Nokia Lumia 520 review

Key Features: 4-inch 480 x 800 pixel IPS screen; Windows Phone 8; 8GB internal memory, microSD; Dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU; 5-megapixel main camera, no front camera

Manufacturer: Nokia

Nokia Lumia 520 - Design and Screen

What is the Nokia Lumia 520?

The Lumia 520 is Nokia’s lowest-end Windows Phone 8 mobile at present. It’s a phone you can get on bottom-rung contracts, and it costs around £120 SIM-free at time of writing. It lacks most of the flair and neat extra touches of the Lumia 620, but is yet more proof that Windows Phone 8 is a great platform for low-end phones.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Design

One of the most common problems in entry-level phones is that they tend to feel cheap. They are usually chunkier and less stylish than high-end phones, and suffer from more build quality problems.

However, the Nokia Lumia 520 is among the best phones in its class in this respect. It uses a plastic battery cover like virtually all cheap phones, but the backplate cleverly covers the whole phone apart from the screen.

This gives the phone a similar unibody look to the high-end Lumia phones, even though this is absolutely not a unibody mobile. To ensure a sturdy feel the cover is reasonably thick, and it has a matt, textured finish to avoid the tacky glossy plastic that plagues many budget mobiles.

For the price, the Lumia 520 looks and feels like a classy product. However, it’s not quite as cute or pretty as the Lumia 620. That phone’s covers have a translucent layer that gives their finishes an appearance of depth. Here, the plastic is basic opaque stuff.

Its ergonomics are pretty good, though. The textured finish offers a bit of extra grip and the carefully curved rear sits comfily in your hand.

There are even a few neat style touches, such as how the Lumia-staple trio of physical buttons on the right edge of the phone are stark black to contrast punchily with the phone’s hue. There’s no naff labelling of what these buttons do either – another aesthetic blunder common to cheapy phones.

If you’re wondering, these side controls are power, volume and camera shutter buttons. 

The phone comes in red, blue and yellow shades, as well as the more sober white and black models. And both the microSD memory card slot and SIM slot live under the battery cover to help keep the Lumia 520’s exterior simple-looking.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Screen

The Lumia 520’s display is slightly larger than the Lumia 620’s. It is four inches across, which is fairly generous for a budget phone like this. As well as being a shade larger than its more expensive brother, it’s also larger than the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2’s screen and Sony Xperia E’s display. And both of those tend to cost more.

However, it’s pretty basic a number of different ways. Its viewing angles are fine, but the display quality is otherwise limited. There’s a reddish tint to the display, ensuring colour accuracy is so-so and the lack of any sort of reflection-battling layer reduces the impression of contrast and makes the Lumia 520 a bit of a pain to use outdoors - it's seriously reflective.

The glass covering the display isn’t robustly toughened, either. It has some scratch resistance, but will flex under the pressure of a firm thumb prod. However, it’s far from the worst case we’ve seen, and any normal of pressure does not cause any screen distortion.

Screen resolution is 800 x 480 pixels, resulting in pixel density of 233ppi. Sharpness is well below the top phones out there, but for a low-end phone it’s perfectly good. Plus top brightness is impressively uncomfortable to gaze upon in most situation,  and the screen size is large enough to happily read websites and play games on.

Nokia Lumia 520 - Software, Video and Internal Speaker

Nokia Lumia 520 – Software

One area where the Nokia Lumia 520 hasn’t had to scrimp much is software. It runs Windows Phone 8, an operating system that looks and feels similar on a low-end phone to a top one.

It’s this consistent level of performance in Windows Phone 8 that makes the Lumia 520 such a top device. It may be cheap, but it is as quick and slick as you like.

The phone’s core specs aren’t too shabby, either. It has a dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8227 CPU and 512MB of RAM. That’s the same innards found in the Lumia 720, which is a significantly more expensive phone.

Day-to-day performance is great. And it glitched out fewer times than most Windows phones. This grade of overall experience is better than we’d expect from a low-end Android phone – especially from a company that aggressively goes for the entry-level market like Huawei or ZTE.

However, we did notice some more slow-down than higher-end Lumias when playing games. The Sunspider Javascript benchmark, too, shows that the Lumia 520 isn’t quite as speedy as the more expensive Lumias, coming out with a score of 1400ms when the just-unveiled Lumia 625 scored around 1100ms (lower scores are better in this test).

If gaming is a priority, the Lumia 520 isn’t the greatest phone in town, but not because of any performance issue. It’s down to Windows Phone 8.

The games selection available on Windows Phone 8 is poor compared with Android or iOS. And, as is common with new phones, it’s even worse on the Lumia 520. There are just 20 games (at the time of writing) in the Xbox games section of the Windows Marketplace, which is where the highest-profile Windows Phone games live.

The apps selection is pretty limited too, and Windows versions of apps tend to receive fewer updates than their iOS and Android cousins. The basics are covered, but - as with games - if you're an apps freak look for a budget Android.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Browsing and Social Networking

Windows Phone 8 does come with a solid array of integrated features, though. Its People app not only acts as your phone book, but also hooks into Facebook and Twitter to bring you your latest social updates from your friends.

Real social networkers will want to use separate apps for each, but Windows Phone 8 does manage to weave together social networks, email accounts and more traditional phone features like SMS with ease.

Whether writing a message or tapping out a web address, the Lumia 520’s excellent keyboard makes doing so easy. Windows Phone’s virtual keyboard is excellent, with careful design and very accurate, reliable input. The 4-inch screen is large enough for comfortable typing with most keyboards, but somehow the Windows one feels routinely more reliable than the majority of Android keyboards.

It’s quite stylish too, with a sharp, minimal look. However, it does not offer any form of gesture typing - where you draw a wiggly line over the letters in a word rather than tapping - and no way to install such a feature. Some of you may not like this, as gesture typing is generally much quicker than old fashioned tapping, once you get used to it.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Video and Internal Speaker

The Lumia 520’s screen is a little too small to comfortably watch a film on, but the phone’s native video skills aren’t too bad.

Its video player app can play a few video formats without transcoding (converting videos into another format) - including Xvid and DivX. However, it doesn't recognise MKV files at all.

If you’re desperate to use the phone as a portable video player, there are some third-party apps on the Windows Marketplace that’ll handle DivX and MKV files. But not as many as on iOS or Android.

The Lumia 520's internal speaker is a basic mono affair. It sounds a little tinny and harsh at high volumes, but it does at least provide a good volume level for a small, low-cost phone.

Nokia Lumia 520 - Camera, Battery Life and Verdict

Nokia Lumia 520 – Camera

Nokia makes some of the most interesting phone cameras in the world. The Nokia Lumia 1020 is perhaps the best phone camera ever made and the Lumia 925 has the best low-light photo performance of any phone we’ve tried this year.

As you might expect, the Lumia 520 is nowhere near these lofty heights. It has a 5-megapixel rear camera and no front camera at all. There’s no way to shoot easy selfies or to video chat with this phone – for that you’ll need to upgrade to the Lumia 620.

However, photo performance in good lighting conditions is actually fairly good. The 5-megapixel sensor captures limited detail next to the big boys, but focusing is reasonably fast and the photos are a lot less glum-looking than most cameras at this bargain basement price.


Macro-style performance is good for a budget camera, and it can produce shallow depth of field effects


A 1:1 pixel crop comparing the Lumia 520 with the Lumia 925 
There’s one serious limiting factor, though – the Lumia 520 has no flash. Photos are pretty grainy at the best of times, but in low-light conditions, the phone is borderline useless as a camera.

Stay in the light and it’s a breeze to use, partly because of the way Windows Phone 8 approaches its camera software. A tap on-screen both picks a focus point and takes a shot. As standard, all the settings are handled by the phone.

There’s a physical shutter button on the Lumia 520 too, but it’s terrible. Where Nokia’s top-end Lumia’s have a carefully-designed two-stage button (half-depress for focus, full press to take a shot) that feels a lot like a ‘real’ camera shutter control, this one feels much like the power button further up the phone. Taking in-focus shots with it is tricky. Avoid.

Back to the camera app - the downside to the simplistic camera software approach of the Lumia 520 is that you don’t get many features built-in. There’s no HDR mode and no panorama. You can get these using what Microsoft calls lenses.

These are downloadable camera-related modes that you switch between from within the camera app. Only a pair come pre-installed – the face-detecting Smart Shoot and the barcode-scanning Bing Vision – but others are available from the Windows Store app shop, including HDR and panorama (most good ones are paid-for, though).

We’re not convinced those new to smartphones will necessarily realise the extra functions are out there, though. We’d rather have a few more basics built-in.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Battery Life

The Lumia 520 mostly misses out of things compared to its more expensive brother the Lumia 620. No NFC, no compass, no front camera. However, it does have a slightly larger battery.

It has a 1,430mAh 5.2Wh unit, where the Lumia 620 has a 1,300mAh battery. This is to compensate for the slightly larger screen of the Lumia 520, but we were generally quietly impressed with the phone’s stamina in real-time use.

We easily coasted through a day’s use between charges. And while those wanting to use smartphone features like browsing and always-on email checking will generally still have to charge once a day, forgetting to charge overnight generally won’t leave you with a dead phone come mid-day.

Nokia Lumia 520 – Call Quality

One of the other elements Nokia hasn’t scrimped on too much is the Lumia 520’s calling. It may be cheap, but it does use a second microphone to remove ambient noise from the call signal.

Call quality in general is perfectly good. The earpiece speaker only suffers from a slight lack of treble clarity, but supplies a decent level of volume. We experienced no call signal issues, which may be helped by the plastic outer shell - metal outer parts can cause signal issues.

Should I Buy the Nokia Lumia 520?

The Nokia Lumia 520 is a phone that’s all about compromises. You don’t get to make a phone that sells for as little as £115 without cutting a few corners. But Nokia has generally made the right cuts in the right places. The front-facing camera, NFC, a compass and a camera flash are all things that many people simply won’t miss much – especially when the rear camera isn’t too bad to use in daylight.

The issue that’s harder to shrug off is the top screen layer, which is highly reflective and makes outdoors use tricky. As the Lumia 620 has a polarisation filter to reduce reflections – and a cuter design – we’d recommend opting for that more expensive model if the difference in price isn’t too great. However, like the Lumia 520, the Nokia Lumia 520 once again proves a seriously attractive alternative to a budget Android.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 520 cuts all the fat off Nokia’s more expensive Windows Phone 8 Lumia phones to bring the slick Windows experience to budget buyers. There are missing features, but most aren’t missed. This is a fab budget phone.