The new phone’s styling is a step up from the 520. In short, the Lumia 530 has big shoes to fill, and in some ways it’s actually more strategically important to Microsoft than mid-and-high-end Lumias like the 730, 830, 930, and their various carrier-specific offshoots. But it runs the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1 well, it has no problem with any apps you throw at it (aside from those that require 1GB or more of RAM, mostly games), and its 5MP camera is pretty good with color and detail if you give it enough light. Its 4-inch, 800×480 screen is neither particularly dense or particularly great-looking. It’s got a meager 512MB of RAM, and just 8GB of internal storage. Sure, it’s missing a bunch of stuff compared to high-end and midrange smartphones-it doesn’t have a front-facing camera, an LED flash for the rear camera, or LTE. Its price tag likely explains much of its popularity, but it helps that it’s a surprisingly good smartphone for what it is. It’s currently the bestselling prepaid phone on Amazon, where it has been available for as little as $40. Lots of other people apparently agreed with us- data shows that the 520 (and variants like the 521) accounts for 40 percent of all active Windows Phones worldwide, and over half of the Windows Phones in the US. Though we never gave it an official review, we’re fans of the low-end Lumia 520. So is $70 too cheap? How does the 530 stack up against other non-terrible budget Android and Windows Phones? And what, if anything, does it add that the older Lumia 520 didn’t have? Big shoes to fill: Succeeding the Lumia 520 Despite being carrier-locked, it can still be used with budget-focused MVNOs like Straight Talk, making it a tempting option for anyone contemplating their first smartphone. In the US, the phone will usually be sold carrier-locked but contract-free for something less than $100-we picked up our T-Mobile version of the phone from Microsoft’s online store for just $69, and sales will send that price even lower. Microsoft’s (still-Nokia-branded) Lumia 530 smartphone aims squarely for that gap.
$50 locked to Cricket Wireless, $69 locked to T-Mobile But there’s a wide gap between something like that and, say, the $129 Moto E or the comparable phones being pushed out as part of the Android One initiative. Intex obviously went too far when it built its $35 Firefox phone, which is so bad that using it is enough to make you swear off smartphones altogether. How cheap is too cheap? That’s the biggest question facing competitors in the burgeoning market for competent-but-inexpensive smartphones-their phones need to be cheap enough to appeal to dumbphone users and people in developing markets, but not so cheap that they’re unusably poor.
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