14 DAY TRIAL // Officially unveiled last month, Nokia Lumia 530 is finally available for purchase in China. This seems to be the first country to get the newest budget-friendly Windows Phone handset released by Microsoft.
Although the Lumia 530 has been officially introduced in Vietnam on August 1, it appears that customers are now required to register with their email address in order to receive information on the phone’s availability.
This means that Nokia Lumia 530 is not available for purchase in Vietnam, but Windows Phone fans in China seem to be able to order the smartphone beginning today.
According to Engadget China, the Lumia 530 is now available for purchase in the Mainland for only 599 yuan outright, which is about $97 or €72.
Nokia Lumia 530 will be available worldwide by the end of the year, but for now, it looks like Microsoft is taking it slow with the rollout of the smartphone.
As many of you probably know by now, Nokia Lumia 530 will arrive in China with Windows Phone 8.1 and the Chinese version of Cortana, but only after installing Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1.
The smartphone is meant to replace one of the best-selling Windows Phone handsets of all times, the Lumia 520, but the differences between the two devices show that there’s little chance that this will happen.
There aren’t too many reasons for Windows Phone fans who already own the Lumia 520 to upgrade to Lumia 530, but those who wish to switch from another operating system or from feature phones may want to grab the latter over the former.
The Lumia 530 comes with a more than decent 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, which is complemented by an Adreno 302 graphics processing unit and 512MB of RAM.
Even though the smartphone packs only 4GB of internal memory, as opposed to Lumia 520 that comes with 8GB of storage inside, users will be able to further expand it up to 128GB via the microSD card slot. In addition, Microsoft also offers 15GB of free cloud storage via OneDrive.
Nokia Lumia 530 sports a 4-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display that supports 480 x 854 pixels resolution. It also comes with a decent 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus and 480p video recording.
Unfortunately, the smartphone lacks LED flash and secondary camera for selfies. On the positive side, the Lumia 530 offers 3G connectivity, FM Radio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS with A-GPS support.