Nokia Lumia 520 Smartphone Review

Using the Lumia 520

In use, the Lumia 520 is surprisingly agile for a low-cost smartphone. It is also reasonably compact and thin, being 0.39” (9.9 mm) thick, with a slightly curved back, and a good grip.

The dual-core 1 GHz CPU gives an excellent usage experience. On the other hand, the memory size is small: the 512 MiB of RAM may prevent some apps from running.

The screen resolution is 800 x 480, which is good for a low-cost smartphone. It works fine for a four-inch screen, making images to look pretty – assuming that you are not used to a screen with a higher resolution, of course.

The Nokia Lumia 520 has 8 GiB of internal storage, and supports an external SD card up to 64 GiB. The user-available space when used for the first time is about 4.7 GiB.

The Windows Phone 8 operating system is easy to use and intuitive. Figures 10 and 11 show the initial screen when you turn on the Lumia 520 for the first time.

Figure 10: main screen

Figure 11: main screen

Sliding the screen to the left, you see the application list, shown in Figures 12, 13, and 14. The Lumia 520 comes with few preinstalled apps and games, which is nice, since you can simply install what you really need.

Figure 12: list of applications

Figure 13: list of applications

Figure 14: list of applications

You can install new applications from the Windows Phone Store, which has thousands of apps and games available. If you have an Xbox 360 or an Xbox One, you can use your existing Microsoft Live account, and even make your smartphone interact with your console.

The smartphone uses a 3.7 V, 1,430 mAh lithium battery, which easily lasted two days with average browsing and a few calls. Nokia claims it lasts 16 days in standby, 52 h of music playback, 9.7 h of conversation on a 3G network, and 7.3 h of Wi-Fi browsing.

The 5 Mpixel camera is a good surprise, since it has an excellent quality (for a low-cost smartphone, obviously). You can check the quality of unedited photos taken with the device by clicking here and here.

It records videos only at 720p, at 30 fps.

There is no front camera, so the Nokia Lumia 520 cannot be used for video chats.