When Microsoft launched the Lumia 535, its first branded smartphone after absorbing Nokia’s mobile and services division, the strategy had become clear: that the company will start focusing on the low-end in its quest to gain market share in the smartphone industry. This has been further cemented with the announcement of the Lumia 435 and 532, budget Windows Phone 8.1 smartphones clearly targeted at the masses — the devices are even priced lower. After all, a core focus for the company is “connecting the next billion people to the Internet.”

Outside of smartphones, Microsoft also has the Nokia 215 up its sleeve — a sub-$30 feature phone that will enable access to apps like Facebook Messenger and Opera Mini. This is clearly aimed at emerging markets, where the priority is to connect people through mobile Internet, even if it’s through a small screen and slow transfer speeds.

Priced at about $120 unlocked, the Microsoft Lumia 535 seems to strike a balance between the low-end and mid-range. Microsoft markets it as having a “555” strategy, offering a 5-inch touchscreen display, 5-megapixel main camera and 5-megapixel wide-angle front camera for selfies.

As with most entry-level devices, it’s not exactly stellar in terms of specs and design. But being a Windows Phone, performance is decent even this low in the price and spec range. A clear advantage over the Lumia 530 and 520 it replaces in this segment are the bigger screen and better camera. While the user experience is decent, I do have some gripes with the screen being washed out — something common in this price range for Lumia devices. With this pricing, there has to be some compromise in component quality.

Specs

The Microsoft Lumia 535 is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 Cortex A7 clocked at 1.2 GHz. Display is powered by an Adreno 302 GPU, outputting 540×960 pixels onto a 5-inch screen. This results in a PPI of approximately 222. The devices comes with 8GB of flash storage, with the system eating up about half. Good news for photo and music junkies: the device supports miroSD cards up to 128GB. Storage is augmented by 15GB of OneDrive storage — Microsoft account holders who have activated auto backup in September 2014 will have up to 30GB free.

The 535 thankfully has 1GB of RAM, which should improve app performance over previous entry-level devices. Even the “affordable flagship” Lumia 830 ships with 1GB, so raw performance can be comparable, memory-wise.

The Lumia 535 comes with a 1,905 mAh removable battery, which is rated at 552 hours standby and 11 or 13 hours talk time (2G and 3G, respectively). In real-world scenarios, however, I would usually get about 55 hours standby time on this device, with a few calls, news reading and and Skype chats.

Our review device is the Dual SIM variant, which means you can use two SIM cards simultaneously — a great way to reduce device clutter in your purse or pocket, or at least get more than one active line on the phone, whether from the same or different networks. It’s a handy feature whilst roaming — you can keep your current number and also use a local prepaid SIM to save on data, SMS and call costs.

Comparing it with the Lumia 530 it replaces, the 535 is certainly an improvement, although the devices sport basically the same procssor. You can see VR World‘s review of the Lumia 530 from a few months back.

Design and User Experience

The 535 sports the familiar Lumia design — polycarbonate removable back cover that comes in bright colors. The phone comes in orange, green, black and white, with the latter two coming in matte, while the more colorful ones in shiny finish. Our review unit was orange, and while the shiny plastic can be a fingerprint magnet, it’s also provides better grip, which should help reduce accidental drops.

Button layout should also be familiar to longtime Lumia users, with all keys at the right side of the phone: volume rocker at the top and sleep/power button at the middle. Sorry, no dedicated camera button here. Microsoft has done away with the dedicated capacitive softkeys, with on-screen soft keys that can be hidden and shown with a swiping-up motion. This can take some getting used to, especially for those more familiar with fixed capacitive touch keys.

Screen is a bit washed out in direct sunlight

The 3.5 mm audio jack is at the center top, while the USB port is at the center bottom. Pretty standard stuff, unlike the Lumia 830 we earlier reviewed, which had the USB port at the top.

The box comes with Microsoft-branded earphones, Microsoft-branded wall charger and a USB cable. Everything looked suspiciously the same as Nokia’s bundled accessories, only they now carry Microsoft branding.

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For those of you that missed Microsoft’s announcement of the Windows Phone 8.1 update, they said that the update would be rolling out over the course of the next few months across the world. However, the developer preview (basically accessible to anyone that’s interested) is available today. That includes a whole host of small improvements across the OS as well as the addition of Cortana. Windows Phone Central actually has a quick guide of what you actually need to do in order to get your hands on Windows Phone 8.1. The one important thing to note, however, is that only users with Windows Phone 8 and up devices will be able to upgrade to 8.1 and anyone with a Windows Phone 7.x version will not be able to upgrade and gain the new features of 8.1. Some of those features include the Cortana personal voice assistant, VPN connectivity, notification center, more user customization of the interface and an overall better-class OS.

Like we’ve written before, Microsoft certainly has gotten their act together and they appear to be working very hard to make sure that users are getting what they want from their smartphone while at the same time enticing users to switch to Windows Phone from Android or iOS. Currently, Microsoft is still struggling to bring over users that are already part of the Android and iOS ecosystem as most of their users are coming from their low-end devices which are usually people coming to Windows Phone from a ‘dumb phone’.

Microsoft is expanding their hardware partners and they’ve already shown that they’re spending lots of money on their software partners. Now, for them, it will merely be a matter of time until Windows 9 brings all of their platforms together under a single UI and ultimately allow for amazing cross-platform functionalities that utilize their OS’ strength and cloud platforms. Until then, it will be a game of catch up from Microsoft, a game that they’re currently working very hard to push for and honestly they’re making more progress in a much shorter period of time than Apple or Google did with their operating systems. I guess it is easier to make progress once your competitors have paved the way for you, but quality change isn’t easy no matter what what stage.

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If you haven’t been following Microsoft lately, then you’re missing out on what could be one of the most significant changes of strategy I’ve seen in a long time. They have slowly been making baby steps towards reorganizing and reconsidering how they address mobile. I have been following Microsoft’s attitudes towards mobile since Windows Mobile 5.0 and even owned a fair amount of Windows-based devices over the course of that time. However, Microsoft made a lot of mistakes along the way and is finally making major changes to remedy them. And with the smartphone market being a virtual duopoly between Android and iOS it comes as no surprise that people are looking for something different.

At the same time, Microsoft is struggling to retain users in Windows while people start to move towards Android, iOS and ChromeOS-based devices. With their release of Windows 8, Microsoft actually alienated a lot of users because they ruined a fairly well received operating system in Windows 7 and tried to modernize it for touch, but made an insane amount of mistakes. Since then, Microsoft has released Windows 8.1 which has made some significant improvements and is continuing to do so by bringing back the start menu in the Windows 8.1 update which will also bring a bunch of other tweaks that will make Windows 8 more usable for users without touch. One of Microsoft’s biggest mistakes with Windows 8 was to assume that everyone would have touch and that application developers would immediately switch to the ‘Modern’ Metro UI that Windows 8 employs with tiles, many of these tweaks fix those mistakes. Some of those fixes include allowing boot to desktop, a start menu, Metro apps on the desktop taskbar, a persistent taskbar, mouse friendly menus, reduced system requirements and much more. Sure, its a bit late when you consider that Windows 9 is likely due next year, but that’s an entirely different conversation. Right now they need to focus on keeping people happy in the now and preparing for the future, which is exactly what they appear to be doing.

Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia also signifies Microsoft’s renewed focus on hardware as did their announcement about their expansion of hardware partners for Windows Phone, which was necessary to show that they wanted to enable more than just Nokia. Clearly Microsoft can sell their own branded devices as Google does successfully with Nexus and Android. One way that Microsoft followed up on their hardware commitments was by announcing that they would be making Windows free on any device that is 9″ or less, which means we could actually see a lot of 8.9″ Windows tablets relatively soon. But what this enables is Microsoft’s operating system to become a considered option for OEMs when building tablets and smartphones.

Microsoft’s new strategy is to monetize on their cloud software like Office, One Drive and One Note and to utilize their strengths in cloud computing to make their operating systems more attractive. If they continue on this trajectory, they could have a fully unified operating system across all platforms. Eventually, with Windows 9 we can expect to see essentially the same OS plus or minus a few features (based on platform) on Desktop, Tablet and Smartphone. Which is reinforced by Microsoft’s move to make app purchases in their store universally applicable across Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Xbox. This will not only encourage people to use Microsoft’s platform for the flexibility and cross-platform nature, but it will also encourage application developers to make applications that think in a cross-platform manner. That is in combination with their announcement of Cortana, which I would expect to see intelligently integrated into all of Microsoft’s operating systems and eventually into Windows 9. Cortana is going to be Microsoft’s next weapon to fight against Google and Apple to help create differentiation.

I really feel like Microsoft really has it together more than they ever have in their history since Bill Gates left his position as CEO. And to be honest, considering that Bill Gates left Microsoft as CEO when I was 10, it seems pretty fair to say that this is the best I’ve seen them since he stepped down as CEO. They finally understand what they need to do in order to be successful in competing with Google and Apple, and their strategies are solid. Only time will tell how quickly they will start to erode Apple and Google, especially when you consider they’ve successfully helped erode Blackberry’s share.

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