14 DAY TRIAL // The budget-friendly Huawei Ascend Y530 has finally made it to Australia, after the smartphone made its debut in Europe back in February. The smartphone then jumped the pond and arrived in North America for a short exclusive time at Canadian carrier Bell.
Huawei Ascend Y530 is now available in lots of countries and offers Android fans good specs for a decent price. As long as you don’t expect high-end features, the smartphone could be an interesting alternative for those switching from feature phones.
It could also be a slight upgrade from an older entry-level handset, especially for those looking for a cheap device with 3G connectivity.
Customers in Australia can now purchase the Huawei Ascend Y530 through Telstra for only $116 (€80) outright. Keep in mind that the smartphone is only available via prepaid, which means you won’t be able to get it for free.
The price is pretty decent if not for the fact that it comes with an older version of Android, namely Jelly Bean 4.3. Otherwise, Huawei Ascend Y530 looks interesting on paper for a budget-friendly smartphone.
As mentioned earlier, the Ascend Y530 comes with 3G connectivity, but the smartphone has also been approved for rural coverage. Some may be disappointed that the device does not offer 4G support, but that would have certainly increased the price.
Under the hood, Huawei Ascend Y530 is far from being impressive, but it wasn’t intended to anyway. The smartphone is equipped with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, an Adreno 302 graphics processing unit and only 512MB of RAM.
This could be the only problem for the budget-friendly handset, as not all apps and games in the Google Play Store will run smoothly on the smartphone.
Furthermore, the device packs 4GB of internal memory, which can be expanded up to 32GB via microSD memory card. The phone also sports a decent 4.5-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display that supports 480 x 854 pixels resolution.
There’s also a 5-megapixel camera on the back, which features LED flash, autofocus and video recording, while on the front there’s a secondary VGA camera for video calls.
Huawei Ascend Y530 offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and microUSB support, as well as GPS with A-GPS support. It also features FM Radio function and is powered by a 1700 mAh battery that should provide up to 320 hours of standby time or up to 10 hours of talk time.