The cheapest Windows Phone available, but does it sacrifice too much?
Updated: We've taken
another look at the Lumia 610, with a new price drop making it much
cheaper - but does it make it better than the still-cheaper Nokia Lumia 710?
The
Nokia Lumia 610 has placed itself squarely at the low end of the
smartphone market, with just 256MB of RAM and a single-core 800MHz
processor.
Alongside the new stripped down Windows Phone Tango
operating system and a new, more wallet-friendly UK price tag of only
around £125 on Pay as you go, or free on contracts starting from just
£13 per month.
This oddly puts it at a higher price than the better-specified Nokia Lumia 710 - we're not sure what's going on here, especially in the UK market.
Although
the Nokia Lumia 610 is broadly competing with every other low spec and
low price handset, its real competition will come from other Windows
Phone Tango handsets, such as the ZTE Tania.
It remains to be seen how they'll fare, since the Nokia Lumia 610 has
beaten them to market, so as a pioneer of the new budget-conscious
operating system, how does the Nokia Lumia 610 stack up? Based
on physical impressions, it isn't likely to stand out in a crowd, with a
plastic body and a dinky 3.7-inch 800 x 480 TFT screen. The sides have a
metallic gleam to them but it's never likely to be mistaken for real
metal, and the illusion is lost altogether once you actually hold the
phone, which feels plastic through and through. It's
not flimsy, though, with a reassuringly sturdy back cover and a
generally solid feel. At 131.5g, it weighs about what you'd expect for a
phone of its size, which is to say that it's light, but given its
relatively small dimensions of 119 x 62 x 12mm, the weight feels about
right. This
all serves to give the Nokia Lumia 610 a feeling of surprisingly high
quality for such a cheap phone. Especially when compared, for example,
to the substantially more expensive Samsung Galaxy S2, which has none of the density or solidity to it that the Nokia Lumia 610 has. Sticking
to the trademark bright and bold colours of the Lumia range, the Nokia
Lumia 610 comes in magenta or cyan, or if you're feeling more
conventional, black or white. The
phone features several hardware buttons, all of which are positioned on
the right-hand side. There's a volume rocker near the top, the power
button in the middle and a dedicated camera button at the bottom. The
layout isn't totally ideal, since - depending on how you're holding the
phone - the camera button can be awkward to reach without using two
hands. And having the power button so close to the volume rocker means
it's easy to press the wrong button.
We can't help but feel that
having the power button opposite the volume rocker and moving the camera
button slightly further up the body of the phone would have worked
better, as it requires some thumb movement to turn the phone on when
held naturally in the hand. In
addition, the Nokia Lumia 610 has soft key buttons just below the
screen for home, back and search. These are intuitive and feature
pictures of each function, making their use obvious even to someone
who's never used the phone before. The
ports, meanwhile, all sit along the top of the phone, with a 3.5mm
headphone socket in the centre, and a micro USB connector on the right.
There's also a wrist strap hole on the top-left, while the microphone
sits alone at the bottom of the phone. There's
no microSD card slot, which is especially disappointing given the
paltry 8GB of internal storage. The battery cover requires a slide down
from the main chassis to remove - something that can be hard for those
used to popping a backplate off. Thankfully,
for most users it's a problem they'll only have to face once, since as
soon as the SIM card is in there's little reason to remove the cover
again. Although it's good to know that if you ever want to replace the
battery, the option is there, even if it is a little fiddly to get at. The
Nokia Lumia 610 sports a respectable 5MP camera, the lens of which lies
flush with the back cover of the phone. This is always cause for
concern, because scratches and smudges can play havoc with photos,
although in our time with the phone, while it's certainly seen its share
of smudges, the lens has thankfully remained scratch-free. Ultimately,
while it's not going to win any design awards, the Nokia Lumia 610 is a
reasonably attractive and well built handset.
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