Gadgetory

you see smartphone available on the Home Shopping Network for only $99 you might think it's probably gonna fall apart after month or it's really slow and crashy unless it's a Nokia Windows Phone this is Adam lien for Pocket now and this is our review of the Nokia Lumia 521 for t-mobile let's check it out the Lumia 521 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon s4 dual-core processor running at one gigahertz with 512 megs of ram and 8 gigs of internal storage that's not very much so they have to pay attention to what apps you installed fortunately there is a micro SD card slot that will allow you to add up to 64 gigs of extra storage for music videos and photos the 512 megs of ram is also a bit limiting as there are certain apps that you won't be able to install these include many high-end games as well as videos magazine reader for some reason both size is 4.9 by 2.85 0.4 inches and weighs only 4.4 ounces the 4-inch WVGA screen seems small by today's standards but that's a good thing for one-handed usage in fact the Lumia 521 is very well designed when it comes to one-handed ergonomics the thickness and shape make the phone much more comfortable to hold than the extra large extra thin devices that are so popular you can actually hold it and use the Lumia 521 comfortably and that's very refreshing to see by the way if you get the home shopping networks bundle for this phone you get a ton of extra stuff with it you get a cheap rubbery case crappy matching headphones and even an extra car charger it's actually quite an impressive deal now let's look at the hardware at the top you've got the handset speaker along with some sensors there is no front-facing camera but Skype will still work you just have to point the rear camera into a bathroom mirror then you've got a four inch at WVGA screen which isn't very impressive outdoor visibility suffers a bit too but it is still usable with gloves on at the bottom of the usual Windows Phone capacitive buttons for search Start screen and back on the right side there's a series of plastic buttons for treating from the edge for activating the camera power and volume up or down buttons are easy to find with your fingers and they've got a great tactile feedback on the bottom there's the microUSB port on the top is a 3.5 millimeter headset jack I'm back this is a five megapixel camera and speaker all there is no flash so you only want to use the camera outdoors with a good amount of light now let's talk about the software most of our Windows Phone 8 coverage can already be found in our full Windows Phone 8 review that's where you'll get the most meet about the software on the Nokia Lumia 5.1 however we'll look at a few highlights from both nokia and t-mobile here I already mentioned how the RAM limitation may cost CERN Windows Phone 8 apps to be incompatible with the Lumia 521 but there are also some interesting limitations to some of the nokia abs for example the augmented reality view in Nokia's here maps app is not available north city lens and the augmented reality feature in the included Weather Channel app does not work the phone does include no keys here drive free GPS navigation program though the bad news is that the license only includes maps for the USA Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands you also pay extra for other countries but still the United States is pretty big you need to have a t-mobile u.s. SIM card in the phone in order for a here drive to work but it does not require an active rate plan to function another feature that's probably worth the cost of the phone itself is the Nokia Music app you can download up to four custom radio mixes for listening to offline then we get tired of those you can delete them and download for more it's unlimited offline music the catch is you can't rewind any songs you have to listen to the whole playlist though you can't skip about 6 per hour still that's free music with no data plan the only t-mobile customization that's really worth mentioning is the Wi-Fi calling feature it's a little unreliable though so I would only turn this on when absolutely necessary next let's look at the camera we've already mentioned the 5 megapixel camera with no flash and you would probably expect it to be pretty horrible actually I've always found those little LED flashes often included on phones to be pretty horrible themselves not having a flash on this film forces you to only take pictures in decent lighting conditions and if you pay more attention to existing light you can actually get some great pictures with this camera most of Nokia's special camera apps are included as well we've got smart cam panorama cinema graph and the creative studio for post-processing this isn't anything like the high-end Lumia 1020 that's seven times the price and ten times the resolution though in terms of battery life the Lumia 521 does quite well with average juice it's certainly enough for a day and the device doesn't have any terribly power-hungry features like a high resolution screen or image stabilization the key thing here is that the Lumia 521 has a removable BL 5j battery which is pretty common in older Nokia phones you can get another one for about $4 and swap it whenever you want our final rating is going to be a 7 out of 10 while there are a lot of limitations and areas that are lacking with the Lumia 521 the big draw for it is its pricing given the crazy low price there's a huge amount of value included with the phone and it's still fast stable and easy to use in some ways it's actually better than some high-end phones be sure to give this video a thumbs up and thanks for watching