Nokia Lumia 530

Available now
23th July 2014

The Nokia Lumia 520 is Nokia's best-selling phone, with a street price of around €100 for the SIM-free version plus a reasonably large screen and quite decent feature set. The replacement for the 520 is the new Nokia Lumia 530 which is pretty similar in hardware terms but comes with a software upgrade in the form of Windows 8.1 plus some useful add-ons.

Inside the Lumia 530 is a quad-core CPU running at 1.2GHz (up from two cores in the 520) plus 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage plus a microSD slot, an FM radio and a 1430 mAh battery. Apart from the processor cores, this is pretty much identical to the 520.

On the front is a 4" 480 x 854 pixel LCD display. It's worth pointing out that on the earlier 520 it is an improved IPS "super sensitive" display , so this appears to be a downgrade.. however the 530 does have a true 16:9 aspect ratio unlike the 520 which should help with video playback.

The camera is another odd downgrade, the 530 has a 5 megapixel camera with fixed focus and 480p video capture compared to the autofocus and 720p capable 520. Admittedly, the camera on the 530 exactly matches the screen playback resolution, but if you wanted to upload the videos to YouTube then you might find them a bit small.

Maybe we're nit-picking because this is a sub-€100 smartphone, but these apparent downgrades are a bit odd. Still, it does everything that you'd expect a modern smartphone to do including supporting 3G and WiFi data (not LTE), GPS and GLONASS positioning and Bluetooth 4.0. The Lumia 530 comes in single-SIM and dual-SIM configurations.

The software includes the latest bundle of Windows and Nokia applications which will do pretty much everything you want out-of-the-box, and Windows 8.1 features a greater level of personalisation plus the Cortana assistant. As with all Lumias, it comes in a brightly coloured plastic case with optional changeable shells.

Nokia (well, it's Microsoft these days) say that the Lumia 530 should be available from August onwards for €85 before tax and subsidy in select markets first followed by a global rollout.