Nokia Lumia 530 Review: Super-fast, Reliable, Pocket-friendly Smartphone

Notably, the Lumia 530 is one of the first smartphones to ship with the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system, which has been touted to be the best OS Microsoft has churned out for its mobile devices so far.

The latest OS comes with features such as the one-swipe notification area called the Action Center, and the fast Word Flow keyboard. Microsoft also offers 15 GB of free cloud storage on Microsoft OneDrive and free Office apps.

The 530 has a strong lineage. Its roots can be traced all the way back to the 510, the first of the three affordable models released in the Lumia series. Then came along the 520, a major upgrade over its predecessor, which was the highest selling Nokia Lumia phone in 2013.

Without delving too much into genetics, the 530 carries the same genomes as its parents but can it prove to be a worthwhile successor to the 500 series Lumia family?

FEATURES
The Lumia 530 comes with a 4-inch LCD capacitive 480×854 resolution, 1.2 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 quad core processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB internal memory expandable up to 128 GB, 5 MP camera, 1430 mAh battery.

With a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor under the hood, you know you’re dealing with a high-quality manufacturer for processing power. You won’t have the performance of mid-range phones produced this or last year, but you will be able to open apps and browse the web, no problem.

The Lumia 530 works with Windows Phone 8.1, the newest version of the operating system from Microsoft. You’ll be able to download all the newest apps - or most of them, anyway - and they’ll run fine.

You can swish back and forth between menus with no trouble, games (for the most) play fine and although if you make any unexpected jumps (say from the lock screen to a music player) you can expect a few seconds loading time.

Nokia Lumia 530: Side view

DESIGN & BUILD
Nokia Lumia 530 also known as Nokia Lumia 530 RM-1017 is more like the earlier Lumia 520 although it’s a bit heavier weighing 129 grams and measuring 119.7 X 62.3 X 11.7 mm.

It's similarly chunky and bright, with several different colours available. However, the main differences are that the 530 has a gentler, rounder appearance and that it loses the off-screen Back, Windows and Search keys below the screen (these move to the bottom part of the display itself).

The curved back and the diminutive size grips well and should easily fit into most pockets. The power and volume buttons are placed on the right and are easily accessible, thanks to the small size. The keys use slightly better quality of plastic, so they feel firmer than the back cover and better to use.

CONNECTIVITY
The Lumia 530 is a dual-SIM phone and supports Internet connections via GPRS and EDGE at speeds up to 236.8 kbps. There’s support for Wi-Fi, 3G HSUPA and faster HSDPA connections as well. Both are micro SIMs and both SIM cards can run on the 3G network.

MEMORY
You’ll have 4GB of internal storage which means you’ve got just about enough storage for a few albums of music. You do have a microSD card slot that you can expand this storage with - you can add 128GB more space, which I highly recommend you do immediately upon purchase.

SCREEN, CAMERA & BATTERY
Up front is a 4-inch 480 x 854 pixel TFT LCD display. It sits just a tiny bit below the glass up front and looks acceptable when you’re indoors. Outside this display is barely able to be viewed - just enough to be able to take the demo photos you see in the Camera section below.

You've got a 5-megapixel camera here with a 1/4" sensor. There's no flash bulb, and performance isn't great. It's basic. It really is the bare minimum unless you're in the most ideal conditions possible. Above you'll see the camera alongside the headphone jack and no flash bulb.

You'll also notice that there's no longer a physical shutter button for the camera as Microsoft took away that requirement at the start of this year for hardware moving forward.

Video can only be shot at a maximum of 848 x 480 and, as a result, footage doesn't look detailed. It isn't afflicted by the terrible smear that many budget smartphones show when the light falls, though, and the exposure doesn't step nastily as you pan from light to dark areas. In short, for this sort of money, the Lumia 530's camera is pretty decent.

The Lumia 530 houses a 1430 mAh battery, which provides nearly 16 hours of web browsing over Wi-Fi. In my loop test, which includes four hours of web browsing, two hours of calls and and hour of gaming and video playback, the Lumia 530 had 23% of battery to spare. On average use, this should provide a day or more after a full charge. The Lumia 530 take a little over two hours to charge completely, which is on-par with most devices.

Nokia Lumia 530: Colour variate

PRICE
Is the Lumia 530 good for its price - around ($120) 17,000 Naira in Nigeria? The answer is definitely YES!. Surprisingly, the answer might be Windows Phone 8.1, Fast Word Flow keyboard, pocketable size, and free Microsoft Office.

VERDICT
Windows Phone is still far from perfect of course, and is often confusing to navigate (all those undifferentiated text options in an endless queue) and the home screen needs a bit of customizing before it really works, but if you’re not platform-agnostic then it’s certainly worth a look see.

As ever, there’s not much to tempt over a committed iOS or Android user but for a first-time smartphone customer there’s a lot of good features, a very neat looking calendar and arguably the best free music streaming app on any mobile platform: MixRadio. (For those who’ve not come across MixRadio, this offers ad-free playlists from different genres and charts that can be downloaded for offline use and customized to your tastes.

In conclusion, the Lumia 530 is a respectable entry level smartphone for a pay-as-you-go price of around ($120) 17,000 Naira.

What do you think of this Lumia 530? Please feel free to share your comment with us on this device.