Microsoft may have taken over Nokia’s mobile division, but they decided to roll with some of the same line of devices Nokia had introduced in their latter days. The Lumia 535 being an improvement over Nokia’s launched Lumia 530 is one such example. It adopts the same design and feel from its predecessor, trying to keep the market grasped by Nokia’s low end devices by improving on the hardware, all the while remaining in the same price range.

The Lumia 535 is a good looking device, the first of many carrying the Microsoft brand name on the body, as said before not really evolving in terms of design other than just being a bit bigger in size. The phone has a 5” IPS LCD display at qHD resolution (540 x 960 pixels) which is a huge improvement over the TFT display in the 530. Moreover, the device also offers Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The phone offers a Dual SIM option like its predecessor and also improves in terms of internal memory with 8 GB storage which will be expandable up to 128 GB via micro SD slot.

The phone is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 chipset with a quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7, and Adreno 302 for graphics processing. A much needed improvement, however, is seen in the RAM department which has doubled and is now 1 GB. The phone comes with Windows Phone 8.1 OS, same as its predecessor but will surely outperform it in terms of performance.

The camera department has improved as well since the Nokia device only provided a rear camera. Microsoft improved exactly on what was criticized in the previous device. Although the 5 megapixels rear camera hasn’t improved in terms of video recording and as such, but the addition of a 5 megapixels camera is exactly what was needed for video calling, etc.
The phone also improved on the battery amperage as it increased from 1430 to 1905 mAh which is a much more respectable figure. It will get a day of use quite easily and can go into the second day as well.