New Lumia 530 Windows Phone for T-Mobile Customers Launches Oct. 5

The new Lumia 530 Windows smartphone will be available to T-Mobile customers on Oct. 15 from Best Buy and Microsoft stores, or available directly through T-Mobile starting on Oct. 15. The price for the phones through T-Mobile is $79.20 each, the company said in an Oct. 2 announcement. Pricing has not yet been announced for purchases made through Best Buy and Microsoft stores.

The Lumia 530 Windows phone is a low-cost model made by Microsoft’s Nokia division and available for use through prepaid, no-contract monthly service plans from T-Mobile. The 530 runs on the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system and includes the Cortana personal assistant feature, which can be used to set reminders, as well as a 4-inch LCD touch screen, a quad-core processor and a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera. Also included is 4GB of memory and access to a wide range of preinstalled Windows Phone apps, including Microsoft Office, OneDrive and Skype.

Microsoft’s Lumia smartphone line appears to represent the future of the company’s mobile division and strategy since its $7 billion acquisition earlier this year, according to a July eWEEK report. The Lumia 530, a dual-SIM device, is not intended to take on Apple’s successful iPhone, but is aimed at carrying the Windows Phone flag into emerging markets and growing the worldwide market for Windows Phone devices. Microsoft also wants to use Lumia smartphones as mobile vehicles for Microsoft’s cloud services, including Office 365, as the company continues to work toward a goal of platform integration.

In addition to the lower-end Lumia phones like the 530, Microsoft has said that it also plans to continue to deliver higher-end products, including the Nokia Lumia 930, as it fights for consumer dollars.

In August, T-Mobile unveiled several other new smartphone models from HTC and Alcatel, including the HTC One M8 for Windows and Alcatel OneTouch Fierce 2 and Evolve 2 models.

Meanwhile, a new cellular carrier performance report by mobile analytics firm RootMetrics found that T-Mobile has moved into third place among the big four cellular carriers in the United States, while Sprint has fallen to the No. 4 spot, according to a recent eWEEK story. The No. 1 and No. 2 spots in the rankings are held by Verizon Wireless and AT&T, respectively.