Microsoft Lumia 535 Review

Microsoft recently launched the company’s ultimate budget smartphone, the Lumia 535. The Lumia 535 fixes *almost* everything about the previous Lumia budget smartphones, including the Lumia 530. For starters, the smartphone packs a 5-inch display, a 5MP rear and front camera, a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 200 processor and a decent 1905 mAh battery. The smartphone is available for only €110. So, is the Lumia 535 a good budget smartphone? Let’s find out.

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Design

The Lumia 535 comes with the Microsoft branding – but the phone comes with the regular Lumia design. It sports a glossy, replaceable back cover which is available in orange, black, gray, green, cyan and white. I bought the black Lumia 535 because the glossy back covers are proper fingerprint magnet. The orange, green and the cyan back covers are also nice and look cheery. As it has a replaceable back cover, you can easily swap out to suit your mood.

The Lumia 535 is a pretty thin device and weighs only 146 grams. As always, the build quality of the device is good. I’ve already dropped it couple of times, but there isn’t any scratch just yet. Overall, the Lumia 535 is a very well-designed smartphone that comes with a brilliant build quality, as well as cheeriness.

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Display

The Lumia 535 is a cheap device, but Microsft has managed to pack a 5 inch display on the smartphone. The display of the handset isn’t impressive, it isn’t bad either, however. The colors on the Lumia 535 are crystal clear. The Lumia 535 comes with a qHD display with the resolution of 960 x 540 pixels which isn’t regular for Windows Phone. Some of the apps on the Windows Phone Store, including Facebook Messenger and Evernote hasn’t been scaled for qHD resolution and looks blurry aka ugly. The viewing angles on the Lumia 535 is decent as well. However, under the sunlight, the Lumia 535’s display performs pretty well when compared to other low-end smartphones in the market.

 

As you may know, the Lumia 535 had a touch-sensitivity issue which Microsoft released a fix for pretty quickly. I’ve installed the fix immediately, however, for some reasons, I still feel the touch-sensitivity hasn’t improved much. Hopefully, Microsoft will release yet another fix for this issue sometime soon.

Despite the touch-sensitivity and scaling issues, the Lumia 535’s display is decent for the price. The Lumia 535’s display isn’t the best when it comes to low-end smartphones. There is a handful of other smartphones on other platforms which comes with better display and offers better viewing experience – one of the best example is the Motorola Moto G (2nd gen). Overall, the Lumia 535’s display is satisfactory for the price but I hope Microsoft will include a better display on the next Lumia 5xx smartphone.

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Camera

When it comes to camera, most of the low-end smartphone doesn’t sport a good or even a decent camera. Thankfully, Microsoft has packed an impressive 5 megapixel front camera on the Lumia 535 as well as a 5 megapixel rear camera.

The Lumia 535’s front camera is very good. However, the smartphone packs a 5MP camera on the back which includes LED flash and autofocus as well. The main camera of the Lumia 535 does a decent job when capturing photos in good light. However, even in good light, the camera is unable to capture photos in detail. In the night, the Lumia 535’s camera struggles a lot but for the price – for example, the camera fails to capture most of the details in low light. On the other hand, the front camera of the device is very good – in fact, I’m impressed with its 5 megapixel front camera. As you may already expect, the front camera doesn’t perform well in low-light conditions.

The Lumia 535 ships with Lumia Denim. Unfortunately, the smartphone doesn’t include the sweet new Lumia Denim Camera features, such as Rich Capture and HDR. Overall, the Lumia 535’s camera is decent and you probably won’t expect much better results than what the Lumia 535 produces.

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Performance

Microsoft has done a great job on optimizing Windows Phone. The operating system is pretty fast, even on low-end devices. However, as some of you may have experienced, the OS lags on devices with 512MB RAM most of the time. The Lumia 535 packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor and 1GB of RAM.

The Lumia 535 runs most of the apps without any problem. Though, I have experienced a slight amount of lag while multi-tasking. However, when it comes to gaming, the smartphone doesn’t perform really great. Overall, the Lumia 535’s performance is pretty great and satisfying.

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Others

The Lumia 535 comes with a 1905mAh battery – which is of course, pretty small for a big smartphone. On our battery-life test, the Lumia 535 performed decently. In our stringent battery rundown test, the Lumia 535 managed 4 hours and 32 minutes — which is pretty good as our battery life test is to refresh our homepage every 30 seconds while playing music and high brightness.

The speakers and microphone is also pretty good. Overall, the Lumia 535 is a very good improvement from the Lumia 530. It’s not the best budget smartphone yet, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft will improve it with yet, yet another budget smartphone sometime soon (MWC?).

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What do you think of the Lumia 535? Let us know in the comment section below.