Microsoft announces mid-range smartphones Lumia 640, Lumia 640 XL at MWC

Microsoft is now targeting the emerging markets with two new budget smartphones Lumia 640 and Lumia 640XL that it announced at the on-going Mobile World Congress MWC in in Barcelona.  Apart from bringing superior features for budget-conscious consumers, the highlight of the devices is that they come bundled with one-year subscription to Microsoft’s Office 365.

The Lumia 640 comes across as an upgarde to the Lumia 635, the company’s low-end LTE smartphone. Sporting a 5-inch HD display, it packs in an 8-megapixel rear snapper with LED flash and a 1-megapixel front-facing camera. There’s an option for dual-SIM card slots. It is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, coupled with 1GB of RAM. It has a 2500 mAh battery. The slightly higher-end Lumia 640 XL comes with a 5.7-inch display with a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 3, a 13-megapixel camera with Zeiss optics and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. The processor and RAM is the same as the regular-sized Lumia 630. A bigger 3,000mAh battery completes the package.

Both devices run Windows Phone 8.1 and also gets the Lumia Denim update, offering features such as Live Folders, one-swipe Action Center and Word Flow. On the storage front, the new Lumia devices get 8GB onboard storage that is expandable up to 128GB via microSD card slot. In addition, there’s also gets 30 GB of free space on OneDrive. The Lumia 640 starts at $159 (approximately Rs 9,800) without a contract and its LTE version will cost $179 (approximately Rs 11,089). The larger Lumia 640 XL is priced at $209 (approximately Rs 12, 946), and its LTE variant at $239 (approximately Rs 14,800). Of course this pricing does not include taxes.