Microsoft Lumia 535

Apart from the Microsoft branding, the Lumia 535 can easily be mistaken for any other Nokia smartphone in the series. It’s available in the usual riot of colours like green, orange, black and white, although the cyan variant will unfortunately not be sold in India. The back panels extend over the sides, and are removable. Our green unit was glossy, and as you can imagine, is easily smudged. The orange variant is also shiny, but the white and black units sport a matte finish.

So here’s what’s good about the Lumia 535’s display. At 5-inches, it’s very roomy, big enough to accommodate three columns of medium-sized live tiles. It gets a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for protection. Unlike the Lumia 630, which is actually a higher end device, the 535 gets an ambient light sensor, for automatic brightness adjustment. Brightness levels are high, and the display is fairly legible in sunlight.

The cameras are one of the main highlights of the Lumia 535. The rear snapper with its 5MP resolution doesn’t raise any eyebrows, although the presence of an LED flash is a welcome addition, one we don’t normally see on affordable Lumia handsets. The front camera though, is the real star. The Lumia 535 is one of the rare budget handsets in the series to actually sport a front camera, and Microsoft hasn’t made do with the bare-minimum VGA resolution. The device is equipped with a 5MP wide-angle shooter, designed to get more people into the frame. The results are some of the best we’ve come across in this price band, outdoing even some high-end smartphones. The fixed-focus lens is admittedly a weakness, but nevertheless, the camera captures sharp, vibrant photos, without sacrificing detail on subjects in the background or those towards the far edges of the frame. Skin tones look very attractive, and the camera has a way of brightening faces to make them stand out. The rear camera is average at best, producing usable daylight shots, but giving us noisy results in low light. It tends to over-expose images to deliver brighter-than-usual results, but in the process, loses out on sharpness and detail.

The Lumia 535 runs Windows Phone 8.1, along with the Denim update, which integrates Update 1. This brings a handful of new features, such as support for app folders, customisable snooze alarms, the addition of Cortana in the UK and China, and other improvements.

The Lumia 535 is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 200 processor. Windows Phone has been optimised to function efficiently on less horsepower, but even so, Microsoft has doubled the usual 512MB of RAM to a respectable 1GB. The increased memory also means that the Lumia 535 can now play all games in the Windows Phone Store, some of which required a minimum RAM of 1GB to work. Overall, the performance is smooth sailing, fine for daily use, and supporting multi-tasking and most apps without any crashes. Games like Beach Buggy Racing and Asphalt Overdrive play without any glitches or lags. The sluggish touch response we mentioned earlier continues to be a concern until it's rectified. It’s worth noting that the Lumia 535 isn’t able to play HD videos well, with stutters and freezes marring the experience. This is because Microsoft has limited support for some 720p codecs on the Snapdragon 200 SoC. At a time when HD resolution is becoming the norm for videos, this decision by Microsoft seems baffling.