A few weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled its most affordable Windows Phone ever, with the launch of the Lumia 530. The device slots in below the recently launched 630 in its range, and replaces the Lumia 520, which was announced almost a year and a half ago.
Earlier this month, the Lumia 530 went on sale in its first market, Vietnam, before also launching in India last week. Today, Microsoft announced that the low-cost Windows Phone 8.1 device is headed to the United Kingdom too, in a couple of weeks' time.
The Lumia 530 will be available in the UK on September 4, priced as little as £60. It will be sold through numerous retailers and carriers, including Carphone Warehouse, Phones 4u, O2, Vodafone, Three and EE (likely on EE's 3G networks, T-Mobile and Orange, as the device does not support 4G LTE).
Microsoft says that the 530 "delivers an uncompromised Lumia experience", despite its relatively modest specs. The handset features a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 chipset, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of onboard storage, with a microSD slot supporting cards up to 128GB. Up front, there's a 4-inch FWVGA (854x480px) display, but no front-facing camera; around the back, there's a 5MP camera, but no flash.
Although Microsoft has announced that the Lumia 530 will be priced "from as little as £60", the actual on-sale price may be a little higher than this. When it unveiled the Lumia 630 in the UK, Microsoft said that it would cost "just £89.95", but none of its launch partners have yet sold the device at that price, with many demanding closer to £100, plus a mandatory £10 purchase of pay-as-you-go top-up.
Image via Microsoft
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