Nokia Lumia 530

In terms of design, the Nokia Lumia 530 follows its predecessor with slight changes. Up front, lies the display surrounded by wide bezels, with the earpiece and Nokia branding at the top. You'd notice that there are no capacitive keys at the bottom – that's because the smartphone has onscreen keys. While the left is devoid of any controls, the right side houses the volume rocker with the power button below it. The 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top, whereas the micro-USB port for charging and data transfer is located on the bottom. Compared to the 520, the Lumia 530 also misses out on a dedicated camera shutter key.

Just like its predecessor, the Nokia Lumia 530 is fitted with a 4-inch display. It bears the screen resolution of 854 x 480 pixels (a shade better than 800 x 480 pixels on the Lumia 520), equating to a pixel density of 245ppi. While the pixel density is slightly better than its predecessor and the Windows Phone platform is pretty vibrant, the display looks fine only at first glance. As soon as you look closely, you'll notice pixelation. The screen is also very reflective and thus causes problems when you're trying to view it outdoors since the brightness is also not that good. The touch doesn't seem to be very smooth either.

In the camera department, the Nokia Lumia 530 follows the brand's other budget offerings, including its predecessor and simply offers a 5-megapixel fixed-focus camera at the back. There's no LED flash to help in shooting low-light images or a front-facing camera.

The Nokia Lumia 530 runs Windows Phone 8.1, which was unveiled back in April during the Microsoft BUILD annual conference and brings a ton of improvements – both big and small, to the OS.

At its heart beats a quad-core Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2GHz. This is the only visible upgrade compared to the Lumia 520 which drew power from a dual-core 1GHz chipset. Complementing the processor is 512MB of RAM, which is same as the Lumia 520. The Adreno 302 GPU is also available for handling graphics, though it's a shade lower than Adreno 305 powering its predecessor. In day-to-day usage, the device offers smooth performance despite the meagre RAM, since WP isn't resource intensive. While we question the low amount of RAM, we must say, that even while playing an intensive title like Asphalt 8: Airborne, there was no trace of lag, although graphics could have been better. However, that doesn't mean that we're happy to see Nokia using 512MB RAM again, since it did launch a version of the Lumia 520 with a full gigabyte of RAM called the Lumia 525. Due to the 512MB RAM, you'll not be able to many popular games such as Halo: Spartan Assault, Order & Chaos and more. Sadly for some reasons, we noticed considerable lag while playing a 720p video.

Well, that's the question which even we're trying to find an answer to, after using the Nokia's latest offering for more than a week. Let's try to answer it in the same manner as we started writing this review – a movie and its sequel(s). The movie sequel can only be popular if it takes the story forward and manages to surpass the expectations set by the first one. Applying the same idea on the Lumia 520 and its successor, the Lumia 530, you can see that the latter is simply hoping to cash in on the success of Nokia's best-selling smartphone. While it does bring some interesting things to the table like a powerful quad-core processor and dual-SIM functionality, we believe it compromises on many things like storage and display compared to the Lumia 520. Even the fact that the 530 runs the latest iteration of Windows Phone isn’t really advantageous as the OS will also come to its predecessor with all the functionality.