Operation

Within the Nokia Lumia 525 we're getting the exact aforementioned SoC Nokia used for the Lumia 520, which isn't an ideal state of affairs. The Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8227 was first seen in devices at the end of 2012, and has already been superseded twice, first by the Snapdragon 400 used throughout 2013's mid-to-low-range handsets, and and so again by the recently-appear Snapdragon 410.

While the Snapdragon 410 is still in the sampling stage, it seems odd that Nokia would continue to use the year-old MSM8227 over a Snapdragon 400. The choice makes the Lumia 525'southward hardware immediately outdated at launch, and comparatively weak up against competitors' offerings.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8227 SoC is built on a 28nm LP process and features a 1.0 GHz dual-core Krait CPU, 1 MB of L2 enshroud, an Adreno 305 GPU, a Hexagon QDSP6 DSP at 500 MHz, a single-channel LPDDR2 retentivity controller, plus Bluetooth four.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/1000/due north, A-GPS and HSPA+ radios. The MSM8227 is paired with 1 GB of RAM in the Lumia 525, which is i of the only upgrades that has been made over the Lumia 520, which included just 512 MB.

There's likewise 8 GB of storage within the Lumia 525, which isn't a huge amount. Of the viii GB (really 7.23 GB), 2.39 GB is occupied by the OS and related arrangement files, leaving but 4.84 GB free to the user. While there is a microSD bill of fare slot underneath the back cover, which supports cards upwards to 64 GB in size, all apps must exist installed on the internal storage. This tin put a bit of pressure level on the express available space, particularly if you desire to install a few games.

Navigating the operating system is a generally smooth experience on the Lumia 525, thanks to hardware acceleration efforts that come across the GPU well utilized. Opening apps isn't exactly speedy, sometimes taking several seconds to get to a usable screen, but the handset doesn't suffer from deathly slowness. 1 GB of RAM appears to assistance multitasking, as I found that a larger number of apps can be rapidly resumed on the Lumia 525 compared to the Lumia 520.

Browsing performance from the 1.0 GHz dual-core processor is specially weak compared to other entry-level smartphones in 2014. Webpages on the Lumia 525 simply can't be manipulated as quickly, and Internet Explorer likes to throw up a lot of checkerboarding, particularly when yous scroll up and downwardly long pages. Spider web browsing is an area where the Lumia 525 would really do good from the stronger CPU cores in the Snapdragon 400.

The graphics processor within the MSM8227 isn't the fastest going around, but cheers to the Lumia 525's low display resolution information technology'south capable of playing games bachelor through the Windows Phone Store. Titles such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are really playable on the Lumia 525, helped by 1 GB of RAM, though not as smoothly as yous'll find on flagships similar the Lumia 1520.

As you can meet from the in-browser benchmarks that I ran on the Lumia 525, both the browser performance and the CPU performance falls far behind other devices. In Kraken especially you can see that a modern flagship SoC like the Apple A7 is around ten times faster than the MSM8227.

The Adreno 305 GPU in the MSM8227 is the same GPU Qualcomm uses in the Snapdragon 400, however the T-Rex HD benchmark from GFXBench indicates information technology may exist running at a lower clockspeed. Comparing on-screen results of the Lumia 525 (WVGA) to the Moto G (720p), the Moto G was 15% faster despite having to return to 140% more pixels. Of class some of this is likely related to the weaker CPU cores, amongst other things.

Unfortunately the video decoding capabilities of the Lumia 525 are capped at 720p; the Snapdragon S4 SoC is simply not powerful enough to decode 1080p content, and if yous try yous'll be left with extremely choppy playback. Luckily the sound produced from the iii.5mm audio jack is decent, and I nevertheless beloved the wide range of volumes yous can choose in Windows Telephone, which provides quite a lot of room for amplification.

The MSM8227 SoC in the Nokia Lumia 525 provides enough oomph for depression-intensity tasks, but falls backside in app loading and spider web browsing. I'm not a fan of how Nokia has used a twelvemonth-former chip in a device marketed as being brand new, particularly when at that place are amend, newer alternatives available. That'southward non to say the performance is bad, but I look more from today'south entry-level smartphone.