Nokia seems to have nailed the ultra low-end of Windows Phones with the Lumia 520 on paper. Coming in a variety of jolly colors, it hits the sweet spot of price and productivity, employing a decent display, dual-core processor and a 5MP camera, all at rock bottom pricing. These are the dry specs, though, and it will certainly feel the Android heat in that price range, so read on to find out whether the Lumia 520 delivers in the important aspects...
Design
The rectangular front and strongly tapered back of the Lumia 520 are nice to look at, but the phone feels somewhat bulky and edgy in the hand for this modest screen size. The choice of materials fits the price range, as Nokia used nothing fancier than basic plastics for the rigid-feeling, fairly slippery housing. The back cover is very easy to pry open, revealing the micro SIM and memory card slots, and is available in red, yellow, black and white to suit your style
The buttons on the right are not easily clickable and with a pretty shallow tactile feedback to boot. The most-used lock/power key is in the middle there, where you have to press it with your thumb joint instead of the finger tip, which seems reserved to press without bending the finger only the volume rocker.
There is the usual for Windows Phones camera shutter key underneath those, but spaced away enough from the edge to allow comfortable grip while capturing photos and videos with it.
Display
A 4” 480x800 pixels IPS-LCD screen is what you will find mounted on the Nokia Lumia 520, with pretty thick top and bottom bezels surrounding it. The 235ppi pixel density is good for the category, and the viewing angles, while shifting color and contrast a bit at the end of the tilting motion, are wide too.
When you add peak brightness that ensures decent outdoor visibility, we have no complaints about the panel that Nokia chose to ship with the Lumia 520, save for the apparent lack of oleophobic coating, making you wipe the screen pretty often.
Nokia, for that matter, has equipped the display with the Synaptics super-sensitive touch layer that debuted in its Lumia 920, and allows you to operate the handset even when you have your gloves on.
Interface and functionality
The Lumia 520 runs the newest Windows Phone 8 version, meaning it is decked up with live lock screens and features like Kid's Corner, but being a Nokia handset, it also offers the excellent HERE offline navigation suite for free, as well as Nokia Music and the other Lumia goodies, like the camera apps set.
Nokia is spoiling the Lumia 520 owners with the exclusive Angry Birds Roost app that takes you deep into Rovio's universe of game previews, reviews and updates, scoreboards, news, and timewasters like adding angry avians to your camera headshots, and sharing them on the social networks.
The display might be of average size, but the phone is not that small, so you will still stretch your thumb quite a bit to reach all letters on the on-screen keyboard while using it with one hand.
Processor and memory
A dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon S4 Plus ensures smooth WP8 performance, and 512 MB of RAM is just the right basic amount for the platform to run any game or app thrown at it, which the 256 MB WP brethren can't say for themselves.
The phone comes with a decent 8 GB amount of internal memory, and there is a microSD slot for further expansion, too, which is an achievement nowadays.
Internet and connectivity
The Lumia 520 is somewhat slow to rerender the page upon zooming in and out, leaving you with blurry text for longer than it should, but scrolling, panning around and page display are spot on. Naturally, you don't have access to content that requires Adobe Flash due to the platform's specifics, so bummer if you need to watch a video on a more obscure site, or play a Flash-based game. Not that you'll be doing long browsing sessions on a 4” display anyway, but the Internet Explorer browser on the Lumia 520 does the job in all major aspects otherwise.
The phone has 21.1 Mbits HSPA+ modem inside, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS radio to take advantage of the HERE Drive, Maps and Public Transit suite, which is perhaps the most comprehensive offline navigation package for a mobile you can have.
Camera
The 5 MP shooter on the back of the Lumia 520 lacks an LED flash, but, as in every Windows Phone, is equipped with its own two-stage shutter key on the right. Shot-to-shot times are about 1-3 seconds, depending on how much light there is around, and you can go directly from a locked phone to the camera interface by pressing the shutter button.
There aren't many options to choose from in the app, just a few preset scenes, which include a macro mode and backlight setting. You can also set the ISO, white balance, exposure and aspect ratio of the photos beforehand, and that's about it. Nokia, however, supplies its own Panorama and Cinemagraph apps for spicing up your photography experience on the Lumia 520 a bit.
In automatic mode the phone performed pretty good, with accurate color representation and enough detail in the photos. White balance measurement were mostly correct, and color saturation just right, though we'd like to see a tad sharper and brighter shots, but we did have a rainy day, so you might want to push the exposure up a notch in such conditions.
As most phones in its category, the Lumia 520 shoots video with a maximum of HD 720p definition, and it comes out with smooth 30fps. The colors are accurate and the footage is well defined, without wandering focus or skipped frames.
Multimedia
We have the Photos app on Windows Phone to sift through your camera or SkyDrive photos, and Nokia adds the Creative Studio app to its Lumias for editing them on the go.
The music player sorts your tunes by artists, albums or playlists, and you've got a pretty strong loudspeaker to enjoy them, though the sound output is flat and tinny as usual with those tiny speakers.
The phone runs popular video formats like DivX/Xvid without a hitch, and at up to 1080p definitions at that.
Call quality
Voice calls in the earpiece sound about average in terms of strength, but the sound comes somewhat hollow and distorted towards the highest volumes. On the receiving end the situation is below average, with the phone's single mic mustering muted and crackling sound, that needs to be relayed with more strength to boot.
Battery
Nokia promises nine and a half hours of 3G talk time from the Lumia 520's 1430 mAh battery, which is a pretty good feat, and the excellent 61 hours of music playback. The only somewhat weak endurance point here is in video playback times, which are sub-5 hours, and below the category average.
Conclusion
If you don't mind the sketchy call quality, Nokia has hit the nail on the head with its most affordable Windows Phone handset to date. It runs the newest version of Microsoft's mobile OS, has a zippy processor, expandable storage, and produces decent pictures and video.
Add a few exclusives like the touchscreen that can be operated with gloves, and the free HERE offline navigation suite, and the Lumia 520's about $200 price tag without any contract suddenly becomes very, very appealing.
As a direct competition we can point out the lighter HTC 8S, which also runs WP8 and has roughly the same specs, save for less internal memory, but compensates it with the addition of an LED flash. It, however, costs a hundred bucks more SIM-free, and doesn't offer free global offline navigation.
Then comes the Android army, in which there are plenty of last year's handsets in this $200-$250 price range, like the single-core HTC One V or the dual-core Sony Xperia sola. They can give the Lumia 520 a run for its money with all those Android apps and widgets behind their back, though we have to admit that the free voice-guided offline navigation that Lumias come with is a pretty big selling point, if you master the Live Tiles, and can live without a few of your favorite dedicated apps on Windows Phone 8.
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