light Operating System that doesn't task the device's resources so much. In our experience with this phone, the battery has truly lived up to expectations and even surpassed it, the icing on the cake would have been if it was enabled for wireless charging but this is a budget device so for the pocket friendly price it's a very good bargain. .
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| even though its a Monoblock device it still has a removable 1430 mAh battery |
CONNECTIVITY
The phone uses bluetooth 3.0 and USB 2.0 for interconnectivity with other devices. It uses a single Micro SIM card for mobile communications and its equipped with a dual-band GSM/WCDMA/HSDPA/HSUPA radio (on the 850,900Mhz; 1800,1900Mhz; 900,2100Mhz frequency bands) so you can use it in most parts of the world when roaming. You can handle up to 21Mbps download speeds on HSDPA (branded as 3.5G or even 4G in Nigeria) network and 236.8 Kbps on EDGE. Although this download speed basically depends on your network service provider. Its also equipped with a WLAN IEEE 802.11 b/g/n WiFi Radio for WLAN connectivity. One Drawback is that there's no NFC (Near Field Communication) on this device but considering the fact that the features of NFC haven't been fully implemented into our countries ecosystem the lack of NFC can be overlooked.
Nokia has always been a prolific contender in the smartphone market, in light of their recent woes, the Lumia 520 is a reminder that they are still one of the best manufacturers out there. The phone has accomplished what it was set out to do without any hiccups. While reviewing this phone we were very impressed with this device, it has got a lot going for it, its got a very good screen resolution, its rarely ever Lags, its got a very strong battery, call quality was good and messaging/chatting was impressive. we had no reason to complain because we got great value for our money. however it indeed had a few drawbacks such as the lack of a front facing camera,No flash for the rear camera as well, no NFC and wireless charging but bickering about this makes us look like an ungrateful toddler. did i also mention that this phone goes for an amazing N28,500 its the best entry level/budget smartphone on the market as far as we are concerned.
We rate this phone 8/10: it could have gotten better ratings if it had a flash and a front facing camera but its still highly recommended if you are looking for a budget device that's reliable but if you are interested in another Nokia budget phone with full options(front facing camera, flash, NFC) we recommend the slightly more expensive Lumia 620.
Source: Nokia
Picture Credit: WPcentral
Note: if you are interested in any of this devices you can call us on 07059925285, email us at technerdng@gmail.com or visit our online retail store TheSmartShopng. be sure to subscribe to our blog so as to get timely updates for more device reviews and tech news in the future.
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