Gadgetory

if you want to be prepared for anything a mid-range Windows Phone might not be the top of your shopping list but at a press event in Barcelona today Microsoft made the case for why it's two newest Lumias might just fit the bill for the right kind of user I'm Michael Fisher with pocket now going hands-on with the 5-inch Lumia 640 and the 5.7 inch Lumia 640 XL we decided to shoot these hands-on zaz a single video because despite their different sizes the devices here are quite similar there are no real surprises in terms of form factor or specs each one is a polycarbonate block available in multiple colors and finishes depending on which back cover you choose that cover peels off to reveal a replaceable battery 2,500 milliamp hours on the smaller phone and 3,000 on the XL and a microSD slot on each good for up to an additional 128 gigs of storage this being a low to mid-range device 20 the cameras aren't PureView branded and they don't have fancy touches like 0 is but they're pretty high res at eight megapixels and 13 megapixels with the higher pixel count and Carl Zeiss optics of course going to the bigger phone each one also offers wide angle front-facing camera at a much lower resolution one megapixel and five megapixels respectively and each also features the camera improvements we saw at CES such as dynamic flash and auto HDR no surprise since each phone ships with Windows 8 1 and Lumia denim with a guaranteed upgrade to Windows 10 later in the year the software experience for now is very familiar on both 720p displays with Windows 8 1 humming along nicely on a Snapdragon 400 clocked at 1.2 gigahertz and backed up by a gig of ram that's double the system memory of the earlier Lumia 630 and Microsoft has also brought back nice and easy to mitad from that model like the proximity and ambient light sensors as well as the glance screen Stephen Elop took the opportunity here at mwc to tout the advantages of the Microsoft ecosystem particularly for business users in addition to all the upgrades coming with Windows 10 later this year Lumia 640 buyers can expect to get 60 minutes of Skype world class service per month an extra Microsoft Office license for their PC or tablet and a one-year subscription to office 365 which includes a terabyte of onedrive cloud storage as well whether all that excites you or not will probably depend on how invested you are in Microsoft's ecosystem the real advantage to these mid tier phones is of course price when they go on sale in April they'll come in four colors with both single sim and dual SIM variants with options for both 3g and LTE radios depending on the options you select you'll be paying between 139 and 159 euro for the smaller phone and between 189 and 219 for the XL with not a hint of aluminium insight and an almost totally middle-of-the-road spec sheet the Lumia 640 and 640 XL will definitely appeal more to budget consumers than flagship hunters and perhaps more fittingly they may make a ripe target for bulk purchases by the enterprise sector we'll look forward to finding out in the months to come for more news and devices from Microsoft Samsung HTC and many others at mwc 2015 stay tuned here on youtube and visitor mwc hub at pocketnow.com till next time this has been michael fisher with pocket now captain two phones on twitter with jaime rivera and anton d Nagy in Barcelona back soon with more