| Review of the Nokia Lumia 520 |
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The Lumia 520 is a super-inexpensive smartphone from Nokia that is well suited for people who don’t really have a burning need to own a smartphone, but can clearly benefit from some of the features a device such as that can provide. It is by no means the sort of phone that most people would consider. Last Updated: 01-Jul-2013 |
The trouble with reviewing phones
in this class is that I tend to overlook glaring flaws just because it’s cheap.
When I look at many of the phone’s attributes I’d pan them if this was a
Galaxy S4, an
HTC One, or an iPhone 5, but just because it costs so much less I tend to
look the other way and say “hey, this isn’t so bad, GIVEN THE PRICE”.
I was torn between writing a hardnosed review that compared the phone
feature-by-feature against the current state-of-the-art, and writing one that
pandered to the low end of the market by calling crappy features GOOD because
you didn’t have pay so much for them. In the end I felt that to be fair I needed
to do BOTH. So, in each case I’ve compared the feature against what is now
possible on high-end phones, but at the same time I’ve looked at the quality of
the feature in terms of what you get for your money.
Before reading this review,
please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
RF Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
RF Performance, and how to interpret it.
This is one area where the Lumia 520 doesn’t have to be apologetic. In fact,
most phones across all price points provide pretty much the same performance
these days, because most of them work with the same RF chipsets anyway. While
antenna design can play a role in the real world performance of the device, it’s
far less important than the chipset. The 520 is not different in this respect
and provides RF performance that is on par with the most expensive phones on the
market.
Audio
Click on this link for a full description of
Audio Performance, an how to interpret it.
This is another area where the
520 doesn’t compromise just because it’s cheap. It provides in-call audio
quality that is at least as good as the current crop of Samsung phones,
including the S4. I suspect that many people in the market for this level of
phone will probably used it AS A PHONE quite frequently.
The sound levels through the built-in earpiece are excellent and there is no
clipping or sympathetic vibrations that on lesser phones force you turn down the
volume.
When using the device hands free the speakerphone feature provides reasonable
volume with reasonable clarity. It’s hardly the best speakerphone in the
business, but most smartphones (especially high-end ones it seems) have fairly
mediocre speakerphone functionality anyway.
Multimedia Audio
The tiny speaker on the back of the Lumia 520 is rather tinny-sounding, even if
it does produce a fair amount of volume. Music sounds excessively shallow and
peaky, so you’ll probably want to connect a headset to this phone. However,
don’t expect much low-end bass, as this phone doesn’t seem to produce all that
much. Even when connected to an amplifier and high-end speakers the overall
sound quality of music is detectably sub-par when compared to other smartphones
on the market. I’d like to say it’s acceptable for the price, but given that
providing decent audio isn’t an expensive proposition I’m going to say this is a
disappointment, regardless of price point.
Display
You get what you pay for here. The display on the Lumia 520 is about as low-end
as it comes in the market these days. It starts with what is now a rather low
resolution of just 800 x 480 on a 4-inch display. A year and a half ago that was
admittedly the top-of-the-line, but these days we expect resolutions of at least
1280 x 720 or (in the case of top-end models) 1920 x 1080. So to be fair, the
resolution isn’t really an issue, as we’ve only had the higher-resolution models
for such a short time and chances are the target audience for the 520 is going
to find that it’s more than enough.
The screen is an LCD design that has relatively limited viewing angles.
Surprisingly, when the phone is tilted up or down it quickly dims, but then gets
brighter as the phone approaches 90 degrees. There doesn’t appear to be any
color shifts, and so overall it isn’t a horrible screen. Just the same, you’re
going to have to view it straight on for best results. Still, to be fair once
again, I’ve tested phones with much worse displays than this, and so for the
money it’s actually better than expected.
At this price point you do not get quality shatter-resistant glass (it might
even be plastic) and the screen has absolutely no resistance to skin oil. I’ve
never had to clean a screen as often as I was forced to clean the Lumia 520’s. I
would HIGHLY RECOMMEND that the first thing you do is buy a screen protector.
Get one that’s made out of PET, as this has a certain degree of skin oil
resistance that is lights years better than the material this screen is made out
of.
Processor and
Chipset
The Lumia 520 uses a dual-core 1 GHz Qualcomm S4 processor coupled to an Adreno
305 GPU. So in the performance department the 520 is actually not half bad. It’s
not top-end by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s definitely better than
earlier Windows Phone 7 devices and more powerful than a comparably-priced
Android phone. In terms of performance-for-the-buck it does really well here.
There is 512 MB of RAM, which by today’s Android standards is excessively low.
However, you need to understand that Windows Phone 8 has very limited
multitasking capabilities, and as such doesn’t really have a pressing need for a
large amount of RAM. There are WP8 models with 1 GB of RAM on the market, but
only some high-end apps need it.
Internal storage is 8 GB, which isn’t a lot, but surprising for a low-end phone
you can augment that storage with a MicroSD card. Windows Phone devices don’t
use expansion memory the same way as Android. You must buy top-end cards (which
admittedly aren’t that expensive) and once you insert them you pretty much have
to keep them there, as they become part of the system storage.
The WiFi on the phone seems up to the standards of others, but surprisingly I
couldn’t get half decent ping times from my home connection. On both my Android
phones and on my computers I routinely see 12 to 15 millisecond latency, but
when I test the ping times on the Lumia 520 I typically see 45 to 60
milliseconds. This may be the fault of the WP8 operating system and not
something Nokia can do anything about. It doesn’t help that Windows Phone has a
notorious slow browser, which is only worsened by poor ping times.
GPS
I didn’t get much of an opportunity to thoroughly test the GPS and there doesn’t
appear to be any way on a Windows Phone 8 device to actually find out how many
satellites are locked or how strong they are. Spec sheets I’ve seen say that the
GPS supports the Russian GLONASS satellites, which should greatly increase the
accuracy in the presence of obstructions such as buildings or leafy trees. If
the spec sheets are correct, then the GPS is at least as good as the current
crop of mid-level smartphones.
Camera
Let’s begin by saying what virtually every other review has said of the Lumia
520: the camera software is AWEFUL. It’s stock Windows Phone 8 and has virtually
no features whatsoever and you get only 2 choices of picture resolution. You can
pick from a 3.4 megapixel 16:9 picture, or a 2 megapixel 4:3 picture. The spec
sheets say that it has a 5 megapixel sensor, but there doesn’t seem to be any
way to setup the camera to take photographs of that size.
Nokia supplements the poor Microsoft camera app with a few add-ons that provide
some advanced functionality, but these are not particularly well-conceived. Take
the Smart Shoot app for example. It gives you a reasonable substitute for the
feature known as Best Shot on many other devices, in that it takes a series of
photographs one after that other and lets you pick which one you think is the
best. However, the app doesn’t do any post-processing to identify the one that’s
the sharpest (as does the camera app on the Galaxy S4), nor is there any way to
zoom in on the pictures before you pick one, thus you can’t closely examine them
to see which one has the least amount of motion blur.
The camera hardware is also quite slow. If you’ve used a high-end phone like the
S4, or even a recent point-and-shoot camera, you’ve come to expect that when a
series of shots are taken (such as with a Best Shot feature) those pictures are
snap just fractions of a second apart. With the Lumia 520 the shots are taken
once every half to three quarters of a second, which seems excruciatingly long.
The resulting picture quality is not bad however, especially in well-lit
conditions, though the maximum resolution of 3.5 megapixels means there just
isn’t a lot of detail. Low light shots are generally quite poor. We can’t really
fault the 3.4 megapixel resolution however, because the HTC One touts only 4
megapixels. However, the quality of the photographs from the HTC One is lights
year better than the Lumia 520. Still, the shots are generally much better than
we were seeing on smartphones just 3 or 4 years ago.
The 520 does not have a front-facing camera. This means that you won’t be able
to use the device for video calling, or for taking self portraits. It also does
not have a flash, and so you can’t light up dark subjects that are too dim to
expose otherwise.
On the video side of things the 520 is capable of taking pretty decent 720p
videos (no 1080p is available). The videos are quite smooth and free of skips
Conclusions
There’s no question that the BEST FEATURE of the Lumia 520 is its price. At
between $130 and $150 outright (no contract) it’s the lowest-priced smartphone
to come along in ages. That means people on budgets can finally afford to get
away from the dumb phone world and into the smartphone world. It’s excellent for
pre-paid plans where the idea is to spend as little possible. The main
competition here is clearly low-end Android devices, as Apple doesn’t actually
play in the low-end market. Huawei is the company most threatened by this phone,
so if you’re in the market for a smartphone, you’ll probably be looking at
Android products from Huawei as well.
The phone has plenty of features one would expect in a smartphone, even if those
features aren’t as well implemented or as complete as one might expect from a
higher-end device. If you are willing to spend a little more money however, I
would recommend you look elsewhere, even at other phones in the Lumia line. The
520 is really just a phone for those whose aim is to spend as little as possible
on a new smartphone. If you are truly that kind of buyer, then the 520 is
certainly a lot more phone than you probably thought you were going to get for
that little money (buying a used phone notwithstanding).
