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3 spectastic Lumias for price of 1 rival flagship: Microsoft sells biz on cheapie experience

We've missed you, Stephen Elop

Andrew Orlowski Mon 2 Mar 2015 // 11:33 UTC

MWC 2015 Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop emerged from cryogenic storage at Microsoft to announce two new phones and give a glimpse of mobile Office for Windows 10. But not a lot – more will be revealed at Microsoft’s developer event, Build, in April.

Elop, who hasn’t been seen much since Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia’s devices unit last year, made a welcome return to emphasise Microsoft’s pitch this year: value-for-money phones for business.

“You can get three Lumias with similar specifications for the price of one flagship competitor,” Elop said.

And to sweeten the deal, Microsoft is bundling a year’s subscription to Office 365 (with one extra mobile client licence) with one of its new devices. You also get 60 landline minutes a month and 1TB of data.

Both new Lumia models are certainly aggressively priced. The Lumia 640 supersedes the popular 625, and augments the 630/635 and 730/735 models. It’s a 5-inch model priced at €139 (3G) and it's €159 for the LTE before taxes and subsidies. There will also be a dual-SIM LTE model. So expect a sub-£150 street price.

A rare sighting of Stephen Elop – speaking from inside a balloon suspended over the show floor at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona 2015

The “640 XL” supersedes the 1320, and is a slim (9mm) 5.7-inch model with a large (3000mAh) battery. The camera is decent for a low/mid-range phone, 13MP with Zeiss optics. The list price is €189 (3G) and €219 (LTE).

There are more details here.

A first glimpse of the new browser, codenamed "Spartan", running on a Windows 10 phone

The Nutella Experience

A little more of mobile Office was shown off – these being Universal apps, they have a strangely bland and generic quality. Universal mobile Office has a desktop-style hamburger menu that looks plain odd on a mobile. But few will care if the functionality advances – Office for Windows Phone has languished for years. Outlook was shown with inline editing of the sent text in a reply, and attaching files from inside a message. Basic stuff, but it had been missing from Windows Phone so far. ®

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