That started to change with the introduction of the Lumia
520. With its low price, bright colours and unique design, the Lumia 520 was a
breath of fresh air in a dull market segment overflowing with similar-looking
Android phones from second-tier brands. According to a recent report, the Lumia
520 accounts for nearly 45 percent of all Windows Phone devices sold in India,
and just over 25 percent worldwide.
Even so, there was room for improvement. The Lumia 520 was
criticised for coming with only 512MB of RAM and dispensing with a front-facing
camera. Honestly, though, the front cameras on phones in this price range are
generally so bad that they're unusable anyway, and video chatting isn't popular
enough for it to be a significant miss. The low amount of RAM was more of an
issue, since people were afraid that heavier apps and games wouldn't run well.
The Lumia 525 is thus a mid-lifecycle update which fixes
this problem and leaves pretty much everything else exactly as it was. Nokia
has responded to buyers' and reviewers' criticisms and has done what it could
without raising costs too drastically. It's good to see that the company is on
its toes. Even if this helps sway only a few buyers who were earlier on the
fence, every small victory counts.
However, the Lumia 525 is still smaller and weaker than many
of the Android options available in its price range. Windows Phone is better
than it was, but there's still not guarantee that you'll find all the apps you
need or the games you'll see your friends enjoy on their Android phones. Let's
see if the Lumia 525 has enough going for it to compensate for these factors.
- Look and feel
There's no mistaking Nokia's visual identity. The use of
bright-coloured polycarbonate was a risky choice, but it's paid off. You might
not want to own a bright cyan, magenta or yellow phone, and for that reason
they're also available in at least black or white, but you'll always know that
these phones are Nokias.
Our review unit had a bright, glossy, almost-fluorescent
yellow shell that was sometimes too overpowering to look at. Even when the
review unit was lying on its back on a table the side panel was eye-catching
enough to be distracting. When viewed head-on, there's about a half-mm border
of yellow plastic around the front panel, and that was distracting too!
Thankfully, Nokia sells replacement shells in white, orange and yellow, so if
you buy this colour only to find it a bit much for your taste later on, you can
swap it out.
If you've ever used a Lumia 520, you'll find the 525
identical in terms of dimensions and weight. It's easy enough to hold and use
in one hand, and is actually quite small by today's standards. The back is
curved nicely, although the front corners are a bit sharp.
Nokia's habit of placing all buttons on the right edge has
become a bit of a Lumia trademark: you'll find the volume rocker, standby
button and camera shortcut all in a row. It makes sense to have the power
button on the side of larger phones, but on this one it winds up being
awkwardly out of reach.
You'll find the standard Windows Phone Back, Home and Search
buttons below the screen, and nothing but an earpiece and Nokia logo above it.
As mentioned already, there's no front-facing camera. There are two sensor
cutouts, but they're completely invisible. If it wasn't for the garish colour,
we'd actually say this phone looks simple and understated.
All you'll see on the back is the camera lens, a faint Nokia
logo, and a small cutout for the loudspeaker. There's no flash, and the lens
doesn't need to bulge out either. The shell is highly glossy and rather flat in
the middle, so it's likely to get scuffed up over time as you use it.
The shell pops off without too much trouble, but it's too
easy to end up pushing the camera lens down for leverage, which leaves it
smudged. Underneath, you'll see a traditional removable battery and slots for a
single Micro-SIM card and a microSD card positioned such that you'll need to
take the battery out to get to them. We noticed that it was necessary to put
the shell back on carefully, to make sure the plastic buttons on the shell
lined up properly with the contact points on the phone itself.
Nokia's recent phones have shipped with chargers that for
some reason have a plastic earthing pin. Phone chargers don't need to be
earthed, so the only purpose this could serve would be to open the shutters on
modern three-pin sockets. The plastic pin slides inwards so the charger itself
isn't much more bulky than usual, but it means you won't be able to use two-pin
sockets. The Lumia 525's charger also has a fixed wire, unlike almost every
other phone on the market today. For PC syncing there's a separate, but much
shorter USB cable.
- Features, specifications and software
Apart from the doubled amount of RAM, the Lumia 525 is
internally identical to the 520. It's powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4
Plus, with integrated Adreno 305 graphics. The S4 Plus is acceptable for such a
low-end device, but there are quad-core Android models on the market in this
price range now. The lone camera can take 5-megapixel stills and 720p videos,
but there's no flash.
The screen resolution is 480x800 which was common in the
early days of Windows Phone, and now feels about right for a 4-inch screen on a
low-end phone. The screen isn't nearly as sharp or accurate as we'd like. There's
8GB of built-in storage and the microSD slot will accept cards up to 64GB in
capacity. Nokia has given the Lumia 525 a relatively small 1430mAh battery
which is adequate considering that none of the internal components are
particularly power-hungry.
A quick dip into the phone's info screen told us that it was
running Lumia Black, the latest version of Windows Phone with Nokia's
customisations baked in. However, many of the useful little tweaks that we saw
on Nokia's higher-end Lumia 1320 and 1520 are missing here: there's no Glance
screen and no shortcuts like double-tap-to-wake. You'll also get the less
capable Nokia Drive app, rather than Drive+. The difference is that you get
navigation and turn-by-turn directions only in India rather than full international
coverage.
Nokia Smart Cam lets you take bursts of photos and then
either pick the best one or combine them all into an action sequence. You can
also blur backgrounds to emphasise motion, merge shots to make sure everyone in
a group is smiling, and remove unwanted moving objects. As we've seen even on
more capable hardware, it's possible to get good results with the tricks that
merge multiple shots, but you'll have to try a few times to make sure people or
objects are moving at just the right speed, with just the right background.
There isn't much else to say about the Lumia 525's software.
Nokia preloads Zinio, a news aggregation and magazine reader app; Bigflix, for
streaming Indian movies; Flipkart's ebook reader; and Nokia Beamer, which lets
you stream your screen's contents to a Web browser via the Internet. Of course
you get Microsoft Office, Xbox Games and SkyDrive (soon to be renamed to
OneDrive) as well.
- Camera
We were very pleasantly surprised by the quality of images
captured by the Lumia 525. The only complaint we had with photos taken in
daylight was that they tended to be a bit overexposed, thus making colours
appear washed out. The level of detail captured, even when focusing on grass,
is amazing considering this phone's entry-level status.
With no flash to help out at night, it seems that Nokia has
developed a way to make low-light shots brighter. When taking photos, we were
surprised by how they made rooms look lit up even when the only light was
coming from outside. This comes at the cost of clarity and detail, and you'll
notice a lot of noise and speckling when looking at these photos at 100 percent
zoom.
- Performance
We were happy enough with the Lumia 525's performance when
it came to navigating through the interface. The phone took a bit of time to
load some apps, but things were otherwise smooth. We noticed some graphical
glitches in Temple Run 2, which really shouldn't have put that much stress on
the phone. With that in mind, it would seem that high-end games are totally out
of the question.
Benchmark scores came in at roughly half as much as the
Lumia 1320's, which in turn were roughly half as good as the Lumia 1520's. It's
clear that you get what you pay for, and so Nokia's new entry-level Lumia
remains exactly where the 520 was in terms of both performance and value. We'll
have to wait for the next generation to see Nokia up the ante.
It should come as no surprise that the Lumia 525 struggled
to play HD videos. Simple AVI files worked fine, but anything encoded at a
heavy bit-rate should be avoided. The built-in speaker is loud enough, but
sounds a bit hollow and tends to distort sound at if the volume is set higher
than halfway up.
Our battery life loop test took 7 hours, 17 minutes to kill
the Lumia 525 with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi switched off and the screen brightness
set to Medium. That's a pretty decent figure, and you should be able to get
through a full day of calls, texts, music and simple Web browsing.
- Verdict
The Lumia 525 is a small, affordable phone with a
surprisingly decent camera and plenty of attitude, but not much else going for
it. When held up to similarly priced Android phones, it's hard to make a case
in favour of Windows Phone, which is why Nokia has capitalised on looks and
ease of use.
If you're looking for the most powerful phone available for
around Rs. 10,000, this is not it. You'd be better off with Lenovo's A706, for
example. However there is one very clear market for the Lumia 525: first-time
smartphone users. If you're graduating from feature phone (Nokia or otherwise)
and are looking for a phone that will let you browse the Web, take good photos
and use Facebook or WhatsApp easily and in style, this phone is a pretty decent
option.
