Last year Nokia managed to reach out to customers through the 52x and 62x Lumia series. But in recent times, budget phones built on the Android platform have completely changed the market. Especially Xiaomi, Lenovo, Motorola, Asus and some other companies have completely captured the phone market priced below Rs 10,000. Will Microsoft Lumia 532 be able to make a place for itself in the dual SIM phone market? Let’s find out.
Design
The Microsoft Lumia 532 Dual SIM phone is not known for its beauty. It looks bulky and is not attractive at all. In fact, it looks like another phone from the Asha series. We got the black model for review, but it was not sleek at all. This phone is also available in white, green and orange colors. It weighs 136 grams.
This is a budget phone so it is pointless to have high expectations. There is a 3.5mm headset socket on the top of the phone and a micro-USB port on the bottom. The power and volume buttons are on the right side and there is a camera on the back, which does not have a flash. And there is a space for the speaker below it. There is a front camera on the front of the phone, which is placed above the screen. Microsoft’s logo is made on this phone in the style of Nokia, along with the company’s name text. The battery is quite small. On removing the battery, you can clearly see the space for two micro SIM cards and a micro SD card.
Specifications
Looking at the Lumia 532 Dual SIM phone, it seems as if it is a model of many years old. Perhaps the reason for this is the phone’s screen. 4 inch display and 480×800 pixel resolution, these specifications say a lot about the phone’s screen. The quality of the screen is also not good. The colors look faded, the phone has brightness but there is a problem in using it when exposed to direct sunlight.
The phone uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, which has four cores of 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 and has integrated Adreno 302 graphics. The phone has 1 GB RAM and 8 GB internal storage. Like other Lumia phones, memory cards up to 128 GB can be used in this as well.
The phone has Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and A-GPS. It also has FM radio. The battery capacity is 1560mAh, which is very disappointing. There is nothing to be excited about in the camera as well. The rear camera is 5 megapixels and the front camera is 0.3 megapixels. You can record videos in 480 pixels with the rear camera. You get a headset and charger with the handset.
Software
Microsoft Lumia 532 Dual SIM comes with the Windows Phone 8.1 update. The Cortana tile on the home screen is bigger in size than before in the new operating system, but it doesn’t work if you select India as the location. However, selecting US English does work. The new phone also comes with some useful in-house apps like Here Maps and Here Drive+. The Bing Maps app is also preloaded on the phone. Lumia Camera is a great app, but the weak camera spoils the fun. Similarly, apps like Lumia Cinemagraph, Lumia Selfie, Lumia Storyteller and Lumia Creative Studio are not very useful. Our favorite app is the MixRadio app, which has a great library of songs and you can create playlists as per your choice. But sadly, the cheaper premium subscription plans are no longer available.
You can ignore many apps like Bing’s Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, Money, News and Sport and can also remove them from the phone. Microsoft has given too much importance to third-party apps. BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook, Foodpanda, Gameloft Hub, Jabong, Paytm, Redbus, Star Sports, Truecaller and Twitter were preloaded in the phone. Some of these are useful while others do nothing except eating up space. By the way, the most important thing is that compared to earlier, you now get more apps on the Windows Phone platform. Especially those common apps due to whose absence customers had to be disappointed.
Performance
Due to the weak hardware, this smartphone scored very low. In AnTuTu and WPbench tests, this phone got the same number of points as Nokia Lumia 630 Dual SIM.
Many of our sample videos did not play on the phone. The Lumia 532 failed to play 720p videos at all. 480p video files played, but through a third-party app. The speaker volume was loud but a bit muffled.
Despite having a fixed focus lens, the performance of the rear camera was not that bad. Photos taken in low light were good. This clearly shows that Lumia 532 is much better than Xiaomi Redmi 2 in terms of camera. However, the videos turned out to be poor as expected and the front camera was of no use.
In the video loop test, the battery lasted 9 hours and 4 minutes, which is a surprising result considering the size of the battery. It looks like Microsoft has made some changes to its software and hardware to reduce battery consumption, and that’s a good thing.
However, we did face some issues while using this phone. On a few occasions, we found that the phone switched off on its own. And we had to remove the battery several times to turn it on. After not using the phone for some time, we found that it started updating on its own. This process took about 10 minutes, during which we could not use the phone at all.
Our verdict
Microsoft cannot win in the budget segment on the basis of features and specifications alone. That is why the company has tried to improve its hardware and Windows Phone software experience. To some extent the company has been successful, but there are many things in which Android is still far ahead. There are not many advantages in Lumia 532 Dual SIM. If you believe in value for money, then trust Xiaomi Redmi 2 and Motorola Moto E (Gen 2).
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