The Nokia Lumia 521, a variant of the Lumia 520 for T-Mobile in the USA, has recently passed certification by US regulatory body the FCC. While the availability date for the device, which was announced at Mobile World Congress at the end of February, has not yet been officially announced by Nokia or T-Mobile its certification by the FFC suggests it will be available in store shortly.
As expected the FCC test documents indicate that the Lumia 521 will support the 850, 1700/2100 (AWS) and 1900 UMTS bands. This contrasts with the global variant which will support the 900 and 2100 UTMS bands. Both variants support Cat14 HSDPA (21Mbps) and Cat6 HSUPA (5.76Mbps) for uplink and downlink connectivity respectively. Both variants also support quadband GSM for times when a 3G coverage is not available.
The Lumia 520 / 521 is the new entry level to the Lumia line up. It has a 4.0 inch WVGA (800 x 480) TFT screen, 8GB of internal memory, microSD card support, a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor running at 1GHz, and a 5 megapixel camera.
Nokia has previously indicated that the Lumia 520 will cost an estimated €139 before taxes and subsidies, and will debut during the first quarter of 2013 in Hong Kong and Vietnam, with wider shipping in the second quarter of 2013, including Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America on T-Mobile.
On T-Mobile in the US the device is likely to be available for free with a contract tie in. On a T-Mobile UnCarrier plan (effectively SIM free) the phone is likely to cost around $175.
