Microsoft Reveals The Lumia 535 Low Cost Smartphone
by Brett Howse on November 10, 2014 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Microsoft
- Lumia
It has been a while since the official Nokia smartphone acquisition was completed, but to date all of the current Lumia phones have carried the Nokia brand alongside Lumia. Microsoft has been busy going through the Nokia apps over the last while, and updating them to be Lumia apps, and as of today, they have now done the same with the latest Lumia smartphone to be announced. The Microsoft Lumia 535 will be the first official Lumia smartphone to drop the Nokia name. With this being a 5xx series of Lumia, it is aimed at the value conscious end of the market.
Microsoft is calling the Lumia 535 their 5x5x5 proposition. The first of the fives is five free integrated Microsoft experiences with the company listing Skype, Office, Cortana, OneDrive, and Outlook. Astute readers will recognize that these free experiences are available on all Windows Phones though. The second five is a five megapixel front facing camera which is one of the latest trends in “Selfie” cameras, which is good to see regardless of if you take selfies or not. Horrible front facing cameras have been a staple of most smartphones for too long. The final five is a five inch display, but this time with a qHD (960x540) resolution IPS LCD.
The press release does not include full specifications for the phone, but as a 5xx series we can expect it to be fairly low end parts. The 530 is powered by a Snapdragon 200 with quad-core Cortex A7 CPUs at 1.2 GHz, so it would make sense for the 535 to offer the same. The Lumia 530 is only equipped with 512 MB of RAM, but hopefully the 535 bumps that to 1 GB to allow the entire Windows Phone app store to be available to this device. Storage on the 530 is only 4 GB of internal NAND with microSD expansion up to an additional 128 GB which would fall in line with the low cost of this device.
Update: The full specifications are now available. It is indeed a quad-core Snapdragon 200, but included is 1 GB of memory and 8 GB of storage. The battery is a 1905 mAh 3.7 volt part, for just over 7 Wh of charge. Although the front camera is indeed 5 MP, it can only record FWVGA resolution video (848 x 480). For a complete listing of specifications please check here.
There will be two versions of the Lumia 535 with both a single SIM and dual SIM model to be made available. As is often the case with Lumia phones, there are colors aplenty with bright green, bright orange, white, dark grey, black, and making its return to the Lumia fold, cyan. The 535 will be available in “key markets” beginning in November, with an expected price of around 110 EUR before taxes and carrier subsidies.
People looking for a new flagship Windows Phone from Microsoft will have to wait a bit longer. Microsoft has clearly targeted the low cost segment of the smartphone market, but they now have an almost dizzying array of devices for different regions. The Lumia 535 joins the already launched 530, 630, 635, 730, 735, and 830 as low cost devices. Not all devices are sold in all regions, and it appears Microsoft is happy to continue with the multitude of devices to serve different markets much like Nokia was doing.
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jjj - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Oh well guess i've missed the low cost and the price went all the way up to 110Euros.editorsorgtfo - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
In the past, people might give Lumia phones the benefit of the doubt due to the Nokia branding.Now, with the Nokia branding purged, this phone will fail spectacularly.
You can get much better specced budget Android phones in the market now.
With the bugbear of Windows and the bundled Microsoft crap ecosystem e.g. Internet Explorer, Onedrive, Bing, Microsoft should be paying users to use its phones.
damianrobertjones - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Such a silly post. It hurt to read it. The kids next door have Android phones and, frankly, the ecosystem is a mess.garretelder - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
Why in the world would anyone get that thing? /Garret at http://www.topreport.org/phones/Alexvrb - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
You're silly. It's a solidly built full-featured device for a good price. The latest IE11 mobile (as found in 8.1) is quite good, Onedrive is great but they're integrating DropBox too, Bing is actually decent too. You clearly haven't used a WP 8.1 device for any length of time.They've even got pretty much all the key apps. The last one I would want is VLC and they've got it ported to Windows 8.1 Modern UI already with preliminary work done on a WP 8.1 port. Even so, better developer support would be good going forward. Hopefully more developers will get on board with Universal Apps.
Michael Bay - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
It is what Lumia 530 should have been, nothing more.Nokia was out of its mind indeed if they planned to sell flash-less lowspec phone at a pricepoint higher than similar droid crap.
CaedenV - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Well that makes the first of the 3 new devices announced. I am not particularly thrilled to see yet another low end WP device come to market, but if this is priced in that low $100 price range that the Lumia 5xx devices normally hit then it should be a decent seller... but if it really does sell for ~$140 as mentioned in the article then I am not sure they can compete against the Android devices.Glad to see it has a full 1GB of ram, it was insulting when the 530 was released with only 512MB. The OS runs just fine on half a gig, but it locks you out of a lot of programs.
Also glad to see Cyan coming back as a color option. Personally prefer Black or White devices, but if I ever did jump on a color then Cyan would be it.
Next we should expect to see a refresh of the 1320 as a cheap 6" device, and then a midrange 5" device which should hit market soon after (or at the same time) as this 535. Once those are out of the way then there is a chance we will see the next gen flagships with 3D touch and Win10, that's what I am waiting for to replace my 920!
ABR - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
The Lumia line is a mess right now. Almost every phone is oversized, thick as a brick, or both. The insistence on day-glo plastic doesn't help either. Some models are switching to these horrible on-screen buttons, even without taking away the space the dedicated buttons used to take up on the bezel. The last good phone they made was the successor to the 925, which I can't even remember since you can't find it on shelves anywhere. I sure hope someone else steps up to keep the OS alive besides Lumia and walking-dead HTC.BedfordTim - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Agreed. I don't care about thick, but I do want a small phone I can put in a front trouser or shirt pocket. I also want a decent camera. Lumia offer lots of slightly too large phones with poor cameras, and a few briefcase only monsters. Why do we need the 535, 625, 630, 635 and 7xx when they are all the same spec and price within a pound or two.dayoATX - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Lumia 530 by Nokia is 11.2 mm thick, this baby 8.8, see spec comparison here. "http://wmpoweruser.com/microsoft-lumia-535-vs-noki... This is the first MSFT branding and their first design release, one can tell, they are showing corrections of what the 530 should have been, I bet there are more corrections, updates and upgrades coming.