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.

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. 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.

Specs at a glance: Microsoft/Nokia Lumia 530 Screen 854×480 4" (244 ppi) LCD touchscreen OS Windows Phone 8.1 CPU 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 200 RAM 512MB GPU Adreno 302 Storage 4GB, expandable via MicroSD by up to 128GB Networking Single-band 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Micro USB, headphones Camera 5MP rear camera Size 4.7"× 2.45"× 0.46" (119.7 × 62.3 × 11.7mm) Weight 4.55 ounces (129g) Battery 1430mAh Starting price $50 locked to Cricket Wireless, $69 locked to T-Mobile

Microsoft’s (still-Nokia-branded) Lumia 530 smartphone aims squarely for that gap. 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. 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.

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

Though we never gave it an official review, we’re fans of the low-end Lumia 520. 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. It’s currently the bestselling prepaid phone on Amazon, where it has been available for as little as $40.

Its price tag likely explains much of its popularity, but it helps that it’s a surprisingly good smartphone for what it is. 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. It’s got a meager 512MB of RAM, and just 8GB of internal storage. Its 4-inch, 800×480 screen is neither particularly dense or particularly great-looking. 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.

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.

The new phone’s styling is a step up from the 520. Both phones are on the chunky side and sport removable plastic shells that cover the removable battery, micro SIM slot, and micro SD card. Where the 520’s squared edges make it look a little boxy, the 530 picks up the rounded corners of the 630 and 635. The back of the phone is curved all the way around, and though it’s thicker than most it feels nice in your hand. The matte plastic is smooth and rigid and free of creaking and flexing.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The removable back cover (white, on our T-Mobile variant) can be replaced with black, green, or orange covers, or with flip covers in any of the four colors. The green and orange colors of the x30 Lumia phones skew closer to “highlighter” than previous models but the black and white covers are always there for people who prefer something a little more subtle.

The 530 has fewer buttons than the 520, mostly in response to changes Microsoft made in Windows Phone 8.1. The capacitive buttons on the front have migrated onscreen—the display’s resolution is 854×480, but the onscreen buttons leave the OS with the same 800×480 of usable space as before. The volume rocker and power button are still on the right edge of the phone, but the dedicated camera button is no more. As we said in our Lumia 630 review, Microsoft ought to provide some kind of software camera button on the lockscreen to replace it.

So far so good, right? So far the 530 is mostly an even-cheaper version of the 630 and 635, which is not intended as an insult. Unfortunately, the Lumia 530 has a big flaw that’s apparent the first time you turn it on: its screen.

The display in the Lumia 520 is easily its weakest point. It’s workable, but even compared to the 620 and 630 it has poorer contrast, color, and viewing angles, and it’s susceptible to backlight bleed. We were hoping the 530 would be a step up, but it’s actually a sizable step down. It makes the screen in the 520 look like the screen in the 630. Let's begin with this picture.

It's obvious that neither the 520 nor the 530 can approach the black levels of the Lumia 635. We're not talking AMOLED-levels of contrast, here, but the 635 has a screen that's obviously higher-quality than either of the 500-series phones, even though the resolution is the same and the density is actually slightly lower (244 PPI in the smaller 4-inch phones, 217 PPI in the 4.5-inch 635). Things get worse for the 530 when you get up close and personal.

This picture illustrates where the 530's screen is weaker than the 520's. Note the vaguely greenish whites, the muted blues and oranges. Compared to the 520 and especially the 635, the 530's screen just looks washed out. And then there are these viewing angles to contend with.

So, to recap: Blacks on the Lumia 530 are noticeably less black than they are on the 520. Whites are greenish and bland. Colors are faded and dull. As in the 630 and 635, the auto-brightness sensor has been removed. The backlight across the top of the screen is uneven. Viewing angles aren't the worst we've ever seen—certainly not as bad as in the $35 Firefox phone—but they're still poor. And the screen has that sickly, shimmery look usually associated with low-quality touchscreens and digitizers.

If it sounds like we're being too hard on the screen, it's because it's hard to overstate the degree to which screen quality affects day-to-day use. Plenty of phones, tablets, and laptops have usage-specific shortcomings—a weak GPU will be bad for you if you play lots of games. A missing front camera will be bad for you if you want to do a lot of video chatting. But a bad screen affects everything you do with your phone, from reading to watching movies to browsing the Internet to playing games. Even when taking pictures with the camera, the quality of the screen makes it difficult to know exactly what your pictures are going to look like until you load them up on a computer. It’s incredibly disappointing that Nokia-or-Microsoft-or-whoever took the worst thing about the 520 and not only failed to improve it, but actually managed to make it worse.

It’s too bad, because otherwise the 530 is a competent phone in the same ways that the 520 is. Audio quality out of the headphone jack is good, and the single rear-facing speaker can put out pretty loud sound (though it distorts at higher levels). The touchscreen is responsive and accurate. It just doesn’t look good, and it makes it more difficult to appreciate the stuff the phone does well.

Software, internals, and performance

The Lumia 530 comes with Windows Phone 8.1 , and enrolling the device in Microsoft’s developer preview program will get you the benefits of Update 1 and any future improvements. It’s the exact same software and update access you’d get with a flagship phone.

We’ve covered WIndows Phone 8.1 extensively elsewhere, but we wanted to take a moment to reiterate just how well-suited it is to low-end hardware. The phone uses a quad-core version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 200, which includes an Adreno 302 GPU, and comes with just 512MB of RAM. Despite these limitations, animations are fluid. Apps and Web pages load fairly quickly. You don’t usually feel like you’re waiting on the phone, which isn’t the case with iOS 8 on the iPhone 4S’ aging hardware.

The lack of RAM is most noticeable in two places. First, there are apps in the Windows Store (mostly games) that refuse to run in less than 1GB of RAM. Gaming is such a common smartphone use case that this seems like an oversight, but if you don't game you won't need to worry about it. Second, applications and Internet Explorer tabs need to reload their states often, sometimes even when jumping between just two or three apps. The OS needs to suspend applications aggressively to keep RAM clear, and depending on how well your app restores its state this may become frustrating for multitaskers.

A dearth of good Windows Phone benchmarks makes it difficult to compare the 530's 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 200 and its Adreno 302 GPU to the 520's dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus and its Adreno 305 GPU. GFXBench 2.7, one of our standard graphics benchmarks, won't run on devices with 512MB of RAM. We've seen these chips show up in enough Android phones that we can give you a ballpark estimate, though.







For multi-threaded tasks, CPU performance will basically be a wash. The Snapdragon 200's got four cores compared to the S4's two, but the S4's custom "Krait" architecture can perform more instructions per clock than the 200's ARM Cortex A7 architecture. In our Moto E review, we saw that the Adreno 305's GPU performance was about 25 percent better than the Adreno 302's, so you're taking a small step down there. It's another step down from the 520, though in day-to-day use you won't notice it as much as you notice the screen. For comparison's sake, the Lumia 635 uses essentially the same 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 as the Moto G—CPU performance will be the same as the Lumia 530, but graphics performance will get a boost.

The Lumia 530 only has 4GB of storage, of which a little over 2GB is usable. Luckily, this is one place where Windows Phone 8.1 trumps Android. One of our chief complaints about the Moto E was that 4GB of storage is extremely limiting, and the operating system only provides a handful of (mostly manual) ways to offload data from the phone’s storage to a microSD card. Whether apps can be run from an SD card or even store data to one varies from app to app, and changes Google made to external storage handling in version 4.4 still haven’t been embraced by all developers.

Windows Phone 8.1 handles SD cards with much less hassle. Put a card into the slot (the 530 accepts cards up to 128GB in capacity) and the operating system will ask you if you’d like to store all future app, photo, video, and music downloads to the card. Tap Yes, and that’s it—the 4GB of internal storage is suddenly and (mostly) seamlessly expanded by whatever card you’ve chosen. The Storage Sense app will let you decide what kinds of items you want to keep on the SD card, too—if you only want to run apps from internal storage but want to store all media on the card, that’s entirely possible. Having 4GB of storage space is a big liability for the Moto E. The Lumia 530 and other low-end Windows phones can avoid the problem entirely.