Nokia Lumia 521: Quality Smartphone on an Extreme Budget
by Vivek Gowri on August 8, 2013 1:08 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- Mobile
- windows phone 8
- Lumia 520
- Lumia 521
The camera, on paper, looks pretty competitive. The 5MP resolution won’t blow anyone away, but as we’ve noted recently and before, resolution isn’t the biggest deal in the world. The plastic optical system with a f/2.4 lens indicated some promise, though. This being Nokia, obviously the natural expectation is for the imaging system to hold its own.
And for the most part, it actually does. The image files by default are 16:9 aspect ratio, with a resolution of 2592x1456. This isn’t exactly 16:9 actually—that would be 2592x1458—but it’s near enough to make no difference. The rest of the camera interface is pretty much the same as what we’re used to in most other Windows Phones, with the exposed manual control options being limited to ISO, exposure, white balance, aspect ratio, and four scene modes. And I know I covered this before, but I really liked the camera button; it’s a shame that more phones don’t have solid two-stage camera buttons with good, positive feedback.
In well-lit scenarios, image quality is pretty solid, with good colors and reasonable sharpness. It won’t blow anyone away, but this is easily on par or ahead of where we were in terms of smartphone imaging before the Galaxy S2 and iPhone 4S came out in the latter half of 2011. What actually surprised me was that the images looked pretty solid when viewed at 1:1 on my 30” display (the 2560x1600 resolution is very close to that of the image output, which made it easier). Definitely much better than I was expecting, and actually better than many of the smartphone camera stills that I’ve accumulated over the years, particularly ones more than a year old.
The low light story is mixed. On the one hand, the lens is bright enough to give you pretty reasonable images in dimly lit situations, with good detail and not as much of the grainy mess I was expecting. It's worth noting that in dimly lit scenarios, the shutter speed is a bit slow so it's pretty easy to end up with blurry images if you aren't careful. These are usable, social media-worthy photos though, and that’s really all that can be asked from a phone like this. On the other hand, there’s a distinct lack of fancy features. Like a flash. Yeah. So while the 521 is a decent low light camera, if low light is really closer to no light, you’re out of luck.
As noted before, there’s no front facing camera either. It’s not a huge deal for me, because I rarely make use of the feature—Skype video calls from my phone just aren’t part of my normal usage model—but it’s something that could count as a pretty big omission for some people, particularly internationally. I think an LED flash and a front facing camera probably could have been included for not that much more, perhaps an increase of $10 on the price would have covered it, but I can understand why Nokia would be so hesitant to increase BoM costs on a device like this.
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USGroup1 - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
I'm sorry but your browser tests and conclusions are beyond stupid. Your Sunspider test result clearly shows that the slowest Windows phone 8 device has a faster browser than some Android devices with much more powerful SoC."Microsoft clearly optimized for Sunspider, as we’ve seen over the years, and while that lets them stay competitive in that one benchmark, it doesn’t really mean anything as far as having decent or even acceptable browser performance. It’s just sad."
Wow, just wow, so they optimized their browser for Sunspider test to make it look good, lol pity they didn't do it for Google Octane Benchmark right?
MrSpadge - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
It's well known tast companies optimize for Sunspider so much that the score doesn't correlate with real world performance any more. Not saying this isn't true for the other benchmarks as well.. but don't weight Sunspider scores too heavily.Maybe Mozilla should port Firefox to Win Phone instead of trying to build an entire new OS?
InsGadget - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
In general, web pages work fine on my L920, even full desktop ones. I'd like to see some real-world tests instead of these canned benchmarks, anyways, since they can be easily gamed.Myrandex - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
I agree my Lumia 920 handles pretty much any website I can throw at it with no issues. The only ones that I have trouble with are ones that are flash based (very rare) or ones not designed for touch screens (which would affect all platforms, such as websites with menus that require you to hover a mouse over...come on realize how popular touch screens are and get rid of that stuff web devs!)Flying Goat - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
You can't really port Firefox to Win Phone any more than you can to iOS. Microsoft won't let third party browsers use their own JIT Javascript compiler, so would have to be either very slow, or an IE wrapper. They also won't have access to the functionality needed to set up a secure sandbox. See http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/05/09/windows-on...madmilk - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
Most JITs are so-called "tracing" JITs -- they optimize at runtime. However, optimization by the JIT is not free, so it only makes sense to do it when there's a real need. Sunspider's tests are so short that browsers often don't bother, resulting in suboptimal scores.This can be hacked around for a significant increase in scores (or the test can be modified -- there's a modified Sunspider test that runs each test 50 times), but Sunspider is so far from a realistic Javascript workload that such a hack would likely cause extra time and power consumption in other tasks. Additionally, Sunspider doesn't do anything to evaluate other parts of the browser like DOM, which very often is the bottleneck in large Javascript applications.
cheshirster - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
I agree, and that is unexpected on Anandtech. IE on 521 is performing really well in real-world compartions to low and middle price androids.savagemike - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
So - could I just pick one of these up on Amazon and use it with an MVNO of AT&T?notposting - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
AT&T has the 520 available as a GoPhone, might be a better choice (probably need to check data bands, locking).A5 - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
Yeah, the 520 is a better option if you're using an AT&T MVNO. 521 just gets you 21mbps on T-Mo bands.