14 DAY TRIAL // We reported a few days ago that Nokia and T-Mobile had teamed up to offer Lumia 521 owners the option to upgrade their smartphones to Lumia Black.
Along with Nokia’s new features and tweaks, the said update also includes Microsoft’s Windows Phone GDR3 platform release, which has already been delivered to the rest of the Windows Phone handsets, other than Nokia.
Beginning today, T-Mobile customers who still own the Lumia 521 can check for the Lumia Black update in their devices. WMPoweruser reports that the smartphone has recently received the software update 3056.0000.1404.0034, which includes all the new features in Lumia Black.
Keep in mind though that now all Lumia Black new features will work on the Nokia Lumia 521 due to hardware limitations. The Finnish company has already confirmed that users with smartphones with less than 1GB of RAM won’t be able to take advantage of some of the features offered by Lumia Black.
According to Nokia, the Lumia Black should bring new capabilities and increase the smartphone’s functionality. Those who own more advanced Windows Phone handsets will get new features like App Folder, Nokia Refocus, Nokia Beamer, Nokia Storyteller, Nokia Camera and Nokia Glance Screen 2.0.
One thing T-Mobile Lumia 521 users will be pleased to know that the update will bring is the “Double tap to wake up” feature, which will allow them to wake up the smartphone by simply double tapping on its display when it’s in sleep mode.
On the other hand, the Nokia Beamer functionality that would allow Windows Phone smartphone users to beam photos, documents, presentations, by simply scanning a QR code on the screen, is only available to Lumia devices packed with 1GB of RAM.
Nokia Refocus is another feature included in Lumia Black that’s limited to those smartphones with PureView cameras and at least 1GB of RAM.
But T-Mobile Lumia 521 users will still get cool features like Nokia Glance 2.0, which will allow them to keep track of info in real time directly on the phone’s display.
Basically, all notifications from various popular apps and social services such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, as well as calendar, email, SMS will show up on your display.
If the update has not yet popped up on your Lumia 521, you may manually check for it by going to Settings / Phone Update / Check for Updates. We recommend users to have their smartphone’s battery at least 50% charged before attempting to upgrade to Lumia Black.