Nokia Lumia 525 Enters Battle For the Mid-Range Smartphone Market

Nokia has held a low-key launch of its latest mid-range Windows Phone 8 smartphone, the Lumia 525, which will hope to challenge the recently announced Motorola Moto G.

The Finnish manufacturer, which is set to sell its deIncrevices and services business to Microsoft, says the 525 is a variant of the Lumia 520, not a replacement.

No Replacement

It features a 4-inch super-sensitive touch screen (meaning it responds to fingernail taps and can be used with gloves on), a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and a 5-megapixel rear camera. Like the 520, it doesn’t have flash but can shoot HD video at 720p.

There’s 1GB of RAM on board, 8GB of mass memory, Nokia’s suite of HERE Maps, including for transit and driving, and a microSD card slot to support up to 64GB of memory. Further enhancing the memory situation, Microsoft is including 7GB of free SkyDrive cloud storage.

The phone, which has a swappable, candy-coloured polycarbonate shell, comes in orange, yellow, white and black, and measures 4.7 by 2.5 by 0.39 inches. Again like the 520, the 525 has access to apps including Instagram and Vine.

Nokia released the 525 out of Singapore priced, unlocked, at US $199 (£122) – the same price as the Lumia 520. Details about when and how quickly it will reach the rest of the world are still to come. (Nokia says it has a deal to sell the 525 to China Unicom and a 526 to China Mobile.)

The Lumia 525 could be very good news for Nokia, which during the third quarter sold 63 million phones, thanks to its Lumia and Asha lines, proving its arrow is once again pointing in the right direction. Its sales figures, and the increasing market share of the Windows Phone platform have largely been attributed to the success of Nokia’s mid-range handsets.

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Originally published on eWeek.