Nokia Lumia 530 Review

By: Unknown on 3:33 AM

Key Features: 4-inch 480 x 854 pixel LCD screen; 4GB storage; Windows Phone 8.1

Pros

• Looks better than some budget phones

Cons

• Low-power processor causes performance issues
• TN screen is ugly
• Very limited internal memory

Manufacturer: Nokia

What is the Nokia Lumia 530?

The Nokia Lumia 530 is the lowest-price Windows Phone mobile Nokia has produced to date. It’ll take over from the super-popular Lumia 520, and starts at an even lower price – £79.99 on pre-pay.

As with any Nokia phone, you get a reasonable base level of design and build here. But we find it hard to stomach that this is – in several ways – a step down from the Lumia 520, a phone that for now can be had for £20 less.

SEE ALSO: Best Mobile Phones

Nokia Lumia 530 – Design

No matter how much money is stripped away from the budget, Nokia always tries to put that little bit of extra attention into the design of its phones. With the Nokia Lumia 530 there’s very little extra budget to put aside, but it’s still better-looking than some low-cost phones from the smaller names.

The back of the phone is a simple textured plastic, and there are none of the finishing touches of the slightly more expensive Lumia 630 and Lumia 635. No translucent layers to give depth to the finish, and after a few days’ use we can see where the texture of the plastic back is starting to wear to a shine a bit.

It may be a cheap suit among phone covers, but you still get colour-matched power/volume buttons, and the characteristic Nokia option of bright colours. The Nokia Lumia 530 comes in bright green and orange as well as black and white.



These colours seem to be all the rage over at Nokia towers this year, being the same ones on offer for the Lumia 630 and Lumia 930.

In-hand, it’s pretty obvious this is a cheaper phone. However, the smoothly curved back feels good and the 4-inch screen ensures easy handling even though the Lumia 530 is pretty chunky at 11.7mm thick.

SEE ALSO: Best Android Phones



We also like that the Lumia 530 isn’t laden with seams. Oddly enough, the Lumia 930 has loads more even though traditional logic suggests the more seams something has, the scrappier it’s likely to look. Although not really a unibody phone at all, the full coverage of the back cover gives the phone the unibody look.

Pop the back off and you’ll see the microSD slot, removable battery and microSIM slot. This has become the standard complement for a budget phone, and the Lumia 530 certainly needs its memory card slot. It’s one of the first Windows phones to offer just 4GB of storage, as previous versions of Microsoft’s OS mandated at least 8GB. Storage is pretty tight once the space taken up by the default software is accounted for - this will be no travelling video collection.

Windows Phone fans may also notice another sign that this is a new-ish phone – there are no physical soft keys, and no camera button. These, and 8GB storage, are all things found in the older Lumia 520. The Lumia 530 is pretty stripped-back even in the budget Windows phone stakes.

Nokia Lumia 530 – Screen

The phone also has a pretty low-end screen. It’s four inches across and 480 x 854 pixels in resolution.

It’s a small, fairly low-res display. However, much like the Lumia 520, as the screen is quite small the pixellating effects of the resolution aren’t terrible.

The Lumia 530 display offers 245ppi, which isn’t too far removed from the 256ppi of the (admittedly much better) Motorola Moto E. As long as you don’t look too close, the pixels don’t scream at you like babies crying on a long-distance flight.

Of course, that only affects the sorts of things when resolution doesn’t matter hugely. We still found browsing the web a bit of challenge. Reading articles through the combo of low resolution and small display size isn’t a great deal of fun. This sort of limitation applies to gaming too.



Image quality isn’t great either. The Nokia Lumia 530 uses a TN panel rather than an IPS one, and these types of screen suffer from contrast shift, which is where the character of the display changes quite radically when tilted away from the perpendicular.

Tilt the Lumia 530 left and it goes darker, tilt it right and it goes brighter and more washed-out. Turn the display more than a few degrees to the left and you get colour inversion, making the screen barely comprehensible at times.

Numerous low-end phones still use these kinds of basic screens, but the Lumia 530 is positively blown out of the water by the Motorola Moto E, which offers a 4.3-inch 950 x 530 pixel IPS screen at the same price. Even the Lumia 520 used an IPS screen, albeit a pretty low-end one.

It’s a very disappointing screen all-in, with limited black level, and contrast issues that exhibit most noticeably as hard-to-read text when the font’s white and the surround colour is bright-ish too. That may sound like an unusual situation, but it’s pretty common in Windows Phone 8.1’s Live Tiles.

The Lumia 530 is simply not that nice to look at, either. The layer of glass that sits on top of the screen has a mottling effect that spoils the look of any areas of bright, block colour. Again – Live Tiles, anyone?



There are a few positive things to say about the screen’s construction, though. It may not use Gorilla Glass 3, but the top glass layer does still seem to be pretty tough. Weak screen coverings tend to flex pretty easily under pressure, but with the Lumia 530 you have to press just as hard as you do with Gorilla Glass to make the screen distort.

The Lumia 530 screen is not too recessed, either. This limits how badly the phone suffers from reflectivity, meaning it’s reasonably clear outdoors even though top brightness isn’t exactly eyeball-melting.

Altering brightness to cope with daylight reveals one of the Lumia 530’s most annoying traits, though. Like the Lumia 630, there’s no auto brightness setting as the phone does not have an ambient light sensor.

Most phones can automatically turn the screen’s intensity up and down to match the surrounding light conditions, but here you have to do so manually. The toggle that switches between the three low-mid-high levels is accessible from an easy-access drop-down menu, but having to flick through settings several times a day gets annoying. Especially when you press the button one time too many and end up with a barely visible screen on a sunny day.

Nokia Lumia 530 – Software

The Nokia Lumia 530 runs Windows Phone 8.1, the latest version of Microsoft’s mobile OS at the time of writing. For those who have experience with Windows Phone 8, or even Windows Phone 7, it’ll seem very familiar. 

You have your home screen of Live Tiles and the apps menu, both of which scroll vertically. It’s fairly easy to use, even though its style is actually quite different from the other two big mobile OSs: Android and iOS.

Microsoft made a bunch of important updates in the 8.1 edition that bring the system a little closer to these two, though. First, there’s now a drop-down menu of notifications and features switches. 

Finally, you don’t need to head into the email app to check out the gist of your latest emails with a Windows phone. It’s an improvement.


The software soft keys are new too – previously phones had to have hardware ones. Neither the drop-down nor the soft keys look quite as good as much of the Windows Phone 8 bedrock that they sit on, but it’s just a sign that Windows Phone 8.1 is really just a bit of a stop-gap release before we see Windows Phone 9 later down the line. And a bit of visual scrappiness is nothing to complain about much in a phone like the Lumia 530 that costs under £80. 

Nokia Lumia 530 – Apps and Performance

What hasn’t changed much is the generally very good performance of Windows Phone. You can flick through the basic Windows interface about as fast as your fingers allow, without any of the stuttery lag you might see in some Android phones in this entry-level class. 

However, this only really applies to the real core of the Windows Phone 8.1 system – the home screen and apps menu. All bets are off when you head into an app, and here we do start to see the cuts to the Lumia 530’s internals a bit.

Apps often take quite a bit longer to load than we’d like, and moving within an app is generally a lot less slick than it is in the core UI. Not disastrously so in most cases – but it’s the first impression that’s the best when it comes to the Lumia 530’s performance. Actually use it for a while and you realise: it's not very fast. 



The phone uses a quad-core Snapdragon 200 1.2GHz CPU, a low-end processor with really very low-power Cortex-A5 cores. A ‘quad-core’ tag is nice to have, but we imagine the Lumia 530 might perform better with the dual-core Cortex-A7 Snapdragon 200 used in the Motorola Moto E. 

The phone takes 1503ms to complete the Sunspider java benchmark, which is pretty low for a Windows phone – they’re often quick compared to Androids in the same class. 

You may also be surprised to hear that the Lumia 530 is actually less powerful than the Lumia 520. While the older phone has just two cores of 1GHz a piece, its cores are much better than the 530’s, using a more advanced 28nm Krait architecture. Its Adreno 305 GPU is also a fair bit better than the Lumia 530’s Adreno 302. 

But do you really notice it in gaming? We honestly found it hard to test to start with as the Lumia 530 barely has enough storage to install the few high-end games – like Gameloft’s Asphalt 8 – that exist on Windows Phone. After taking a few photos, we had well under 1GB to play with. 

Thankfully, though, the system makes it very easy to install apps to a microSD card. We tried again, this time with a 64GB microSD installed. 

Asphalt 8 runs, and looks fairly good despite missing out on lots of the visual flash you’d get in a high-end phone. However, it does get quite choppy when there are a few cars on screen, and the audio is quite broken throughout – something that is actually more annoying than the frame rate issues. 

The Lumia 530 also struggles with playing 720p MP4 videos, which is hardly a tricky task. In short, this is not a powerful phone.

Nokia Lumia 530 – Camera

One of the Nokia Lumia 530 cuts we’re most disappointed with is that it does not offer an autofocus camera, something that has to-date been seen in even pretty low-cost Nokia phones. Instead it has a fixed focus system.

This means you can’t really take proper close-ups, or choose a specific item to be in focus. It makes photography feel extremely rudimentary, even though with the Lumia 530 you get access to the same Nokia Camera app as the Nokia Lumia 930. It gives you access to manual controls, but we honestly don’t think there’s much point using them here.



Shooting is also very slow. There’s a delay of about 2.5 seconds between shots, and given there’s no focusing to account for, this is a very, very poor performance. Fixed focus cameras should really be quicker than their autofocus rivals, but the Lumia 530 is slower if anything.

Image quality is, as you might expect, not great. The 5-megapixel sensor isn’t capable of rendering all that much detail, and thanks to the small 1/4-inch sensor noise introduces pretty obviously as soon as light levels dip below the optimum.

We’re not going to trash it entirely, though. We’ve seen far more unnatural-looking or weak colours at this sort of entry-level spot, and while we noticed a tendency to underexpose in scenes with a bit of light variance (making us wish there was an HDR mode – there isn’t), it can deal with outdoors night-time show reasonably well.

Here are a few samples to demonstrate:



The Nokia Lumia 530 doesn’t have an LED flash or a front selfie cam. Aside from software borrowed from its brothers, the camera’s only real key feature is that it’s not completely dreadful.

Nokia Lumia 530 – Battery Life

The Nokia Lumia 530 has a removable battery, a 1430mAh unit that you can take out and replace if you’re brave enough to use spares from eBay. While we got a full day out of a charge with reasonably careful use, battery performance is not really all that great.

With a mid-day top-up, we still found the battery level was skirting the floor by bed time, and with fairly light use you’ll still chomp through about 5-10 per cent charge an hour.

We have a feeling this may be down to the kind of processor used. While low-powered, the Lumia 530’s 45nm processor architecture is a good deal less efficient than the 28nm type used in the older Lumia 520. Once again we’re left missing a phone announced more than 18 months ago.


For a less anecdotal take on the Lumia 530’s battery life we left it playing a looped MP4 video. It didn’t even make it to the four-hour mark, lasting for 207 minutes – just under three and a half hours. That’s dreadful stamina, and a sign that we only got through the day because using this phone dissuades you from doing too much web browsing or gaming.

Nokia Lumia 530 – Call Quality and Sound Quality

There are loads of cutbacks in the Nokia Lumia 530. However, we still found call quality to be reasonably, with the usual robust sound we expect from Nokia.

The maximum volume of the internal speaker is unusually high for an entry-level phone too. It really pushes the tiny driver. Unfortunately this does show through in the sound quality a bit. The Lumia 530 does have a rather grating effect on the ear at top volume.

Should I buy the Nokia Lumia 530?

The Nokia Lumia 530 is a phone that saddens us. Last year, Nokia re-established itself as a great force in budget phones with mobiles like the Lumia 520 and Lumia 620.

They looked good, they felt good, worked well – and they sold by the truckload as a result.

The Nokia Lumia 530 is a phone that runs off the fumes of this initial momentum, and it feels like a cash-in on the goodwill the company worked for last year. Corners have been cut at almost every turn, and every viable cut to the hardware has been made – no doubt with the aim of increasing the profit margins earned from the excellent Lumia 520.

Where the Lumia 520 seemed like a bargain, the Lumia 530 now feels overpriced if anything – having been trumped by so many phones in the year between the two models. Our top tip – grab a Lumia 520 while it’s still on shelves. For all its faults, the Nokia Lumia 530 is still a workable phone with some minor charms. But it's ultimately a disappointment.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 530 cuts out every little extra, streamlines every feature to save money. But it does so to too great a degree, offering a worse experience than either its now-cheaper predecessor or the many Android alternatives.