Launched sometime in May in Kenya together with the Lumia 640XL and the Lumia 430 Dual SIM, the Lumia 640 LTE is a beautiful phone. Sleek, affordable and so presentable.
At around 19,000, Lumia 640 LTE comes in the box its user guide, a battery and a charger. There’s no USB and no ear phones and users need to buy them separately to transfer data or listen to the FM radio. However, users get 15 GB Free on OneDrive and an additional 15GB free when they activate Camera roll backup.
The phone is around 72.2mm by 141.3mm by 8.8mm and you can hold it with one hand and make a call. It’s 5” Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3 Display with a resolution of 1280 by 720 makes it a good phone for both work, social media and just fun. It’s 8.0 MP back camera coupled with 8 GB internal memory and an expandable memory card of up to 128GB makes it a good phone for photos and videos even while on the go as you catch your 4G LTE Network.
It has a 0.9 HD front camera with a LED flash and a Quad-core 1.2GHz clock-rate Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 400 processor.
The phone runs Windows Phone 8.1 with Lumia Denim and weighs around 145 g and comes with a 2500 mAh removable battery.
We picked a white Lumia 640 LTE which is single SIM and uses a Micro SIM.
On the front, the Lumia 640 has a front camera at the top left, an earpiece in the middle just above the Microsoft Logo. On the bottom front, the phone has a back button on the left, the home button at the centre and search button on the far right but they are not put on the edge but designed to be on the display screen not on the edge as normal. At the back, the phone has its main camera at the top and and its flash next to it towards the left. The Microsoft logo and name comes on the back middle.
The phone’s left egde has nothing, the top edge has ear phone jack towards the left while the right edge has the volume and the power or lock buttons. The charging slot is on the bottom edge at the center.
One of the challenges any new Lumia users will have is the struggle to get started. After inserting in your Micro SIM, you still need a Microsoft account to have some of the processes working. Of course Microsft wants to promote its accounts too. Microsoft keeps putting people off with its need to create or use an existing account, not because its bogus, but the time wasted is way too much especially to someone who’s moving from Android.
You will also need the account to buy and updates apps or sync your data and get other Microsoft services such as OneDrive.
Then you get to customizing your tiles and getting apps like Google, Here Maps, Twitter and Facebook working. At the moment, the firm is promising that on every buy of this phone you will get a 12 month Office 365 Personal subscription for free. Plus you get your Cortana, a digital personal assistant to remind you of your itenary everyday.
We promise to get a deep dive into the phone for a more detailed review of its perfomance soon.
Key Specs of the Lumia 640 LTE
Size: 72.2mm by Lumia 640 LTE by 141.3mm by 8.8mm
Display: 5”
Main Camera:8 MP
Internal Memory: 8 GB with MicroSD expandable to 128GB.
Network : 4G LTE
Front camera: HD 0.9 MP wide angle with a LED Flash.
Processor : Quad-core 1.2GHz
OS: Windows 8.1
