I bought one of these things last year, as my old iPhone 3GS had run into a few technical gremlins that were starting to piss me off. For starters the sound had quit working when it rang + the power button had fallen off. Also I couldn’t use the latest Apps on it ‘cos of the age of the OS on it.
When I bought it, the Nokia Lumia 530 was still selling for around £69, but could be picked up for around £40 if you weren’t too fussy about the case colour. I largely bought it ‘cos of the price + I thought the Windows interface looked craploads better than the newer iOS interface. I ended up with a lurid green cased one.
The smooth rounding of the case makes this phone a rather slippery sucker, and all too easy to drop / accidently smash yourself in the face with it while tinkering with it in bed.
It uses a Nano-SIM, which means I couldn’t transfer my number over to it, and being on Vodafone Pay-as-you-Go making it more seriously awks still.
But at least unlike an iPhone, it has a slot inside the case for a Micro-SD card. The 64GB Micro-SD card I bought for it wouldn’t work, so I’ve started using that in my SatNav instead, and I’ve started using a 32GB Kingston Micro-SD card instead which works fine. Removing the case to insert that + the SIM card is a fairly simple job of holding the top corner of the screen while pushing against the camera lens.
The phone didn’t come with a USB to synch music or charge it, but came with a funny looking mains charger with a collapsible earth pin.
Windowsphones generally get slagged off for not having as great a number of apps for them as iOS or Android devices, but you’ll find apps for the things the cool kids hang out on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine (shit), Tinder, Amazon Kindle, Candy Crush, Blackberry Messenger, Skype, etc.
Battery life, generally needs charging every 24-48hrs.
Worth getting if you need a cheap smartphone to take places you’d rather not take your expensive one, or want a smartphone but don’t want to auction off a kidney in order to be able to afford one.
