Nokia lumia 530: Affordable but not amazing

Your first smartphone is always important. Pretty much like every other thing. It leaves you with an experience and some lessons for the future. When it comes to smartphones, they leave you with a dos and don'ts list for the future.

My first smartphone was a Nokia Lumia 710. It ran on the Windows Phone OS, had a five-megapixel camera. The screen was not that big, but quite responsive. There were certain things I liked about the OS. To mention a few, the tile design was something new and different; I could download music from Nokia Music and store it for offline use.

But then there were a few things that made me drift away from the OS. The battery life was miserable. I had to keep it plugged it to the charger all the time. The Windows Marketplace did not have a wide variety of apps, as compared to the Google Play Store.

It will be fair to say that the Lumia and Windows Phone OS left me with a bittersweet feeling.

Now let's come to the Lumia 530. Microsoft Devices has termed it the "most affordable Lumia". The dual SIM smartphone is the company's bet for the beginner or low-end segment. Let's take a closer look at the Lumia 530, but keep in mind what I mentioned about the Lumia 710, we will come back to it later.

Operating system
The Lumia 530 runs on Windows Phone 8.1, which brings along with itself, among other things, one swipe notifications, Cortana, the Action Centre and a Word Flow keyboard. You also have Internet Explorer 11 on board. The Bing Search has also been expanded, which allows users to search stuff not only online, but also on their device - emails, messaging and so on. The Windows Phone 8.1 worked smoothly. Its live tiles provided a brilliant experience. As I mentioned before, the tile design always presents something different.

Performance
The Lumia 530 runs on a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon S200 processor. It is backed by a 512MB RAM and comes with only 4GB of internal storage. These are two blemishes on the Lumia 530. Even for a phone that is dubbed as the cheapest Lumia, a 1GB of RAM would have been a fair deal. And the internal storage doesn't leave much for the user, but a bright spot is that storage can be beefed up to 128GB using a memory card. The RAM was simply not enough for a quad-core processor. The 530 gets its power from a 1,430mAh battery and will easily last you a day.

Display
The four-inch LCD FWVGA screen on the Lumia 530 does look compact but it yielded average results. The display had poor viewing angles and gave an overall grainy look. With a resolution of 480 X 854 pixels, don't expect too much from the display.

Camera
Keeping in line with its earlier models, the Lumia 530 comes with a nice bunch of camera apps - Cinemagraph, Panorama, Storyteller and so on. The device does not have a front-facing camera. It does, however, come with a five-megapixel rear camera. The rear camera will perform well in well-lit conditions, but it will be a tough ask for the camera to yield good pictures in dark settings, owing to the absence of a flash. The addition of a flash is negligible, but the front cam, we think, is a big miss.

The good, the bad and the ugly
As usual, with the Windows Phone OS, users will have a few things that no other OS offers. Mix Radio and Here Maps will help immensely in terms of the music and navigation, respectively. There is also the One Note app and the Office Hub, which will let users handle official documents easily on the go.

But now recall what I told you about the Lumia 710. Smartphone users these days don't want to take chances on their first device. They want a resolute device. Take nothing away from the software of the Lumia 530, it is the hardware that is a tad disappointing. No front-facing camera, a RAM that plays a bit part role and an average display - all these features leave the Lumia 530 on a weak footing. It is available for Rs 7,349.

Do you fancy yourself going for a Windows phone, when you have alternatives like, say, the Moto E, which is available for almost the same price? Well-nigh impossible. Windows Phone loyalists might still have a crack at the Lumia 530, but that's pretty much it.
NOKIA LUMIA 530
Price: Rs 7,350
Dimensions: 119.7 X 62.3 x 11.7 mm, 129g
Display: 4 inches; 480 x 854 pixels, TFT
Battery: 1,430 mAh
OS: Windows Phone 8.1
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 1.2GHz quad core
RAM: 512MB
Storage: 4GB expandable up to 128GB with microSD card
Camera (front/rear): NA/ 5MP