Review : Nokia Lumia 510

The last and latest addition to WP 7.5 segment of the Lumia series, Nokia Lumia 510 was launched back in November 2012 during the time of Diwali as a Diwali present by Nokia to India. Lumia 510 is Nokia‘s answer to all the budget smart phones out there to mark the presence of windows phone in the league. After the high-end Lumia 900, mid-range Lumia 800 and the low end Lumia 710, Nokia had launched Lumia 610 which has a lot more similarity to Lumia 510 than to any other handset in the series. But what made this handset budget smart phone? Let’s find out in the review below.

Box contents:

The retail package suffice of everything that we can expect along with a smart phone. The micro USB cable, battery, handset, user manuals, headset, all in a small carry package.

Build:

Quick fact, The Lumia 510 measures 120.7 x 64.9 x 11.5 mm with a volume of 81 cc and 129g weight.

The first thing which caught as soon our attention as we unboxed the package was the matte finish back. That is pretty impressive. Camera, then the Nokia branding in the middle in landscape and the speaker grill below all looks very neat. The matte finish provides a good grip to the phone comparing to those glossy ones which slide in hand.

The front panel has nothing special. Earpiece on the top followed by the Nokia branding with a display in the center with the three usual capacitive buttons at the bottom.

The screen just loves fingerprints so its better to opt for a matte screen guard for this else you may get tired cleaning it again and again.

Left and the right sides follow the same trend as of any typical windows phone till date, with volume rocker, power key and camera key on the right side in respective order and the left being empty.

The 3.5mm audio jack can be seen on the top with micro USB dock at the bottom edge.

Hardware:

The Lumia 510 features a Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon chipset which has 800 MHz Cortex-A5 CPU and Adreno 200 GPU. It runs by 256 MB of RAM and 4GB internal memory with no other oppurtunity for any kind of memory upgrade.
It sports a 4.0-inch WVGA that is 480×800 pixels resolution TFT capacitive touch screen 65K color display with 233 ppi pixel density. Apart from this, it has the usual Accelerometer and proximity sensor along with 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. Due to the lack of app ecosystem we don’t have any benchmark results so its all on paper.

This Windows Phone device is powered by a 1300 mAh Li-Ion battery. In our testing period, the battery lasted for a day with occasional 3G usage, about 4-5 hours screen time and 2 hours of calling.

Software:

Now coming to the mobile operating system. Nokia Lumia 510 runs on Windows Phone 7.5 with an option for upgrade to Windows Phone 7.8 as when available.

Windows Phone 7.5 as a mobile operating system when comparing with the other competitors in the league like iOS and Android is far behind. Considering how clean the operating system looks and even works that smoothly it lacks the developer support and hence the app ecosystem. It works good, but when it comes to the using this as a replacement for any Android or iOS device, you better ask this yourself.

The application quality varies a lot. We have observed that the apps developed by Nokia works darn good, but the experience can get a new level down or high depending upon the developer. For instance the Whatsapp experience on this Lumia 510 was very bad, Hike was a little better but not so good. So it is the responsibility of developers not to ruin the experience, but in turn it comes back to the operating system for providing proper resources to be developer friendly.

Camera:

Lumia 510 packs a 5MP rear camera without any LED flash. Windows Phone 7.5 don’t support secondary camera so no front camera was expected.The 5MP just works fine. It has got nothing special. We found that the camera on Lumia 610 was better than this and it better be; after all, that’s the only thing in which we found the Lumia 610 to be ahead of Lumia 510.

Here are some sample shots and a sample video from the Lumia 510:

Lumia 510 Sample Shot #1
Lumia 510 Sample Shot #2

Conclusion:

Windows Phone 7.5, to be honest, is ages behind of the current smart phone scenario. It provides a neat clean user interface with absolutely no lag when it comes for normal usage, but as soon as we shift to any app it loses the command. This Lumia 510 with 800 Mhz processor and 256 MB of RAM may suffice the bare minimum requirement to run the os but cannot provide the actual Windows Phone experience.

Lumia 610 which is quite similar, just has a better camera than this else everything is the same at about 2k higher price. Yes, this is the budget Windows Phone device which may excite some of the Windows Phone lovers who can’t or would not like to spend much.

In the future, we may see something good with Windows Phone 8 which has a lot of technical advancements and support features over Windows Phone 7.5. We suggest you to wait for sometime and go for Lumia 620 the budget Windows Phone 8 device but yes it will be 5k expensive.

Let’s see how WP8 will come along especially in the low-end category.

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