Nokia Lumia 510 Review: Stands out at 10k

Packaging

The Lumia 510 comes in a very compact thick cardboard box, so compact that the accessories have to cramp for space inside. However this increases the mobility of the whole package and not only of the mobile. The Asha-style blue-red colour theme continues. The slide-out box that carries the stuff holds the mobile, the 1300mAh battery, earphones, wall charger, data cable and manuals.

For a 10k phone, the packaging is very good we would say. The black interior provides a connoisseurs look. The material is thick and feels solid in hand. The earphones are not exactly of premium quality.

Design and built

The phone looks classy and fairly well-built – a usual Nokia trait. We instantly fell in love with the rubbery back that provides one of the best holds in any 4-inch devices around. It doesnot slips if your palm sweats, nullifying the accidental falls on a very hot day. The edges are round, to a level where it gives the phone a playful and youth-centric look rather than the sharper edges of the higher-end Lumias that are more executive-classes.

The 510 comes with a 4-inch display which dominates most of its glossy front side. The earpiece sits at the top without the front camera. At the bottom are the three hotkeys – back, Windows and search. The backside has the awesome rubber finish which houses the 5MP Autofocus camera (no LED flash) and speaker. The right side has the volume rocker, lock and camera keys, the top have the 3.5mm jack and the bottom has the microUSB port.

All-in-all a very lovable design, although mostly plastic and thus won’t be very rugged.

Display

65K is not really enough for a 4-inch screen but you won’t find much of a problem of pixilation on the 510. The main reason for it is the default black background and absence of any wallpaper. The icons keep the theme palette constant so you won’t notice anything there. It’s the photos that show a bit of evident.

Being a TFT screen it has just about decent viewing angle (about 60-degree from horizon). The display is bright enough with above-average sunlight readability. Most importantly the touch feedback that the screen gives back is delightful. Even tapping on the screen gives out a solid sound.

User Interface

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango

The Lumia 510 runs on Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. Nokia decided not to customize it too specific to its own taste, not that there was much scope anyway. We’ve always found the WP 7.5 to be more stable and visually pleasing than Android and iOS and the version on the 510 is no different. You have the great lock-screen with date, communications and meeting updates and then the Metro UI with the brilliant live tiles. Note that MS have since done away the “Metro UI” term and now it’s called “Windows 8 Interface”, so hereafter we’ll refer to it as 7.5 interface (as 8 interface will confuse users, won’t it?)

The interface will be usual for the WP 7.5 users – long press on a tile to move or delete it, swipe right to bring the main menu, long press Windows shortcut button to voice command and bringing out the recent windows by long pressing the back shortcut. There are other usual operations like bringing up the Bing search page by pressing the search hot-key, or pinning an app from the main menu to the live tiles. You can also uninstall the uninstall-lable apps by long pressing them on the main menu.

The Bing page has the bar-scanner and local navigator.

A look at the settings menu will give you options to customize sound, display, phone, connectivity, power, language etc. and also option to track your phone. No manual update option available.

The interface is very fluidic with eye-pleasing transition animations. Thanks to the proprietary OS, it integrates deeply with the hardware specs so you won’t feel any lag or discomfort in moving around at all.

Our only complain is the closed ecosystem of Windows Phone, much like the iOS but without the huge app-store. You need Zune to sync media, no microSD card, no Bluetooth file transfer, no out-of-box screenshot taker etc. For many of these you’ll have to get a Windows 8 device.

Phone and messaging

The dialer is big enough for most people. You can import contacts from various popular online mail accounts and social media sites. An advantage is the display of social media updates from your contacts alongside. Call quality is decent and at both ends we did not find any drop in voice quality.

Messaging supports threaded view and online chatting is integrated – again an advantage over most Androids.

Browser

IE loads the mobile version of your site by default but you can change it in settings. It loads sites pretty neat except the ones with complex JQueries. Flash is not supported out-of-box so it takes the video to the native player instead. You won’t see flash content loading. Pinching zoom is very smooth and there is no lag whatsoever.

Camera and Video recording

The 5MP snapper picks up colors pretty true although don’t try it under low light as there is no LED flash, resulting in a fair amount of grains. What we liked however, is the fact that those pictures came out with more information that what we expected, what if with grains. Overall we would say the low-light performance is better than some other 10k bricks.

The VGA video recording is nothing to talk about and only advisable when you don’t have other options. The videos are fit to be viewed over mobiles only and shared via MMS.

Multimedia playback

The gallery uses your favorite photos to customize the UI which looks beautiful. The albums are arranged side-by-side. You can’t share photos by Bluetooth ofcourse, but there is also no option of selecting multiple photos in one go. So if you’re deleting 20 photos, you’ll have to delete them one-by-one!

Audio output is brilliant retaining the Nokia standard both through the speakers and earphones. The earphones are great on voice call but lacks a bit of bass while listening to music, especially with songs with lots of double paddle drums.

The phone can play 720p video perfectly, and 1080p 30fps quite fine. The 1080p @60fps lags just a bit, but we did not expect it to play those fluently anyway. Even a Core i3 on a laptop skips frames sometimes!

Apps, Connectivity, performance and Verdict

Apps

This is where the Lumia series shines. On one hand where you have plain vanilla WP 7.5 on most other brand devices, Nokia gives you a wide choice of in-house apps – some are best in their class! For example, talking about the 510 specifically, you have Nokia maps, music, drive and its own app-hosting called App highlights. You can get more choices on the Marketplace or App highlights viz. Xpress, counters, city lens etc.

Connectivity

Biggest drawback of WP 7.5 is that it doesnot support BT file transfer, which is now available with WP 8 devices. Apart from that it supports 2G, 3G (HSDPA), Wi-Fi, microUSB and also 3.5mm audio jack.

Battery

The 1300mAh BP-3L battery gave us about a day of real-life usage from morning till late evening. You’d want to charge it every night but that’s pretty decent for a screen of this size.

Benchmarking

The benchmarking scores are as follows –

MultiBench 2 avg score: 3.30675

Onebench: 138774.2416

Bottom line

The Nokia Lumia 510 is restricted only by Windows Phone 7.5. But if you’re looking for a more stable, fresher platform at 10k that stands out among the sea of Androids – the Lumia 510 more than does the job.