Nokia Lumia 530: A Windows Phone... for under £50 How much new smartphone will £50 buy you? Quite a bit, it turns out. The Lumia 530 is available this week from £39.95 for SIM-free upgrades (though it's £82.52 SIM-free) and will feature on the high street for just a little more, with no strings attached. Microsoft LUMIA NOKIA 530 As it turns out, the Lumia 530 is a very …
I HAVE a Moto G. I've been using it alongside a Lumia 720 for months. I've finally given up on it as it struggles with performance (I've pared down the running apps). Back to the 720 then, hopefully, a 930 shortly (or an 830, I'm undecided).
I'd have considered the new Moto G, but it's just as under-powered.
Strange. I've had a Moto G for about six months now and it's been good enough that I bought one for my wife to replace her knackered xperia. The only problem she's had is that the xperia could go a three or four days between charges where the G doesn't but she got used to charging it more frequently and it's been otherwise fine.
Bearing in mind the earache I'd have got if it had been a poor performer, I've been pretty pleased with it.
WHERE can you buy this phone for less than £50?
The price on Nokia's website (sim free) is £90.
With a Pay-As-You-Go lock in it's £70.
The same issue plagued the Nokia 630 phone, where reviewers said it was less than £100, but in actual fact the price was £140.
"The same issue plagued the Nokia 630 phone, where reviewers said it was less than £100, but in actual fact the price was £140."
But Microsoftia having whispered in the reviewer's ear that it was £100, that's what all the reviews said, making for positive headlines. Moreover, when writing their conclusions these same people would have contrasted against cheaper phones, and thus were more likely to give the newcomer a positive review.
Whilst customers will notice the price differential, if they've already gone in with the belief that a reviewer has declared the relevant phone to be the bee's knees, there's a fair chance they'll find the extra few tenners.
This is called "marketing" these days.
Can this phone do wifi only when there is no payg credit left? I was thinking the teenagers would be buying these to bring to College for BBM on the guest wifi. Looks jolly, basics all there, they don't do photographing text much (I send them slides of lessons as pdfs).
If it does turn up in high street shops for less than £50, can anyone post a tutorial on putting the thing on silent?
Granted, they've pushed some of the storage cost back on the user by expecting them to buy an SD card, but that's still very, very reasonable.
I suspect it's the kind of phone I'd get for my kid when she's 11-12. Has apps, isn't something she'd get mugged for and won't break the bank if it gets lost or broken.
Oh please, there are plenty of very cheap Android phones out there. Even the Chinese manufacturers are producing some quality Android phones which won't burn a hole in your pocket.
No child should be raised with the indignity of being forced to use a Windows phone.
And it has a kids mode whereby you can set all the apps that can be used, including phone if required.
Add the family safety mechanism at setup, both baked in to the OS and you have a system much better designed for kids than other systems where you have to add all kinds of net-nanny stuff to make it child-suited.
My son was handed down his mum's old Nokia 710 and promptly lost it. So as to not reward stupid behaviour, I got him a £40 ZTE Kis III, thinking it would be functional but rubbish, but surprisingly that too is quite a nice phone.
It's amazing what £40 will get you these days.
I agree with your comment that its a relative downgrade from the 520. I recently had to replace a broken 520 with another Windows phone, and I chose ... another 520. For me, the 530, the 630, and the 635, represent a backwards step. The 520 has a couple of simple but nice features that I would not want to do without. The automatic screen brightness sensor, the dedicated camera button, the better-quality screen, the focusable camera.
Windows phone 8.1 has some useful enhancements over 8.0, including the ability to create playlists on the phone. For some reason, in 8.0, you could only create playlists on a PC then transfer them over, a strange and annoying mis-feature. It also has the long-asked for ability to have separate volumes for music and phone ringer.
Nokia Maps has to be the strongest reason for owning one of these. You can download entire country and region maps over WiFi, and use it as an offline (and no SIM, if you want) GPS. Neat.
Windows phones couldn't compete with the high end iPhones and Android phones, so now Microsoft decides to lowball the price points and hope that someone, anyone would pick one up.
If I want a cheap backup phone with scant regard for apps, I would have gone for a classic Nokia candybar phone with Symbian/S40 installed. At least those phones last a long time, and have a legendary battery life.
The last thing I want is Microsoft's ecosystem e.g. Bing, Internet Explorer, Office, Onedrive shoved down my throat, and signing up for a Microsoft account to use most features.
Global market share of 3% and dwindling. Good luck Microsoft. Let's see how much money you burn this time.
3% of world market share... yep, pretty horrible.
But then when you compare it to the approx 8% market share of "willing to pay for stuff" Android users (80% total market share modified for 90% piracy rate), it becomes worth targeting.
Unless someone can find confirmed figures for Windows Phone and iPhone piracy rates...
Ultimately, I guess that the really disappointing thing here is that out of the entire smartphone market, 72% seem to think they're entitled to free apps - many of which have required months to develop...
> 3% of world market share... yep, pretty horrible.
> But then when you compare it to the approx 8% market share of "willing to pay for stuff" Android users
But how many Windows phone users actually install anything at all? (Perhaps whatsapp).
These things are obviously aimed at replacing S40, very few people I know who have had S40s used them for anything other than a phone and camera. These will be the same.
"Has Nokia's cut price cheapie cut too deep?"
I thought Nokia had flogged their phone business to Microsoft and gone back to making wellies or something.
Nokia is only a borrowed name in this context, not the company making and selling the product.
Microsoft isn't desperate. The people running Microsoft are a great deal smarter than you want to believe, which is why they're rich and you aren't. They've noticed that the budget phones are capturing market share with kids and students, and they know that capturing the hearts and minds of youth allowed them to achieve world domination in the eighties. Unlike you they can afford a billion dollar loss leader to do it again. In ten years YOU will be an old fogey to a new generation and so Microsoft doesn't need to care about you or your opinions, especially when they know you wouldn't buy their stuff if it came with a genie and three wishes.
And why is it better to have Google software stuffed down your throat? Consider an Android phone: Google has forced all the people selling Android phones to include Google as the default and only usable search, Gmail, Google Apps, Google Play, Google I'm crap at voice recognition and Google Sniff Your Farts TM
Cortana is astoundingly good at voice recognition. It beats Siri hands down. Android voice recognition isn't even in the race.
Is it possible to use a winphone without an accompanying windows desktop? I mean fully use it, not just ignore some features.
The comment above re having to create playlists on a PC prompts the question, along with an expectation of constantly attempted lock-in from microsoft, but it is a genuine question, as I've not run a windows desktop for years. Judging by the tv ads, the assumption is that the phone is part of your windows "ecosystem" but maybe they're learning life's not like that any more.
The thing about the playlist creation on a PC only applied to WinPhone 8.0, it is fixed in 8.1 But to answer your question, a Windows phone and say, Linux (Kubuntu 12.04 LTS) are problematic, at least as far as WinPhone 8.0 go, which is what my experiments were done with. The phone appeared to be an MTP type device, it didn't appear as a nice USB mass-storage device. Only the Nautilus file manager could recognise it and attempt to copy files to and from it, but these operations were not reliable.
Getting music onto the phone was especially troublesome, as some kind of processing appears to take place as files are added, involving setting up lists of album titles, artists and track names. In the end I found only two reliable ways to get stuff on and off the phone: (1) use the phone's SD card in another card reader attached to your particular computer, Linux works fine for this. When the card goes back in the phone, the phone scans it for new files and sorts itself out quite well, just like the Blackberry Bold does, or (2) connect it to a Windows PC, when it magically appears as a storage device you can drag and drop with. I used VMWare running a Windows 8.1 image to do this, its all speedy enough to not be a problem.
Last time I tried, I could not use any cloud-based services (OneDrive) to save stuff to the phone's local storage, I don't know if that still applies. WinPhone is still very much a moving target, extra features and enhancements get added now and then. It felt as though it was only just out of beta when it shipped, it had some very rough edges and absent features.
Edit: it seems as though MTP can be made to work, as more recent Android devices use it. I expect that the Lumia can be made to work via MTP, or will soon be supported if it currently isn't.
I use a Lumia 720 running WP8.1 alongside an iPad and a couple of desktop Macs. The only problem I've had is that you can't synch contacts from the Apple world over to the Nokia. Other than that it works fine, the mapping app is great, it runs all the app I want and was a third of the price of an iPhone. And no, I don't use a windows desktop at home or at work.
Sure you can use it fully without the app. Connect the phone by USB and it shows up as a storage device. You can move music on and photos off directly. In fact I find it more convenient to do it that way. I have found Windows Media Player a convenient tool for managing playlists and music.
Hi,
Just thought I would share my budget Android experience. Just over two years ago I got my first droid. A Galaxy Ace. What an absolute piece of sh*t. It was terribly slow and laggy. The whole experience was very poor. When the time came to upgrade I eventually chose a Galaxy S3 which despite being a few years old still seemed quite a good phone.
I received two, one for me and one for the wife. Hers is still preforming well as she did not install the 4.3 upgrade. Mine, which has 4.3 is full of problems. I also have Nexus 7 tablet which now performs very poorly despite factory reset etc. My point is that Android has its problems and a budget Android, if my Ace is anything to go by is best avoided.
I have played with a few Lumias in the shops and I like the OS. My daughter is soon hoping to get her first smartphone and based on my experience it won't be a low end Android. It will probably be one of these. I too will probably dump Android when my next upgrade comes around. If Windows Phone is still in existence I will probably give it a go.
Get her a Moto G.
I bought the 4G version from Tesco a few weeks ago for £140 and it is brilliant. I had to unlock it, which was just £1 on eBay.
I've had high end Android phone's in the past and this equals them in every way apart from the camera. I found it to be better when it comes to battery life.
If she needs a good camera on her phone, then I guess this isn't the phone for her. Also it might not perform well with games as I don't play games much on my phone so I don't really have any idea how well they work.
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