UK retailer Carphone Warehouse is selling the Nokia Lumia 520 for £60 on PAYG, a saving of up to 40% over standard pricing. In a seperate promotion Phone4u are offering the the Lumia 520 SIM-free for £89. Both of these prices are the lowest we've seen in the UK market for Nokia's low-end Windows Phone device and represent excellent value for money.

Carphone Warehouse had earlier offered the Lumia 520 for £60 as part of a special PAYG upgrade offer (requiring an existing PAYG account in good standing), but this latest offer is available to all, with the only requirement being a £10 top up. The Christmas promotion, which is available online and in high street stores, is available on Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, and Virgin Mobile.

Those who buy the Lumia 520 through Carphone Warehouse can choose from the blue, red, white, and black colour variants. In addition all those who purchase a device will be entered into a prize draw to win one of ten tickets to meet The Saturdays and go to a private gig.

The low cost of the Lumia 520, in contrast to other Lumia devices, is achieved, in part, by cutting a few corners, the most notable of which are the downgrading of the screen quality and the absence of front facing camera, compass sensor, NFC chipset, and camera LED flash hardware. The hardware omissions do have an impact (e.g. compass functionality HERE Maps, video calling in Skype), but do not seriously degrade the overall Windows Phone experience. There absence is a reasonable compromise given that the Lumia 520, at this price point, is nearly one third of the cost of the next phone in the Lumia line up (Lumia 625 and 620 at £150). Or, put another way, you could buy nine Lumia 520s for the cost of one Lumia 1520.

Here's the conclusion to our Nokia Lumia 520 review:

Taken holistically, though, the Lumia 520 is still cracking value for money, in terms of the future proof operating system, the built-in Office suite, the mapping and navigation services, the 150,000 third party applications available in the Windows Phone Store, and (as highlighted above) even the built-in camera.

The more Nokia push Windows Phone down into this price territory, the better it will do, I suspect - budget Android phones tend to be slow and clunky, whereas the 520, on the whole, flies. And with greater sales at the budget end will come marketshare increase and revenue, increasing awareness further up the price spectrum. Assuming that Windows Phone continues to grow, I suspect we'll be looking back in a year's time and realising just how much the Lumia 520 and 620 had to do with the ecosystem taking off across the world.