Check out our review of the Nokia Lumia 521 phone.
The Nokia Lumia 520 was one of two phones announced by the company at this year’s Mobile World Congress trade show, and at the time it was confirmed the device would make it to the U.S. under the care of T-Mobile. Despite a month or so of silence, the network has now confirmed the arrival of its Lumia 520, which will be known as the Lumia 521.
T-Mobile’s Lumia 521 is almost identical to the Lumia 520, just with a splash of network branding below the screen. The specs look like this: It has a 4-inch touchscreen with a 480 x 800 pixel resolution, a dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage memory. Unusually for a Windows Phone device, there’s a microSD card slot ready to increase this by up to 64GB. Nokia has given the Lumia 521 a 5-megapixel camera complete with autofocus and the ability to record 720p video. There’s no video call camera though.
Windows Phone 8 is its operating system, and Nokia has loaded the phone with plenty of apps, including Cinemagraph (shown during MWC) and Panorama, HERE Maps and Nokia Drive. Confusingly, although T-Mobile calls the Lumia 521 a 4G phone, it’s not a 4G LTE phone, and connects to the network’s 3G HSPA+ service.
The Lumia 521 joins the Lumia 810 and the HTC 8X in T-Mobile’s Windows Phone 8 line-up, Both are available for free with a monthly cost of $15 and $18 respectively, but we’re expecting the Lumia 521 to be considerably less expensive. T-Mobile hasn’t provided an exact price, but some sources are quoting a $185 unlocked, no-contract cost. The phone is scheduled to arrive in May, and will be sold through T-Mobile stores, along with Walmart and Microsoft’s retail outlets.