Nokia and Sony are two of the most famous manufacturers in the Indian smartphone market. They have time and again come up with great technology to keep its consumers loyal to their brand. To compete in the smartphone market Nokia has gone with its Lumia range which offers various Windows OS smartphones coming at different price ranges.
On the other hand Sony has relied upon the Xperia range which again has a number of models to offer in all price ranges, this range works with the Android OS. Two budget phones of these manufacturers are the Nokia Lumia 520 and the Sony Xperia M.
Screen: Considering the price of both the phones let’s have a look at the features of both phones. The Nokia Lumia 520 has a 4 inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with a pixel ratio of 480 x 800 pixels. The Xperia M comes with similar 4 inch TFT capacitive touch screen with a display ratio of 480 x 854 pixels. The screen of both the phones is scratch resistant.
Ram and Storage Options: The Lumia sports a 1 GHz Dual core processor supported by 512 MB of RAM, while the Xperia M carries a similar speed processor the RAM is 1 GB making it a slightly faster phone. The internal storage in Lumia is 8 GB and the same can be extended by 64 GB with the help of an external memory card.
The Xperia M has only 4 GB of internal memory and expandable external storage capacity of 32 GB. Both phones have the capability to connect to 2G as well as 3G networks. Thus both phones can access to high speed data networks also. In addition the phones can connect to Wi-Fi, USB and Bluetooth connections. The Xperia has an advantage over the Lumia in the fact that it supports NFC feature while the Lumia doesn’t. This however isn’t important as there are very few phones in the Indian market that support NFC.
Camera: The camera of Lumia 520 is 5 MP and comes with autofocus and geo-tagging feature. There however is no flash in the Lumia 520. The Xperia M has a 5 MP camera with LED flash. HRD, autofocus, panorama and geo-tagging feature are also present in the Xperia.
Operating System: Another important differentiating factor between Lumia and Xperia are their Operating Systems. While the Lumia runs on the Windows 8 OS which has only a limited number of apps, the Xperia runs on the more popular Android OS which has huge number of apps and also can be subjected to experimentation unlike the Windows OS.
Battery and Other features: The Lumia has a 1430 mAh battery which offers a decent battery back-up. Nokia claims that the same is capable of providing 14 hours 40 mins back-up in 2G calling. The Xperia M on the other hand has a 1750 mAh battery, which is bound to provide more battery back-up than the Lumia one. However the different features of the phones may cause the battery back-up to go up and down.
A number of additional features follow both the phones while the Xperia M has a document viewer, the Lumia comes with a pre-installed Office for the phone which offers much more room for viewing and editing all kinds of documents. The usual SNS integration, Clock, Calendar etc are present in both the phones.
Price: While the Nokia Lumia 520 can be bought for a price of around Rs. 10,000, the Xperia M is available at around Rs. 13,000.
Our take: Both phones form a good package and one needs to choose between Android and Windows to decide which phone one wants to buy otherwise there isn’t much to separate the phones. The price will be the differentiating factor for sure. The Lumia 520 is cheaper by around Rs 3,500 so make your choice wisely. My choice will be the Nokia Lumia 520. What about you?
