Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) opened a press conference Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress with the announcement of its new Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL smartphones. These two new phones are targeted towards a bigger tech market with its lowered price point, making it available to more consumers.
The Lumia 640 and the Lumia 640 XL are both technically the successor to the Lumia 630 and Lumia 1320 respectively. Featuring the Clear Black Display, the Lumia 640 sports a 5-inch, 1280×720 screen, while the Lumia 640 XL ups the size a bit to 5.7-inch. Spec-wise both are almost the same, 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage. The Lumia 640 gets an 8-megapixel front camera while the Lumia 640 XL gets its 13-megapixel Carl Zeiss optics camera.
The Lumia 640
Lumia 640 XL
Perhaps the most notable feature of both phones is its one-year free subscription to Office 365 Personal, which saves its users at least $70 worth for the new units. Coupled with its relatively low-cost, Microsoft aims to widen the base for Windows Phone users, which would in turn help the development of more apps for its mobile OS.
Information for the announcement of the two new Windows Phone models was actually already leaked at least a day prior to the press conference at the Mobile World Congress. The leak was through an empty link header, which clearly detailed the announcement in the title.
Both the Lumia 640 and the Lumia 640 XL will be installed with Windows Phone 8.1. However, the two phones are also designed to be upgradeable to Windows 10 later on after it becomes officially released. It will be commercially available sometime around this month, at an equivalent price of about $156 (3G) and $178 (LTE) for the Lumia 640, and about $212 (3G) and $245 (LTE) for the Lumia 640 XL. It will also be available in matte and glossy versions, as well as in cyan, orange and black colors.
