Microsoft Lumia 535 Announced with 5-inch Display & Windows Phone 8.1 for $130........

Microsoft has finally ditched the “Nokia” branding from the Lumia smartphones, and the new ones are coming with the Microsoft branding, as the company announces the Lumia 535 smartphone with the Microsoft Lumia branding that gets more attention than the phone itself.

The Lumia 535 comes with a 5-inch display and the budget device will have a qHD resolution (960 x 540 pixels), and it is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core processor and 1GB RAM. These specs make the phone better than the other Lumia smartphones in the recent times, which were all in the budget range but came in with huge compromises in the specs.

The smartphone is said to come with Windows Phone 8.1 OS with the Denim update, and the bumping of RAM is a very important thing to note, to make the experience better for gamers. With the total control under Microsoft, the phone is coming with the five essential services: Skype, Office, OneDrive, Cortana, and OneNote.

“We believe that there’s a lot of equity in people’s knowledge and understand at the basic level of our numbering scheme,” says Neil Broadley, director of phone product marketing at Microsoft. “Lumia is very much our smartphone brand,”

The camera on the Lumia 535 is another interesting part, because the company has maintained the same camera module from the Lumia 735, and it has a 5-megapixel wide angle lens for selfies and video calls on Skype, which comes pre-installed. The rear side on the Lumia 535 has a 5-megapixel camera as well, with an LED flash.

While there is 8GB internal storage in the Lumia 535, the phone has a MicroSD card slot for the storage expansion to 128GB. The company is also offering 15GB cloud storage for free. The battery packed into the device has a capacity of 1905 mAh. The smartphone is coming in both, Single SIM and Dual SIM variants, just like a few recent Lumia devices, and it is headed for a launch later this month for a price of 110 euros ($130).

Comparing this with other Windows Phone devices in this range, it was Lumia 530, priced at $114 but the specifications have got quite better for the little change in pricing, and Microsoft is betting on this for this year end’s growth in market share, as there is no flagship Lumia smartphone lined up in the coming couple of months.