Created: 25 August 2012 · Last edited: 10 September 2026

Announced in August 2012, the SH530U is a budget-oriented smartphone available in China through China Unicom, in Taiwan under the Commtiva brand, and in Russia and Malaysia as a carrier-free model. Its main selling point is undoubtedly its large 5-inch display, although the rather meagre 800 × 480 pixel resolution makes it considerably less impressive than the screen size might suggest.

There is nothing impressive about the hardware either: the SH530U is powered by a MediaTek MT6577 dual-core processor based on ARM Cortex-A9 cores and clocked at 1 GHz, with 512 MB of RAM. Internal storage is unusually generous for a phone of this class, with 20 GB available, including 4 GB allocated for application installation. Storage can also be expanded using microSDHC memory cards of up to 32 GB.

The SH530U features a 5-megapixel CMOS camera capable of recording HD video, while a 0.3-megapixel VGA camera is provided on the front.

The phone supports both GSM (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) and W-CDMA/UMTS (900 / 2100 MHz) networks and, more importantly, comes with two SIM card slots. For a budget smartphone, this is probably its best feature. GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and an FM radio are also included.

The SH530U measures 80.85 × 146.5 × 9.9 mm and weighs approx. 169 grams. Its 1950 mAh battery provides a reasonable amount of capacity for a phone of this size. It is available in white and pink.

The operating system is Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, with Sharp's new Feel UX interface pre-installed. At the time, this was quite a perk: owners of several of Sharp's Japanese smartphones were still waiting for ICS updates that would never arrive, while the SH530U gets both ICS and the new Feel UX interface right out of the box.

For those wanting to get more adventurous with the phone, root options are also available: XDA Developers.