Nokia Lumia 520

Available now
25th February 2013

One of the problems that Nokia have had with their device strategy is to close the gap between their value Asha range of Series 40 feature phones, and the Lumia range of Windows phones which all tend to be rather expensive. But help is at hand.. priced at €139 before tax and carrier subsidy, the new Nokia Lumia 520 is Nokia's cheapest Windows phone to date, but it is still more than the magic €100 mark.

Although the 500-series tag indicates that it sits at the bottom of the range, the Lumia 520 actually has a bigger screen than the more expensive Lumia 620. But size isn't everything, and the 620 has a higher quality display and a video calling camera where the 520 does not. Instead, it replaces the unlovely Lumia 510 with something much, much better.

The display is a 4.0" 480 x 800 pixel IPS panel which can be used while wearing gloves, on the back is a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and 720p video recording, inside is a dual-core 1GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM and 8GB of onboard storage plus a microSD slot (that's up from 256MB and 4GB respectively on the Lumia 510). The Lumia 520 has all the normal smartphone features including GPS and GLONASS, 3.5G, WiFi, Bluetooth and USB connectivity, except unlike most of the Android-based competition this runs Windows Phone 8 instead.

Windows Phone 8 comes with support for Microsoft Office 365 built in, plus Nokia's own enhancements of free turn-by-turn navigation and other add-ons. Windows doesn't have the massive range of applications that some rivals have, but it does pretty much everything that every other smartphone does, and it looks refreshingly different from the likes of the iPhone and Android handsets.

The next phone down in Nokia's range is the Asha 311 which retails for about €100 SIM-free, where the Lumia 520 will be about €60 more. The Asha range is pretty good, but if you can find the extra money then you'll end up with a much better device. There's still a pretty big gap between the two ranges, and it was perhaps a mistake from Nokia to ditch the low-cost Symbian smartphone platform that used to fill it.

Inside, a modest 1430 mAh battery is quoted as giving up to 9.6 hours talktime on 3G, and the Lumia 520 measures 120 x 64 x 9.9mm and weighs 124 grams. Available colours are yellow, red, cyan, white and black. Nokia say that the Lumia 520 should be available in Vietnam and Hong Kong during Q1 2013 with Europe, China, India, Latin America and Africa following during Q2.