The Nokia Lumia 520 is Nokia's fifth Windows Phone 8 handset. It's a phone which slots into the very bottom end of the range, just below the Nokia Lumia 620.
If you look beyond Windows Phone 8 then there's also a whole host of Android competitors such as the Huawei Ascend G330 and the Orange San Diego.
The Nokia Lumia 520 has a fairly generous 4-inch, 480 x 800 display and is powered by a 1 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and 512MB of RAM. That may not sound like much but the power matches the Lumia 620, and we had few qualms about the performance of that phone given its price. The screen is actually slightly bigger than that of the Nokia Lumia 620, which only has a 3.8-inch display.
The Nokia Lumia 520 starts at around £150 SIM free or from around £100 if you buy it locked (and the price has already plummeted to £70 in some stores), while the Lumia 620 retails from around £175 SIM free or £150 locked.
That means a decent saving for those who don't mind committing to a network. It's a little cheaper than the Huawei Ascend W1 too.
The Nokia Lumia 520 will be undergoing a facelift soon when it gets the new Lumia Amber update, which will bring FM radio and an all new camera to the handset in Q3 2013 - we'll update the review when it appears.
The front of the Nokia Lumia 520 is mostly screen as you'd expect and at 4-inches it's a decent size for a low-price handset. The pixel density of 233 pixels per inch also isn't bad at all for the money you're paying - sure it's dwarfed by the likes of the 469 ppi HTC One, but it's also many times cheaper.
A huge plus is the ability to use gloves with the screen too - being able to type in the cold weather is becoming a really common ability on phones, but we're impressed Nokia managed it on such a cheap handset.
Unlike some handsets, the screen here isn't edge-to-edge: there's a black border running the entire way around it. At the sides this border is fairly narrow, but it becomes quite wide at the top to make room for the earpiece and a Nokia logo. It's even wider at the bottom, because that's where you'll find the start, back and search softkeys.
The back of the handset is almost featureless, with just a small Nokia logo in the centre, the 5-megapixel camera lens near the top and a tiny loudspeaker near the bottom.
The bottom edge has a micro USB port in the centre, which is used for charging or connecting the Nokia Lumia 520 to a computer.
The back cover is easy to remove - you simply use your nails to peel it away at each corner. The cover itself feels reasonably sturdy, so we don't see it snapping even if you take it on and off a lot.
Once that has been removed, you'll have access to the 1430 mAh battery (which interestingly is bigger than the 1300 mAh battery found in the Nokia Lumia 620).
At first glance it's certainly an impressive handset for the price, easily competing with the similarly priced Huawei Ascend W1 and potentially rendering the Nokia Lumia 620 redundant. In fact, given that it has similar specs, a bigger screen and a better battery, you might be wondering why the Lumia 520 is considered lower-end than the 620.