T-Mobile has officially announced that the Windows Phone 8.1-powered Nokia Lumia 530, complete with Microsoft's new Cortana digital assistant, will hit its network on Oct. 15.

The Nokia Lumia 530 smartphone has drawn plenty of attention since its debut, as it comes as an affordable handset with good specifications and the latest version of Microsoft's mobile operating system.

While Nokia has plenty of higher-end offerings in its portfolio, its affordable handsets have always been the most popular. The Lumia 520, for instance, was a smashing hit worldwide, as was the T-Mobile Lumia 521, and the new Lumia 530 is expected to be widely successful as well.

The Nokia Lumia 530 will hit T-Mobile's network in the U.S. in less than two weeks, on Oct. 15, sporting an attractive price tag of just $79.20.

"T-Mobile prepaid customers can fall in love with the Lumia 530 the same way they did with its predecessor, the Lumia 521 - one of the best-selling Windows Phones EVER at T-Mobile," the carrier boasted in a press release.

"The Lumia 530 is a full-featured smartphone providing customers a great value at an entry level price point. Rocking the new Windows Phone 8.1 operating system, the Lumia 530 comes with personal assistant Cortana - the only personal digital assistant that can set reminders by people as well as location or time, a beautiful 4-inch touchscreen and a quad-core processor for an incredible overall experience at crazy-fast speeds," adds the announcement.

As a reminder, the Nokia Lumia 530's 4-inch LCD display has a modest FWVGA resolution of 854 x 480 pixels (246 ppi), a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of internal storage capacity, with microSD support for additional memory of up to 128GB. Other specs include a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 1,430 mAh battery that will last for up to 10 hours of 3G talk time and up to 22 days of standby time.

On the software side, the Nokia Lumia 530 comes with Microsoft's Windows Phone 8.1 OS, complete with Cortana, Microsoft Office, OneDrive, and Skype, pre-installed.

T-Mobile customers interested in getting the Nokia Lumia 530 as soon as possible will also be able to get the handset starting on Oct. 5, from Best Buy and Microsoft Stores. To learn more about the phone itself, head over to Microsoft's website at this link. For more details about the Windows Phone 8.1 experience and other Lumia offerings in T-Mobile's lineup, meanwhile, head here.