The weather was very cloudy and overcast when we took these photos, but colours aren’t too murky or muddy T-Mobile's version of the phone includes Wi-Fi calling for moments when that network is more robust and reliable than the carrier's voice network. Camera and video 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. Information about the process technology used in manufacturing the chip. The value in nanometers represents half the distance between elements that make up the CPU. Information about the width, i.e. the horizontal side of the device when it is used in its standard orientation.

The phone also has a pretty low-end screen. It’s four inches across and 480 x 854 pixels in resolution. The ISO rating or number is an indicator of how sensitive a camera's image sensor is to light. Image sensors operate within a specific ISO range. The higher the ISO rating is, the more sensitive to light the sensor is. 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. 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. PC Advisor also considers the Lumia 530 to be worse than its predecessor, as it has a worse camera with fixed focus, instead of the auto-focus of the predecessor, half the storage size, and a worse graphics processor. [5] Variants [ edit ]

A small smartphone for a small price

The instruction set architecture (ISA) is a set of commands used by the software to manage the CPU's work. Information about the set of instructions the processor can execute. The Nokia Lumia 530 is an entry-level smartphone developed by Microsoft Mobile that runs the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system.

On November 10, 2014, Microsoft released its successor, the Microsoft Lumia 535, with a 1-inch larger IPS display, double tap to wake, ambient light sensor, Corning Gorilla Glass 3, 8 GB of internal memory (vs 4 GB), 1GB of RAM (vs 512 MB), larger 1905 mAh battery (vs. 1430mAh), 5 MP front-facing camera (vs. no FF camera), auto-focus for the rear camera (vs fixed focus), and LED Flash (vs. no flash). [2] [3] Hardware [ edit ] System on Chip (SoC) A system on a chip (SoC) includes into a single chip some of the main hardware components of the mobile device. SoC 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. Information about the number of pixels per centimeter (ppcm) or per inch (ppi) of the display. The higher the pixel density, the more detailed and clearer is the information displayed on the screen.

The Lumia 530 is a big improvement on its predecessor, but its low price is still false economy against the superior Lumia 630

stand-by time is the longest time a battery charge will last, if the device is not used but is constantly connected to the 2G cellular network. stand-by time is the longest time a battery charge will last, if the device is not used but is constantly connected to the 3G mobile network. The color depth of the display is also known as bit depth. It shows the number of bits used for the color components of one pixel. Information about the maximum number of colors the screen can display. talk time is the time period a battery charge will last, if one is constantly talking on the phone in a 3G cellular network.

Since Windows Phone OS doesn't have all the same benchmarks we use for Android and iOS, it's harder to get a 1:1 comparison on the diagnostic tests. However, the AnTuTu benchmark notched a total score of 11,128. 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. However, you only need to switch on the Lumia 530 to see where Nokia has cut corners to keep the price down. The phone’s 4in 854×480 display not only has a noticeably grainy-looking finish, but its colour accuracy was also quite low. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 67.1 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is below average even by budget phone standards. This meant that colours didn’t look particularly rich or vibrant, and even altering the phone’s colour profile in the settings menu did little to improve its score. 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. 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.One of the main characteristics of the display is its type/technology, on which depends its performance.

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.Storage space is limited to 4GB local, with up to 128GB extra underneath the proverbial hood. RAM is set to 512MB. A 1,430mAh battery promises a rated talk time of 13.4 hours and a rated standby time of 22 days. We'll perform our own in-house tests in the coming days, but as with all phones, you should expect to charge the handset each day. In the US, the FCC tests measured a digital SAR of 1.09 watts per kilogram. Buy it or skip it? The aperture (f-stop number) indicates the size of the lens diaphragm opening, which controls the amount of light reaching the image sensor. The lower the f-stop number, the larger the diaphragm opening is, hence, the more light reaches the sensor. Usually, the f-stop number specified is the one that corresponds to the maximum possible diaphragm opening. The Lumia 530’s 5-megapixel rear camera is a cut above most other budget cameras. In our outdoor shots, colours were rich and detailed even in cloudy, overcast weather, and there was only a very small amount of focus deterioration toward the edge of each frame. We’ve seen plenty of 5-megapixel cameras perform much worse in this kind of weather, and we’d say it’s easily as good as the Lumia 630’s 5-megapixel camera. Estimated volume of the device, calculated from the dimensions provided by the manufacturer. Applies for devices in the form of a rectangular parallelepiped. Information about the height, i.e. the vertical side of the device when it is used in its standard orientation.