Update: Just like the Lumia 950, the big Windows 10 Anniversary Update has arrived on the Microsoft Lumia 650. But unlike desktops and laptops, the new software doesn't bring a whole lot of new goodies to Windows 10 Mobile.

In fact, if you go in cold and look for noticeable changes, you probably won't find any. However, there are some useful additions that will make using the Lumia 950 a little better.

Microsoft has added panorama mode to its stock Camera app – a fairly self-explanatory feature. It has also made the lock screen more informative by allowing for more at-a-glance notifications.

Lastly, Action Center has been updated to allow users to set the priority level of specific notifications so that you'll never miss what matters to you.

Unfortunately, the update doesn't patch in the Continuum ability. This phone is still too underpowered to handle that phone-to-PC feature.

Original review follows below.

'Premium' is a word that's bandied about a lot in the smartphone world these days, especially by PRs and marketing types. And manufacturers, eager to justify the increasing prices of their most highly-specced models, are now in something of an arms race to present each new product as the most 'premium'.

Microsoft hasn't always been on the ball when it comes to build quality, however, with the Lumia 950 and XL in particular being derided as feeling 'cheap' in the hand.

The Lumia 650 is the company's attempt to address its shortcomings in this area. The words, 'polished', 'diamond' and 'aluminum' all feature prominently in the ad copy for the handset, promising much.

At £149.99 (US$199, around AU$260) SIM-free it costs roughly twice the price of the Lumia 550, despite having a similar set of specifications – so you're certainly paying a premium for that upgraded finish.

But with firms such as Xiaomi, OnePlus and Huawei turning out all-metal and glass designs at ever-lower price points, is the Lumia 650 'premium' enough to keep up?

Design

Design is the raison d'etre of the Lumia 650. Microsoft claims the device is its slimmest Lumia ever, and with a soft-touch matte plastic rear, 5-inch Gorilla Glass-strengthened screen and aluminium frame, it certainly feels lovely in the hand – to the extent that you can feel it at all.

It weighs a mere 122g, and after months using the brick-like Lumia 930, when I first handled the review unit I was given it felt as though my hand was empty; that sensation soon passed, but the abiding feel in the hand is quite pleasant.

While not quite up to the standards set by higher-end phones with near-perfect fits and finishes (there are a few sharp edges here and there), the Lumia 650 is certainly the nicest Windows Phone I've ever held.

On the top of the device is the 3.5mm headphone jack and a microphone, while the right side of the device is home to the volume rocker and power key. On the bottom of the device is the micro USB port, for charging and connecting the device to a PC.

The back of the device houses the rear-facing 8MP camera, flanked by a single LED flash and a subtle Windows logo.

On the front of the device the 5MP wide-angle front-facing camera is positioned above the 5-inch, 720p screen, with the front-firing speaker (which is really rather decent) at the bottom edge.

Display

The screen really is a looker. In day to day use – reading emails, browsing the web, watching a few YouTube videos – it certainly hits the mark resolution-wise. Although it has a PPI count of 'only' 297, it packs enough pixels to please all but the most ardent of peepers.

More important than the resolution, however, is the rest of the tech powering the screen – for a display is about more than just sharpness, regardless of how beautiful the panels on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge may look.

The Lumia 650 has an OLED screen, which differentiates it from competing phones that still largely employ LCD technology – and the difference is something that can be appreciated even by those without a trained eye.

OLED panels deliver much better contrast and infinite blacks, and have a great deal more 'punch' than all but the best LCD efforts. Moreover, the Lumia 650 also supports the 'Glance' always-on display feature. Lumias have been offering this for years, and the result is as pleasant and useful as ever.

The panel on the 650 also has excellent colour accuracy and nice viewing angles, really helping to bring the live tiles of Windows 10 Mobile to life. This is one area in which Microsoft has clearly taken some care and time to get things right, and it shows.

A lot has been said about Windows 10 Mobile, both good and bad. Having used several devices on the operating system, my experience with it so far has been, well, middling.

On many levels, the changes made to the layout in the upgrade from Windows Phone make a great deal of sense. The settings menu is far easier to navigate than it once was, and the new level of control afforded to the user is very welcome.

Take, for instance, an instance when I received a call from an unknown number. With Truecaller installed I was able to immediately identify the number as from a regular spammer and ignore the call, something I could never have done on the more locked-down Windows Phone.

Windows 10 has, though, experienced ongoing issues with bugs; however I didn't find this was as much of an issue with the Lumia 650 as with other phones.

Other reviewers have commented negatively on their experience with the software, but on the whole I found the OS to be mostly stutter-free, with just a few quirks here and there.

Some simple things still need fixing though. What was formerly 'Music' is now, confusingly, 'Groove Music', and 'Calendar' is now 'Outlook Calendar'. While not wholesale changes, these do interfere with the muscle memory, and can be irritating when you're in a rush.

Other issues, such as Outlook Mail still taking forever and a day to open even the smallest of attachments and many apps still not 'talking' to each other properly, add to the confusion, while an odd issue with the device refusing to stay connected to my home Wi-Fi for any longer than an hour also persisted.

Unfit for business?

Last year Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the Lumia product line was to be trimmed down to three distinct categories. The first contained devices for serious Windows fans (the Lumia 950 and XL), and the second was handsets for budget hounds (the Lumia 550).

The final category was a relatively difficult market to court: devices for business users, who this handset is meant to appeal to. And with a still-unstable operating system, Microsoft has a great deal of work to do to bring those customers on board.

Although the Windows phone app store is far from barren, there's still a paucity of high-quality first-party apps for many clients. Twitter hasn't updated in some time, Instagram is in a seemingly indefinite beta, and the likes of Snapchat are nowhere to be seen.

And that's to say nothing of Google services, which in app form are mostly absent from the Lumia 650. To make matters worse, trying to access many of these services from a mobile browser is often a painfully slow experience.

This hammers home the issue with regard to attracting business buyers. Those reliant on Google services, such as Analytics, Docs, Pages, Forms and so on have no native support for those apps, limiting the 650's usefulness to a significant degree.

Of course, anyone using Microsoft's own robust suite of offerings are well catered for – but then so are users of those apps on iOS and Android, given the Redmond firm's understandably enthusiastic support for other operating systems.

There's a wider problem beyond the simple availability of apps however, and that's the issue of quality and reliability. Many apps on the Store have seen no development since the late days of Windows Phone 7, or the early days of Windows Phone 8.

What this means in daily use is apps that freeze for no reason, crash, won't uninstall, function slowly, won't scale to higher resolution screens and won't interact properly with the baked-in programs.

That isn't to say there has been no progress at all. Apps such as Facebook, Just Eat, the Daily Mail and The Guardian have all updated to Windows 10, mostly using the Project Islandwood app portability bridge from iOS.

While this means the programs aren't built using a unified design language, or with Windows Phone in mind, these second-hand apps from iOS nonetheless represent welcome signs of life in the dusty mausoleum that the Windows Phone Store has become.

Office politics

Part of the appeal of Windows Phone, and now Windows 10 Mobile, has always lain in the promise of easy access to Office applications.

For many people and businesses the likes of Word, Excel and Powerpoint are nigh-on essential. Having access to a powerful productivity suite on the go is a strong selling point, and Microsoft mostly delivers on the promise.

Starting with perhaps the most popular offering, Word, it's clear that a great deal of thought went into the features of this app. Via the ellipses menu at the bottom of the screen, users have easy access to formatting, fonts, word counts, tables, pictures, spellchecker – all the mod cons that make the modern Office suite so useful.

Powerpoint, Excel and OneNote are equally well presented, with the latter featuring a handy 'Note' drop-down in the quick settings area. In all, this is a powerful suite of tools for those who need them.

There is, of course, the issue that all these apps exist on other platforms – platforms on which they're often even more feature-rich, and certainly receive better support from Redmond.

Indeed, some features, such as the focussed Outlook inbox, are still exclusive to the Android and iOS versions, giving even less reason for those on other operating systems to switch to Windows 10 Mobile.

It's difficult to shake the feeling, though that such observations fall on the deaf ears of both Microsoft and many users of its smartphones.

The Lumia 650, for its price bracket, is well specced in almost every category. It features a nice design, a decent camera layout, a nice screen and a front-firing speaker. And yet it lags behind in one rather crucial area: the processor.

While even the cheapest of the Android competition come sporting, at the very least, the likes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, the Lumia 650 boasts the relatively anaemic Snapdragon 212. It comes from the lowest end of Qualcomm's product line, and its shortcomings are painfully obvious in day to day performance.

When you're swiping through the operating system, and opening and closing 'normal' apps (email, messaging etc), the Lumia 650 doesn't miss a beat. Aside from some extended load times and an unusually long app 'hydration' period (waking from sleep), performance is certainly tolerable.

Launch any vaguely demanding application, however, and things change considerably for the worse. Take the Maps application; it's something of a system hog at the best of times, and here loading directions and changing areas takes an age.

Another case in point is Basemark OS II, a popular Windows Phone benchmarking app. On my Lumia 930 the app mostly flew, as it did even on my considerably less powerful Lumia 520.

On the 650, though, the app wouldn't even open, freezing on the permissions startup page, which needless to say made for an inauspicious start.

As for games… well, you can mostly forget about games. Some titles, such as Timberman, run at a reasonable pace, but anything more demanding than Crossy Road is pretty much out of the question.

What makes this all the more surprising is that last year's model actually surpasses the Lumia 650 in this regard. Saddled with a Snapdragon 400 processor, the Lumia 640 (also currently much cheaper than the 650), runs the same application with relative aplomb.

Although that phone lacks the newer model's nicer in hand feel, that this is the case seems rather counterintuitive, against the established smartphone 'laws of nature'.

Using the Lumia 650 will challenge the power user's notion of what a smartphone should be. For those buying their first smartphone, those looking for a solid budget option and for business users attached to the Microsoft ecosystem, it's a reasonably attractive proposition.

Although performance on many games and some apps is inadequate, the overall experience of using the handset is mostly satisfying, aided in no small part by the 1GB of included RAM (until recently a real rarity on budget Windows devices).

After myriad updates, Windows 10 Mobile is starting to take shape – and it shows, mostly in the day-to-day performance of the OS, which is far improved from even just a month ago.

Another welcome addition here is the 16GB of included storage, rather than the 8GB of recent Microsoft handsets, which is expandable by up to 200GB via microSD card card.

Although Windows Phone/10 Mobile handsets have long boasted adoptable storage, enabling users to install apps to the microSD card as well as music, video and photos, this increase in native storage still makes juggling apps without a microSD card just a little easier.

Battery life

Battery life is perhaps the biggest bugbear for the modern smartphone user, and for many it's the first spec they'll check out when researching their next purchase.

I count myself among this group – although I generally live life in close proximity to my charger, as knowing I have the juice to make it through the day means one less thing to worry about.

So when I learned that the Lumia 650 only sports a 2000mAh battery, I was a little apprehensive. As it turns out, I needn't have worried.

Aided by a power-sipping processor, a relatively low-resolution screen and the tight resource management of Windows 10 Mobile, the Lumia 650 was generally able to last me through a solid day of use.

Waking up at 7am, listening to some music via Bluetooth on the commute and reading some articles during lunch, all the while answering emails and sending messages along with around an hour of calls, generally saw the battery drop to around 45% by 6pm, which is perfectly acceptable.

It should be noted that this impressive performance is in part due to the fact that most owners of the Lumia 650 won't be using their handset as a 'smartphone' in the common sense of the term, simply because it lacks the power to indulge in anything resource-intensive – or, for that matter, fun.

Regardless, for the regular user there's certainly enough juice to make it through the day. Moreover, for business and power users, the ability to 'hot-swap' in a freshly charged battery when the going gets tough is a major advantage.

Smartphone cameras are getting better all the time, helped by the availability of cheap high-megapixel BSI sensors from the likes of Sony and OmniVision. Although generally still lacking when it comes to low-light photography, they're generally capable in most situations.

And this is true of the Lumia 650. While not boasting the same megapixel count as cameras on devices such as the Honor 7, Wileyfox Storm or even the Lumia 640 XL, the 8MP rear-facing snapper is still a dependable workhorse in most situations.

Images shot in good light are sharp and colours are well reproduced, and the handset displays an acceptable dynamic range.

One odd quirk is that images have a tendency to be quite dark, although this can be easily remedied courtesy of the well-designed Windows Camera app, a legacy of the former Windows phone-builder Nokia's smartphone camera dominance.

The app offers easy access to settings such as white balance, ISO, shutter speed and manual focus, and exposure compensation is also easily applied.

As ever, the Rich Capture mode is a welcome assistant, and at this price point having such an easy access to usually hidden features is a nice bonus.

The only real weakness of the camera (apart from a lack of resolution) is its low-light performance, which just isn't up to par. For a quick snap in a dimly-lit bar, shared to Instagram, it's certainly sufficient, but you'll be lucky if you get a shot you're proud of.

The lack of a two-stage camera button is also something of a let-down, as there's no more convenient way to launch a camera quickly, while also providing tactile feedback.

For the selfie-lovers out there, the 5MP wide-angle front-facing camera is capable enough. There is some detail in the shots produced, although as you might expect they look quite flat and muted. It's a similar story with video, with footage appearing crisp, if over-sharpened.

The Lumia 650 is something of a strange beast. Despite the odd choice of an underpowered processor, its try-hard design it makes for a nice first impression. But with such strong competition out there, is it enough?

We liked

The screen on the Lumia 650 is really rather good. With great colour accuracy, plenty of punch, good brightness and sufficient resolution it's one of the strongest displays at this price point.

The phone feels great in the hand – it's easily the most comfortable Lumia I've ever used. And despite having a somewhat small battery pack, it has enough juice to make it through a full day of typical use.

The front-firing speaker is decent, turning out a respectable volume, and both cameras are capable enough for the most users, with the camera app offering a good degree of manual control.

We disliked

Windows 10 Mobile, although improving at a reasonable click, is still quite buggy in general, with a number of long-standing issues persisting. The operating system still lags behind when it comes to apps as well, with the lack of high-quality first-party apps in particular a concern.

And while the Snapdragon 212 chipset does its best to power things along, it just isn't enough. Especially for the price point, this is a very slow phone.

Verdict

The 600 series within the Lumia line-up has always been where the best of budget and premium combine to offer something distinctive. From the 620 through to the 640, these have been popular, powerful devices. The Lumia 650 is a different beast.

It's the experience of using this phone that sets it apart. The lovely in-hand feel, the dependable camera, the decent battery life, the surprisingly good speakers and the mostly smooth day-to-day operation are all key to what a good smartphone experience should be.

The poor processor selection is all that holds this device back from real greatness. If Microsoft had followed the competition, and gone with the likes of a Snapdragon 616, 652 or 617, and maybe doubled the RAM, the Lumia 650 would fly.

Despite this, for business owners invested in Microsoft's services, for Windows fans, and for those looking for a respectable upgrade, this phone is well worth a look.

First reviewed: March 2016

Update: The big Windows 10 Anniversary Update has arrived on the Microsoft Lumia 950. But unlike desktops and laptops, the new software doesn't bring a whole lot of new goodies to Windows 10 Mobile.

In fact, if you go in cold and look for noticeable changes, you probably won't find any. However, there are some useful additions that will make using the Lumia 950 a little better.

Microsoft has added panorama mode to its stock Camera app – a fairly self-explanatory feature. It has also made the lock screen more informative by allowing for more at-a-glance notifications.

Lastly, Action Center has been updated to allow users to set the priority level of specific notifications so that you'll never miss what matters to you.

Original review follows below.

Whenever I look at the Microsoft Lumia 950, it scans my eyes, winks at me and unlocks with the words "Hello, Matt" – as if it knows me and wants to flirt. In a way, I feel like I recognize it, too. And, I won't lie, I kind of like it back … just not that much.

It reminds me of my first true smartphone, the Audiovox SMT 5600, a rebranded HTC Typhoon, before HTC even sold phones. It was small, so it looked like an everyday phone and, importantly for me at the time, it ran Windows Mobile 2003 SE.

More than a decade later, that's once again the appeal of the Lumia 950. It looks, feels and runs like your average-sized Android phone. Only the phone's operating system is Windows 10 Mobile, much to the benefit of Microsoft's diehard fans and PC holdouts.

This 5.2-inch phone does try a few interesting tricks so that it's not too basic. Its iris-scanning technology makes for a nifty unlock method and Continuum lets me scale the software to TV proportions for a useful desktop-like mode.

Lumia 950 lays the foundation for Windows 10 Mobile, and it's off to a better start, even if Lumia sales are dismal. I felt like that about the Audiovox SMT 5600, too, before the Redmond company blew it in mobile.

But now it's up against the best phones ever made, like the similarly-sized Samsung Galaxy S6, iPhone 6S, LG G4 and Nexus 5X. Does it really have what it takes to win converts from iOS and Android, or keep Windows Phone 8.1 users from defecting? Clearly, it's not that simple.

Design

The Microsoft Lumia 950 does its best impression of an average Android phone, almost as if it's trying to get you to buy it, take it home and say, "Too late! You're running Windows now." It reminds me a lot of my Nexus 5X in size, color and styling.

It doesn't measure out to be the thinnest or lightest phone of its size, with dimensions of 145 x 73.2 x 8.25mm and a weight of 150g. But it's still a nice fit for one-handed use with a little extra stretch. The boxy design is palm-friendly, and the thicker-than-normal bezel means you'll never accidentally touch the display.

You'll also never mistake this for a "premium" handset, either. The Lumia 950 is enveloped with a one-piece plastic shell that overlaps its Gorilla Glass 3-protected screen.

While the front is in a glossy black, the rear cover comes in matte white or matte black. Gone are the fun, vibrant colors of orange or lime green, as seen from last-generation Windows phones.

Microsoft played it safe with colors, and it did the same with the microSD card slot and removable battery. It has both, while other phone manufacturers (namely Samsung) have axed these key features, much to the chagrin of vocal critics.

The microSD card and battery are easily accessible behind the removable plastic cover, a boon for professional users. Even the expandable storage slot can be accessed without removing the battery (but the same doesn't apply to the the stacked nano SIM card underneath of it).

Powering that 3,000mAh removable battery is a USB-C port on the bottom frame with fast charging capabilities. I still hate carrying around an extra cable, as much as I appreciate the reversible connection. It'll be easier once microUSB is further phased out of devices at the end of 2016.

The top of the Lumia 950 frame has a normal headphone jack, while the right side houses a power button and volume rocker, or more accurately the volume rocker and power button. They're in reverse order from many of today's phones, and that's how Nokia had them.

Sadly, there's no double-tap-to-wake function. In fact, the only way to turn on this phone is to press that tiny power button on the right side.

I was hoping to see a pair of front-facing speakers, but there's one in the back of this phone, right next to the camera. At least the 20-megapixel (MP) camera is flanked by a fancy triple LED flash on its left side, and there's no significant camera bulge, like on the Nexus 5X.

Instead of the speakers I was asking for, I got something else that's long been on my wish list: a dedicated camera button. Truthfully, I've been asking for this for a while, to the point where I have gotten used to – and like – the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 double tap mechanic for launching the camera app, but I'll certainly take this, too.

The words "Microsoft" are above the screen, and there's an on-screen Windows logo acting as the home button on the front. Around back, just off-center is another Windows logo. You'd never know it was a Microsoft phone without these, meaning Microsoft's fitting in just fine with cheap phones made of plastic these days.

Display

Windows 10 Mobile has a dark theme turned on by default, and it really lets the deep blacks and Microsoft's familiar blues shine on this 5.2-inch AMOLED display.

The quad HD resolution at 2,560 x 1,440 doesn't hurt either, packing 564 pixels per inch (ppi) into this 16:9 display. That's sharper than the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus and ties the Galaxy S7, but it doesn't come close to matching Apple and Samsung's brightness levels.

Brightness has become more important for me than resolution ever since we hit 1080p. I'm now more interested in seeing my smartphone in bright sunlight at the beach, not being able to appreciate extra pixels too small to detect with the naked eye. The Lumia 950 does well enough outdoors and has wide enough viewing angles, but it could be brighter at its max.

Whatever the brightness setting, I noticed this phone runs hot when in use for longer than a half hour. It's most evident when scrolling with my fingers using the touchscreen. The slower (and less problematic) Snapdragon 808 chip shouldn't run this hot, like a problematic Snapdragon 810, but maybe this is why the new Microsoft Lumia 950XL uses "liquid cooling."

The Lumia 950 doesn't have liquid cooling, but it does offer a handy glance screen. This shows limited information, like the time, date and simple notification icons, when the phone is asleep.

Like Motorola's slightly more advanced Moto Display, the static text here is in white against the otherwise turned off AMOLED display in black. It's not a battery hog, but this feature can be turned off in settings.

Windows 10 includes a one-handed-use mode, sort of like Apple's Reachability mode. It drops the entire screen down and stays there even when you tap into other menus. You have to tap the Windows home button to revert it or let the screen sit idle for a while.

This helps that 5.2-inch display feel a smidge smaller for critical, one-handed touchscreen tapping on the subway or tube.

Here's where the Lumia 950 is nothing like Android or iOS. It runs Windows 10 Mobile with a slick Live Tiles home screen. There are just not enough apps to fill it up. It's a bit lonely.

There's no question that scrolling up and down the "Start screen" is a smooth experience, giving me a nice overview of the important apps I decided to pin there. It feels very customizable.

Each app tile is able to take on three different sizes, and many of them move within their square borders. The Photos tile is a slideshow of my recent pictures, the Store tile is a gallery of recommended apps in the Windows 10 Mobile Store and the People tile shuffles around the never-ending rows of contacts' heads – like it's trying to solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle.

Front and center are Microsoft's most colorful and recognizable apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. They're here in full, but then again, you no longer need to have a Windows phone in order to access these Android and iOS-compatible Microsoft Office apps. Furthermore, Outlook is here, but it just works better on Apple and Google-powered phones.

The Lumia 950's stylish interface works well with almost everything else about the operating system. Notifications peek in at the very top, there's a dropdown Action Center for quick settings and notifications history and the on-screen volume menu lets me set the ringer-and-notifications volume and media-and-apps volume separately. Apple is now alone in making this confusing.

Microsoft's mobile app problem

That's why it's a shame that many of the Windows 10 Mobile apps aren't better. It doesn't even have a handle on the basics. Facebook is here, but is often slow. Instagram is outdated, with just one size for your snaps (the app updated weeks ago for iOS and Android), and everyone on Tinder is going to wonder why you're MIA. Don't even to bother to look for any Google app, either.

Then there's the problem of having an equivalent app available, but it's from an unknown third party. You could call them knock-offs. Apps like Hipchat and Twitch and available, technically speaking, but are made by a third-party. Should I trust my credentials with a third-party?

Microsoft Maps is almost "Apple Maps bad," with a poor interface that doesn't use half of the screen. Exits on a major downtown Los Angeles highways are dubbed as "Unknown road," as well as hard-to-find points of interest that should be based on my immediate location or search history. Google has a lock on both. The same applies to Cortana when compared to Siri and Google Voice Search, with cumbersome dictation capabilities.

Data really drives Android, and it's going to take time for Microsoft to catch up. In the meantime, its own apps could use retooling. Half of the app menus throw me into the Edge browser when I click too deeply into their settings or my account information, with HTML that isn't ready for mobile. This made signing up for Groove Music and setting up OneDrive a chore.

There are also too many sign up screens when Microsoft's apps need to work more cohesively. Once I log into my Microsoft account the first time, I should be good to go. Instead, I find myself logging into each app again and again. Just as inconvenient: there's no way to download apps that are in Microsoft's Windows 10 Mobile store on a computer, then have them pop up on the phone.

All said, there are helpful nuances to WIndows 10 Mobile. Work Access, Kid's Corner, the guest-limiting Apps Corner and Provisions help break up the operating system and its apps. Find My Phone is a great way to track down a lost device, too, with frequent pings in case it powers off. Apple has this, Google does not.

But the OS has got to have the apps everyone wants in the first place. It's also no help when few people have the same phone as you do. If you're not an experienced techie, it's harder to troubleshoot issues through Google or at the few Microsoft Stores.

Windows Hello iris scanning

The Lumia 950 doesn't have a fingerprint sensor. Instead, a special camera and Windows 10 Mobile allow this phone to use what seems like a completely futuristic iris-scanning sign in option through Windows Hello.

Eye-scanning is both novel and secure, and I wasn't able to fool it by handing off the phone to a friend or pointing it at a dozen sunglasses-free Facebook pictures of myself. The red light in the corner lit up to recognize me, but it knew my trickery and asked me for my PIN instead.

I really want to say "Thankfully, Windows Hello's eye scanner doesn't need my jaw not to be dropped, because that's where it was," but there's a few caveats with the feature. It's not nearly as a fast as a fingerprint sensor, and I had to look at my phone in the exact same orientation as I trained it.

The Nexus 5X Imprint Sensor, iPhone 6S Touch ID sensor and Samsung Galaxy S7 fingerprint sensor all work in a third of the time, or a split second. They just don't have the same wow factor when showing it off to someone else for the first time.

Windows Hello works well on Surface Book, Surface Pro 4 and compatible Windows 10 PCs, where fingerprint sensors aren't growing ubiquitous, but for phones, it's a different story. Like everything about the Lumia 950, it's a great start. In this case, it just needs to be faster.

Digging deeper into the Microsoft Lumia 950, the hardware reminds me of the Nexus 5X even more than the outside shell. It uses the same Snapdragon 808 System-on-a-Chip at its core with an embedded Adreno 418 graphics processor.

This popular, 64-bit Qualcomm hexa-core processor uses a faster 1.82GHz dual-core chip and more energy efficient quad-core 1.44GHz chip. The same combination can also be found in the LG V10, BlackBerry Priv, Moto X Style and LG G4.

The Lumia 950 is in good company, and bests some of the competition with 3GB of RAM instead of 2GB. This provides a higher ceiling for running more apps at once, when and if Windows 10 Mobile gets enough to max out its memory.

The problem is that Microsoft's phone runs hot with normal use. This may not be the chip itself, but the screen and the back of the phone heat up steadily of the course of a half hour. I expect this from the troubled Snapdragon 810 processor, but not the 808 chip.

It's impossible to weigh the Lumia 950 against other phones using the standard GeekBench 3 benchmark app because, well, the operating system doesn't support it. I can tell there's some slowness between menus and apps, but it's also impossible to turn off animations and I can tell there are a lot of underdeveloped apps that are at the root of the problem.

Overall, I glided through the Windows 10 Mobile experience with ease and not too much lag. There's the occasional glitch, but that's something I expected going into this phone. I really appreciated exploring the files, coming from using the iPhone 6S Plus. Microsoft isn't trying to lock down its file system, and that makes this phone stand out for tinkerers.

Call quality

The Lumia 950 can do a lot of neat things: the iris-scanner login screen is a cool party trick, Continuum mode is promising and the Microsoft Edge browser is competent.

Yet it can't quite pull off some fundamentals, like making clear phone calls. I've been experiencing voices that sound as if they were echoing out of a tin can because either the speaker or software is malfunctioning.

The Lumia 950 speakerphone made things worse. I was immediately asked "Are you on the speakerphone now?" by my mother when I sneakily switched. Moms always know, but in this case so did everyone who I called via speakerphone.

If the call quality is a software error, which it sometimes is, this can be handled through a Windows 10 Mobile update. The speaker issue is a different problem altogether. I will say that the people on the other end of standard calls reported no problems hearing me whatsoever, so at least the microphone is spot-on.

As much as Nokia Lumia phones struggled, many of their cameras did not. It's the one feature that Windows Phone 8 holdouts still cling to in comment threads. I had high hopes for the Lumia 950.

It has a rear 20MP PureView camera that takes advantage of a 1/2.4-inch sensor, f/1.9 aperture and optical image stabilization. The 16:9 photos that result also benefit from a triple LED natural flash. There's also a 5MP front-facing camera with a f/2.4 aperture.

These camera specs have all the marking for a spectacular snapper, and for the most part is succeeded in taking wonderful photos during my trip to the Los Angeles Auto Show. It just couldn't always compare to the cameras on the best phones available.

I carried the iPhone 6S Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 5 with me, two top cameras on iOS and Android, for a proper comparison. The brightness of the Lumia 950 photos fell between these two. Apple's camera suffers from darker-than-normal photos, while both the Lumia 950 and Note 5 punch up the colors and reduce shadows nicely without too much saturation.

While the main camera has a two-stage auto focus capture key, it did struggle at times to focus on moving dancers at an LA Auto Show afterparty. The lightning was appropriately odd, which you'd find in a concert venue, and no camera phone could have captured their fast motions well. However, more than a few shots were out-of-focus even when the dancers weren't moving too quickly.

There was another issue of a little less detail in the cars, especially in the grill area, when I took photos of a Nissan being spray painted. You can still see the spray-painted-over Nissan logo in the iPhone 6S Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 5 photos, but this detail is lost in the red-orange paint on the Lumia 950.

With proper brightness, the Lumia 950 turned out fantastic and, with the flash, photos lit up with the right tones, just as Microsoft had wanted. The app, however, doesn't have as much going on as past Lumia phones.

Gone are the three Lumia camera apps, including the lauded Lumia Camera 5.0 app, and in their place in the Microsoft Camera app. It doesn't have features I like, including Series Shot, but it does have a Rich Capture Mode for automatic fans and proper Manual controls hidden that expand out of the shutter button for everyone else. I also liked the zoom-in mechanic, which requires not two fingers to pinch the screen, but one finger up (to zoom in) or down (to zoom out).

The post-processing always took five to eight seconds to pick the best version of a photo after snapping a series of shots, but the results generally turned out to be positive.

There's also a treat at the end, by way of Living Images, Nokia's trail blazed ahead of Apple's "innovative" Live Photos. The short one-second video it records before photos is just the beginning. The Lumia 950 is also capable of shooting 4K video.

Microsoft's stripped-down camera app is clearly in its infancy. There needs to be more modes, including the return of many Nokia Lumia Camera 5.0 favorites. Samsung and LG are leading the way, and I particularly like LG's wide selfie camera.

Hate selfies? Well, it's better than selfie sticks. That's the kind of innovation I'd like to see in Microsoft's budding return to phones.

I'll continue to update this portion of the review with new photos as Microsoft continues to update its bare-bones camera app.

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One of Microsoft's big selling points on the Lumia 950 is you can connect it up with the Microsoft Display Dock and get the new Continuum feature from the Windows 10 platform.

It allows you to put your phone display onto a TV or monitor, so you have a much larger screen to work from. The Microsoft Display Dock connects up with USB-C support so you can just plug in the Lumia 950 and your phone screen will appear up on the big one in front of you.

The Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL are the only phones compatible right now, so it's a big selling point of the phone. Plus you can also sometimes find a free Microsoft Display Dock in some deals when you buy the Lumia 950.

If you can't see that deal at the moment, it'll cost you US$99 (£79.99, AU$149.95) to buy it separately.

The system is easy to set up. I just took it out of the box and plugged it into the back of my monitor and it wasn't much more complicated than that. It's a bit fiddly to plug in with a few wires around, so this isn't really something you'll want to unplug and take with you much.

On the back of the Display Dock are a DisplayPort and a HDMI port, so you have two separate ways to connect it up to the TV or monitor. Then there are two USB 2.0 slots to plug in a mouse and keyboard.

Then on the front is a plug for the USB-C cable, which comes in the box, so you can connect up your phone with ease. The cable is quite long as well meaning you don't have to sit away with your phone for too long.

When you plug it in, it doesn't take long to get Windows 10 Mobile running up on the screen. Apps automatically calibrate to how big your TV or monitor is. Here's how Microsoft Edge looked on my monitor.

On the right hand side you can see the reading list feature within Microsoft Edge and the left shows what the phone menu looks like.

It worked really well, you can even use two fingers on your phone display to navigate your cursor around the page. I'd personally recommend connecting up a mouse to make this easier though.

I spent a lot of my time using Continuum within the Microsoft Word app. I did find there was sometimes quite a lag while using it, even more so than when using it on the Lumia 950 XL. But it was bearable.

This is something I'd hope Microsoft would work out soon though. When Microsoft claims this works like a PC, I want it to be able to keep up with a simple word processing program.

When using the Lumia 950 XL on the Microsoft Word app I did have the phone crash. That didn't happen to me while using the Lumia 950, but it's possible that the same bug may happen eventually if you use the feature a lot.

The real problem with Continuum isn't inherent to the Lumia 950. It's Windows 10 as a whole, and it's that there just aren't enough apps available right now. If you look at the phone display on the left in this screenshot, everything that's shaded out won't work with Continuum.

Even Skype, a Microsoft owned app, doesn't work on the platform. And I just find that frustrating whenever I'm trying to use a variety of apps on Continuum.

I hope that Microsoft begins to encourage developers to get involved with Continuum. It will be great to see this platform fully flourish, but at the moment I find it quite irrelevant unless you're just looking for a way to put Word documents up onto a big screen and work from there.

You can use a variety of media apps, for example watching movies on your TV. But it's something that has been done before, and better, with Chromecast on Android and AirPlay on Apple products.

Instead, this time you actually have to plug a phone in and it isn't any faster at loading than either of the other options.

It also means you lose a lot of your access to your phone.

The likelihood is you'll have to keep it at the other side of the room while you're watching a film, so if you get a notification you have to either get up to see it or annoy the whole room by stopping the film.

There are a lot of kinks within Continuum, but it's a great addition to the Windows 10 Mobile platform. It works well on the Lumia 950, and apart from a little lag on Word I didn't find it was much different to the phones older brother of the Lumia 950 XL.

But for this to become a fully fledged selling point of the phone, we'll need to see more apps from Microsoft. Right now, it just feels like a glorified Microsoft Office projector and that's not enough.

• Read our Windows 10 Mobile review

Windows 10 Mobile is a new operating system, and judging from our battery life tests, it's not exactly polished enough to avoid being an energy hog. It barely lasts a day with normal use.

I was reaching for my USB-C charger before midnight every night in order to keep the Lumia 950 fully juiced. Its 3,000mAh isn't a bad capacity for a smartphone of this size, as many direct competitors have smaller batteries.

Running our standard battery life test at maximum (like we do for all phones), the fully charged battery wore down to 72% during a 90-minute HD video on a loop. It only beat out the Moto X Style in recent tests, which went down to 70%.

The good news is that USB-C charges this phone exceptionally quickly. From 0%, it bounced back to 10% in just four minutes. It's a Microsoft miracle!

It went on to completely restore the battery in 1 hour and 29 minutes. USB-C charging is fast, and faster than some of those competitors' batteries. The Lumia 950 seems to want to be the first to die and the first to spring back to life.

Microsoft is likely to continue to refine the Lumia 950 software, so that it chugs along better throughout the day. It gets hot, and its standby time isn't as refined as Android, which just tweaked its operating system with Doze mode for Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Like I said with the camera, as the company continues to improve its performance with patches, I'll update this portion of the review with fresh analysis.

Are you willing to be a Windows 10 Mobile beta tester? That's really what it feels like carrying around Lumia 950. It's certainly not ready for everyone, but Microsoft's "Insiders" will no doubt flock to this phone or its phablet counterpart, the Lumia 950 XL.

We liked

The Lumia 950 is the first Windows 10 Mobile phone, and that probably fits your style if you're reading this on a PC, Surface Book or Surface Pro 4. The phone revamps the slick Live Tiles interface that I really like, and the iris-scanning is a fun party trick, even if it takes longer to bypass.

Continuum is the most hyped feature of this smartphone, and it's a handy way of working on full-scale spreadsheets and diving into Word documents with just a phone, Display Dock and several cables. It's not going to replace your PC during travel just yet, but it's something that should excite enterprise folks in the future.

We disliked

There's a lot of work to be done here, Microsoft. All of the top apps need to be a part of Windows 10 Mobile. Furthermore, the existing ones, like Instagram, need to get regular updates so that, next to iOS and Android, they're not lagging behind in more ways than one.

The Windows Hello log in is literally eye-catching, but it's too slow compared to a fingerprint sensor. Microsoft Maps isn't ready for road warriors of any sort, and the phone gets too hot. Call quality could be better, as could the battery life and camera, all things that firmware updates may be able to fix – to a degree.

Final verdict

Lumia 950 feels like a public beta test before Microsoft launches the long-rumored "Surface Phone." It's an incomplete picture that doesn't quite deserve the Surface name, as much as I like the operating system underneath and some of its enterprise features.

Of course, this more than enough for Windows Phone 8.1 users to upgrade to the Windows 10 Mobile flagship's debut. Seeing that attractive Live Tiles design on the phone and then, in less than a few seconds, transitioning to the desktop-like mode via Continuum is a dream come true. Phones are finally acting like computers in a way Apple and Google have barely tried.

Continuum needs to be fleshed out, and so does the app count, camera, battery life and phone call quality. Again, there's a lot of work to be done. The Lumia 950 and Windows 10 Mobile feel like the first stepping stones before Microsoft dials it up to, say, Windows 11 Mobile.

Microsoft is set to kill off its Lumia phone line before the end of the year, fueling speculation that we'll soon see the long-rumored Surface Phone.

A Microsoft employee has told Winbeta it will "end sales" of the Lumia range at some point this year.

Winbeta believes the source misspoke, and meant that Microsoft will be ending production of Lumia phones in December 2016 and will then sell through its existing stock in the following months.

That means you may be able to pick up a great deal on a Microsoft Lumia 950 or Lumia 950 XL in the January sales next year.

RIP Lumia

This matches with information we heard last week about the Surface Phone finally launching. Microsoft's Director of Engineering, Laura Butler, tweeted "Surface Phone is not NOT confirmed".

The double negative makes this a little more suspect than an unambiguous confirmation, but unless that was a mistake, it looks like the Surface Phone will be launching at some point in the next few months.

Winbeta also suggests the phone will be ready for an October launch, but the exact timing is currently unclear.

We haven't seen many leaks on the Surface Phone recently, however, which means an October release is a little less likely than we'd hoped for – we won't have to wait much longer to find out.

• Microsoft's alleged plans for the Surface Phone are hugely ambitious

Via Pocket-Lint

There's a rumor going around that Microsoft is going to drop the Lumia brand from its portfolio. So what?

The rumor came from a line in the press release from the Redmond firm, which announced that Microsoft was selling its feature phone business to FIH Mobile and HMD Global – essentially cutting off a big part from the deal it struck with Nokia in 2013.

• Nokia's coming back to the smartphone game

The line goes as follows: "Microsoft will continue to develop Windows 10 Mobile and support Lumia phones such as the Lumia 650, Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, and phones from OEM partners like Acer, Alcatel, HP, Trinity and VAIO. "

OK – you can read that how you want. On the one hand, it's a triumphant battle cry from Microsoft, pointing out that it doesn't matter its exiting a declining featurephone market as it'll still be right behind the smartphone platform, and that's the reason it purchased Nokia anyway.

We've not heard anything from Microsoft in the past year that suggests otherwise either, despite the terrible decline in sales of its Lumia smartphones year on year, even with new flagship models appearing.

Or you could read the word 'supporting' as meaning 'we'll look after the phones, but that's your lot'. No more Lumia phones.

Well, that kind of makes sense anyway. The heavily-rumored Surface Phone is in the offing, a high-spec device that Microsoft will concentrate its marketing efforts on in an attempt to replicate the success of the Surface tablet range that's turned into a billion-dollar line.

Dropping Lumia would be like LG getting rid of the word Optimus from its range of handsets, or even Samsung dropping Galaxy – it makes no difference to what's underneath. A Surface Phone could be called the Lumia 960 Pro and have the same specs – but it would be easier to market.

If 'buying a Lumia' had the same cachet as 'buying an iPhone' then things would be difference – if the iPhone 7 suddenly became the iPad Pro Pocket (OK, I'll never get a job in Apple's marketing department) then we'd have a real clue about what was coming.

But Microsoft, if it does drop the Lumia line, should be commended for its bravery and agility – it's not giving up on Windows 10 Mobile despite its faltering performance, and pivoting the name to improve its chances is a great thing.

If anything, it would probably be a brilliant move for Microsoft to drop the Lumia line, as it links it with Nokia too heavily. The Nokia Lumia 520 was one of the best-selling phones for the brand, and while it didn't hit the same heady heights, the Lumia 530 / 535 was also a success, coming too under the Nokia branding before it disappeared on the Lumia 550.

So with that in mind Microsoft doesn't want to be associated with an old project if it's trying to create a new marketing image for its high end phones, and Surface phone tells a stronger message than something named Lumia.

That said, there's still a market for the Lumia names on phones, if only just to differentiate between the high- and low-end handsets in Microsoft's portfolio – there's still a strong market for cheaper smartphones and Lumia is a better-known brand name than Surface in some regions thanks to the past performance of the 500-series phones.

So the question of whether or not Microsoft is dropping Lumia is moot – it just needs to do whatever it can to make Windows 10 Mobile a success.

• Can Microsoft make a return to the best phones list?

Lumia flagships are a rare breed, not just in terms of new models, but on the street as well. Almost four years have passed since the Lumia 900 line began, and a lot has happened in that time – not least the evaporation of Windows Phone's already paltry market share.

The Nokia Lumia 930, nominally the last flagship-class device in the WIndows Phone era, was released back in mid 2014, but the world has moved on.

Now, a QHD screen and a powerful 64-bit processor is the bare minimum that an elite-tier handset needs in order to compete. And with quality imaging also becoming the norm rather than the exception, there's little room for compromise at the top.

Against this, everything that once made the Lumia brand special no longer has such lustre. Optical imaging stabilisation is one such example – the thing that Nokia once did best is now commonplace.

Dreams of making smartphones for everyone and seeing Windows 10 Mobile conquer the world with coloured tiles have been replaced with a more modest ambition: making devices to reward fans who stuck with the OS through the lean times.

Enter the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, alongside the Lumia 950.

The Lumia 950 XL is, as the name suggests, the larger device of the two, and it boasts some hefty specifications too, meaning that on paper it looks to be a smartphone geek's dream.

But with the Android and iOS competition now so incredibly strong, is it really enough to restore consumer confidence in Microsoft's mobile vision?

Design

Over its years as a smartphone maker Nokia built up a considerable design pedigree, and the Lumia line was no exception. With the handsets defined by the use of colourful matte polycarbonate, even a punter on the street could recognise the likes of a Lumia 920 at a distance.

Things have changed under the bean counters at Microsoft, and at first glance the Lumia 950 XL is almost totally unremarkable, at least from the front. The 5.7-inch AMOLED display, covered with a sheet of Gorilla Glass 4, takes up most of the faceplate, with only a small, minimalist 'Microsoft' logo adorning the top.

The rear of the handset also tends towards a corporate look and feel. A vast expanse of featureless black matte polycarbonate houses just two notable landmarks – a large, silver-ringed camera 'oreo', and a small Windows logo.

The power button and volume keys are on the right side, as you'd expect, but their layout is odd and confusing. Whereas the power button normally stands alone, on the Lumia 950 XL it's flanked by separate volume up and volume down keys.

This may sound like a minor detail, but as someone who's used Lumias on a daily basis for years I found the new button layout jarring throughout my review period. Moreover the buttons themselves, while nicely clicky, are quite sharp, making them feel unfinished.

On the same side you'll also find the two-stage camera shutter button, always a nice inclusion.

Thankfully, one trend that began a while back – the abandoning of removable backs – has been reversed here. The rear of the Lumia 950 XL is user-removable and replaceable, giving access to the microSD card slot and to the removable battery.

As the 950 XL is a phablet, using it in one hand was always going to be something of a challenge, but thanks to the weighting of the device it's not as bad as I feared it might be. Even at 8.1mm thick and 165g, and with my spindly little mitts, using the handset was never uncomfortable.

Overall, the design of the Lumia 950 XL is unremarkable. In a budget smartphone, I'd list that as a positive, especially given some of the weird-looking units that are occasionally trundled out; but in a 2015 flagship device that costs the best part of an iPhone, it's a different story.

When you're spending the sort of money on a handset that could buy you a week's holiday for two, the experience has to reflect that, and that experience starts when you first pick up the device.

Buy an iPhone 6S and the jewel-like feel is an instant reward, and the same goes for the Samsung Galaxy S6 or even the Google Nexus 6P. These devices are distinguishable and special, whereas the Lumia 950 XL is unfortunately reminiscent of its less-upmarket brother, the 640 XL.

Earlier Lumia devices gave the user a sense of identity in the hand, something unique, and that has been lost. Whether the diehard Windows faithful will care has yet to be seen, but other potential purchasers are unlikely to be blown away.

The genesis of a new operating system that prioritises a unique and cohesive design should be honoured in the hardware carrying it, such as with the Dell XPS 13, and in this respect Microsoft has failed with the Lumia 950 XL.

Display

The screen is another story altogether, and clear signs of Nokia's display heritage can be found in the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL. Outdoor visibility is pretty good, although it would be nice if the screen could become just a tad brighter. The 2K resolution of the 5.7-inch panel equates to a 518ppi, making text lovely and crisp, and enabling the Windows Live Tiles to really stand out.

As might be expected with an AMOLED screen, contrast is excellent. Colours have a very nice 'pop' to them, while blacks are pleasingly deep. Viewing angles are great, with no drop-off in either brightness or colour from any angle.

Somewhat unusually for an AMOLED display, the colour accuracy is also very good. Microsoft claims to have calibrated the panel exactly, and to my eyes I could find nothing wrong, although you have the option to change the white balance in the settings menu.

The device also supports a popular and somewhat mislaid feature in 'Glance', which enables the display of information when the phone is asleep. Double-tap to wake has been discarded, however.

A lot has been said about Microsoft's mobile journey. The firm arrived on the scene in 2000 with Windows Mobile, and rebooted with Windows Phone 7 in 2010 and later again with Windows Phone 8; each attempt failed to capture the attention of mainstream users. Windows 10 Mobile is something different altogether though.

The real story behind Windows 10 is the change in focus, a recalibration of Redmond's mobile strategy. In the past we saw the typical Microsoft bravado, bolstered by years at the top of the heap, culminating in rather brash efforts that failed to make a lasting impression.

Windows 10 Mobile is an acceptance of the current reality of the wider smartphone landscape, and of Microsoft's place in it. Microsoft has reinvented its software once more to meet the needs of a different user base, one that values customisation over almost all else and that doesn't care a great deal about looks.

As such, there is plenty of wholesome geekery on offer. Perhaps the best example of this is Windows 'Hello', the iris-recognition technology built into the device.

Theoretically this enables the user to unlock the phone with their eye, but in practice I found that it failed more often than not, no doubt because I wear glasses.

Microsoft has been careful to label the feature as a beta, with shortcomings to be addressed via software updates, and I found that when someone who doesn't wear glasses used the feature the accuracy was much improved.

While iris scanning isn't perhaps as immediately convenient as a fingerprint scanner, it's nonetheless an imaginative inclusion.

As for the wider feel of Windows 10 Mobile, imaginative isn't the first word that springs to mind. When I first used Windows Phone it was on version 7.5, and compared to Android and iOS I generally felt that it had a bold style and cohesion, even in the third-party applications the other systems often lacked.

Windows 8 cemented this, and to this point I don't believe any operating system looks better on an AMOLED screen. With Windows 10 Mobile, however, Microsoft has abandoned this sense of style in favour of feature creep.

This makes for some odd choices. The circles in the revamped People hub are a little grating, while the renamed 'Microsoft Edge' (replacing the inbuilt Internet Explorer) takes a little getting used to. Removing the native Music app for 'Groove Music' is also a little confusing, especially for those unacquainted with Microsoft's new streaming service.

For every downside there is an upside however. Double-tapping the softkey bar causes the display to sleep, while the phone app has a built-in option for voice recording, a godsend for those doing interviews.

There's even a slider for adjusting the transparency of the Live Tiles, which is a nice touch. In short, even more than Cyanogen OS, Windows 10 Mobile has the potential to be something of a tinkerer's paradise.

The story as a whole is of a shift from design over usability to function over form. The experience is still somewhat suspect, though. I suffered regular stutters when using the Start button, frozen screens at random intervals, apps randomly crashing and occasional issues with voice calls, among other things.

Given that Windows Phone as it currently stands is completely rock-solid, the fact that Windows 10 Mobile is such a mish-mash is a little surprising.

Microsoft will in no doubt improve the experience over the next few months, and those with prior experience of using a device with beta software will understand the risks involved; for the average punter, however, it could well be a no-no, at least for the moment.

USB-C

In the last few years microUSB as a standard has become pretty much ubiquitous on smartphones, with almost every device (so long as it doesn't bear the Apple logo) using such a port for charging and data transfer. The times, however, are a-changing.

USB-C offers a couple of advantages over microUSB, enabling faster charging and, by incorporating a reversible connector design, eliminating the problem of trying to plug the cable in the wrong way up.

This is all well and good, but there's just one problem: good luck trying to find someone who has a spare USB-C cable handy.

With only a few flagship phones currently using the standard, we're not throwing away our microUSB cables just yet. I've been through around four phones in the last five years or so, and I've accumulated roughly enough microUSB cables to circle the Earth twice.

This means that charging most devices isn't an issue, and neither are lost or damaged cables. Working with USB-C is another matter altogether.

Moreover, with the Lumia line, the 'wrong way up' problem was solved with the addition of a textured pattern on the charging cables supplied by Nokia – that one small indent made a big difference.

On the Lumia 950 XL I found the USB-C port more of an irritant than anything else, and if the point of the change from microUSB is convenience, then I'm missing something. I had to remember to take a USB-C cable with me for data transfer and charging in different rooms, something which was a definite nuisance.

This could prove to be a real pain when travelling as well – you can pick up a generic microUSB charger simply and cheaply just about anywhere, and that's far from the case with USB-C at the moment.

Although devices such as the OnePlus 2, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P and LG G5 have adopted the standard, it's not being taken up beyond by everyone with the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge sticking with microUSB.

One Great Continuum

Despite the ever increasing power of smartphones giving developers more and more options for expansion and improvement, not much has actually changed in the last few years. Case in point with the iPhone, which despite various iterations since its original release is still functionally the same device.

With the Windows 10 unified code base and variable design language, Microsoft is hoping to position Continuum as a halfway point between the mobile phone and the desktop, as a device that can revolutionise computing as a whole.

At the moment however, Continuum is limited to dedicated Windows apps, of which there are only a few, meaning the feature is effectively a mirror of Windows RT, enabling a little extra functionality when plugged into a bigger screen.

If the story of Windows 10 is one of potential however, then Continuum is easily the feature that has the greatest chance to become something great; however only time will tell what will become of Microsoft's admirable effort.

• Read our Windows 10 Mobile review

If there was one advantage in waiting so long before bringing out the next elite Lumias, it was that Microsoft had the chance to thoroughly analyse hardware trends before jumping in. As such, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL comes well equipped, both by the standards set for 2015 and for the future.

Powering the device is the controversial Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, an octa-core 64-bit chip clocked at 2.0GHz, and backed up with 3GB of RAM. Much has been written about the Snapdragon 810, and the various '-gates' it's caused, in the past year.

Microsoft has worked hard to counter reported overheating and other issues. The chip is a newer version from Qualcomm, lacking some of the problems of its predecessor, but perhaps more importantly, the Lumia 950 XL has liquid cooling. That's right: liquid cooling.

The geek cred of such a feature notwithstanding, in general use I still found that the device could become quite warm, especially when attempting to do several things at once, or when experiencing one of Windows 10 Mobile's frequent bug episodes.

This also raises concerns regarding the longevity of the device. There's no doubt that Microsoft will continue to optimise both the OS and the chip so they can run with some increased degree of harmony, but whether the phone might melt internally beforehand is another question altogether.

Despite this, whether gaming or running multiple apps at once, I experienced no slowdowns. Really, there's nothing in the Windows Phone app ecosystem that can really challenge the likes of the 810, especially given that the previous most powerful chip in widespread use was 2013's Snapdragon 800, in the likes of the Lumia 1520 and 930.

The app problem on Windows 10 Mobile is the same as it was on Windows Phone – that's to say, pretty bad. Geekbench 3 was not available for use, and so Basemark OS 2 was used. For comparison, I also ran the benchmark app on both the Nokia Lumia 930 and the Microsoft Lumia 950.

All results ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. Windows Phone has many great third-party solutions to many aspects of the app gap, but a proper, current benchmarking app has yet to arise.

Overall the results were a little odd, with the Lumia 930 achieving an overall score of 1001, the 950 managing 1295 and the XL managing only a paltry 890. This doesn't show the whole story however, with the graphics section being quite telling.

Here the 930 managed 1212, the 950 came to 1436 and the XL bounding ahead to 2014. In the System and Web sections, the XL achieved a considerable lead also. However, this was only due to a odd problem with the memory segment, seemingly due to the device attempting to write to microSD rather than the faster flash system memory.

With regards to memory management, Windows 10 Mobile takes a cue from iOS. Instead of truly running in the background, apps are paused, with only certain trusted sources able to break this lock.

This means that multi-taskers might be slightly frustrated, but it makes for swift transitions between apps, as well as meaning that wayward processes have less of a chance to malfunction and consume battery. The device can handle around eight open apps at once before beginning to close processes.

In everyday use I found the Lumia 950 XL to be a strong performer. When swiping through the OS, and opening and closing apps, everything worked as it should. However, as is something of a trademark with Windows Phone, there wasn't much separating it from my Lumia 930 in terms of performance.

The spec sheet of the XL may be an indication of where things are heading, but for the moment it might be slight overkill.

But with the in-built 32GB of storage, along with the potential to at least triple that via a microSD card, even the most demanding of power users ought to be satisfied.

2015 was a great year for smartphone shooters, at least for Android. The likes of the Samsung Galaxy S6, LG G4 and the Nexus 6P stretched what the public now expects from their mobile shoots.

And with both Nokia and Microsoft having thrown millions in marketing dollars at the general public to promote the benefits of Windows Phone, one thing has stuck: a reputation for excellent mobile imaging.

Especially given Nokia's PureView branding, and the likes of the crazy Pureview 808 and Lumia 1020, the perception of the Finnish firm's competence in this field has been sown in the public consciousness. As such, the Lumia 950 XL carries the burden of expectation.

With a 20MP BSI sensor, Carl Zeiss optics, optical image stabilisation and a triple-LED RGB flash, along with 'Rich Capture' technology, the potential is certainly there for excellence.

And sure enough the Lumia 950 XL proves to have one of the strongest mobile camera sensors of the year. In good lighting, detail is crisp, the white balance is almost always on point and colours are appealingly warm without appearing too saturated.

Even in very dimly lit situations the camera was able to pull in a fair amount of light without ruining the white balance, which is no mean feat.

The real star of the show here is the Rich Capture mode, which acts as a sort of smart editing assistant. When you view an image in the gallery, the unaltered image is displayed and then an edited version; depending on the image an extra image may be overlaid for more detail, or an HDR effect may be implemented, among other things.

You can then choose to alter the strength of this effect, for example by controlling the amount of flash present by balancing a flash-lit shot with unlit shot (a really neat party trick for nights out).

Generally the image processing is quite mature, leaving images with a very natural look. That is to say the software doesn't fiddle around with shots too much, an acknowledgement that giving the user more control isn't always such a bad idea.

The extra processing power of the 950 XL over the Lumia 950 also helps in this regard – processing images on the larger phone is a speedy and efficient affair.

This ethos of allowing more user control can also be seen in the camera app, once titled Lumia Camera and now the stock Windows 10 Mobile camera application. It's a masterpiece of design.

Launching in roughly a second when triggered via the two-stage shutter button, you're initially presented with a very simple view. On the right side are the shutter and video buttons, and in the top-right corner sits the shortcut to the settings menu.

The top of the interface houses the camera switch, the flash toggle and the Rich Capture toggle, and in the left corner sits the gallery shortcut. It's a clean interface that doesn't overwhelm.

By 'pulling' the shutter button from the side however, or by pressing the arrow on the top bar, it becomes possible to alter the white balance, ISO, shutter speed and exposure compensation, and switch to manual focusing. It's a photographer's dream, and a pleasure to use.

The Lumia 950 XL is also capable of shooting 4K footage, which I found to be crisp and well presented, and with excellent audio capture due to the four-way mic system.

As for the 5MP selfie camera, as such things go it's a competent performer. It's by no means the best in its class, but it is leagues ahead of the likes of the unit on the Lumia 930.

In all, the Lumia tradition of great imaging performance is alive and well in the 950 XL, Microsoft has succeeded once again in crafting a fantastic package.

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Music

The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL doesn't fare well in the speaker department. Although the driver is able to reach an acceptable volume it can become quite tinny at higher volumes, and it lacks the bass levels of the likes of the HTC One M9.

Despite this, the device is a decent music player. The Groove Music application is well laid out, and organises locally stored tracks in a logical and well-presented manner.

If you have a OneDrive account you can also store tracks online to be streamed later, which is always a nice option, especially for playback across multiple devices.

With an inbuilt equaliser and virtual surround sound, the Lumia 950 XL is also a decent option for audio-hounds, offering fine control over high and low notes alike, and offering presets for various genres.

Movies

With its 2K AMOLED 5.7-inch screen the Lumia 950 XL is made for consuming video content, and it proved to be a treat in this regard. The bright, punchy and accurate colours meant that I enjoyed my Netflix binges with a lot more 'pop' than might normally be the case.

With Windows 10 Mobile, video content is no longer organised into the video Hub that was present on Windows Phone, and is instead accessed through the Films and TV app.

This provides access to the Microsoft store, where various titles can be rented or bought. Locally stored files can also be found here.

In general use, I found only one consistent flaw in the video experience. Typically, when using .MP4 files, the audio would not work in the native app, due to a lack of codec support.

Downloading VLC from the app store solved this problem, but it's a significant problem given the wide popularity of the video format.

Gaming

More than almost anything else, a great deal has been made about the lack of quality games in the Windows Phone Store. While this isn't strictly true, there is a definite paucity of offerings.

When it comes to running the games that are available, the Lumia 950 XL is a strong performer, although as mentioned it did tend to get warm during extended periods of use.

Titles such as Halo: Spartan Strike, Mirror's Edge, Sparkle 2 and Asphalt 8 ran without a hitch and looked beautiful while doing so, even if occasionally lacking a few of the bells and whistles of their Android variations.

Microsoft is pushing the fact Windows 10 works across all platforms including PC, consoles and mobile. But one of the ways it really comes into its own on mobile is through Continuum.

The idea here is you use the feature to make your phone as powerful as a computer. If you have a Microsoft Display Dock it means you can connect your phone up to a TV or computer monitor and work from the biggest screens in your home or work.

It gives you a large screen version of your phones display so you can use a variety of Windows 10 apps but be able to keep everything on your phone and not have to worry about transferring files for when you're on the move.

You can buy the Microsoft Display Dock for US$99 (£79.99, AU$149.95). Some deals throw the dock in for free with the Lumia 950 XL, but those aren't always available so you may have to spend a little extra to get it.

The Display Dock and Continuum is simple to set up. The box looks good sitting on the side of your desk but is quite heavy so you probably don't want to take this around with you wherever you go. It's certainly something you just leave connected up to your TV or monitor.

On the back are connectors for both DisplayPort and HDMI to get it connected to a screen in your home, and then you can also plug in a keyboard and mouse with the two USB 2.0 slots there as well.

Then on the front with a USB-C port to connect the Lumia 950 XL up. You can then begin throwing what you see on your phone onto the screen and also charge up your phone at the same time.

It's simple to just plug your phone in and set up. Then from there it doesn't take long to get it all running Windows 10 Mobile on the big screen.

Apps blow up to the size of the screen you're using. Here's how Microsoft Edge looked for me while using the Lumia 950 XL. You can see the full web page, with the reading list feature from Edge on the right hand side. Then on the left is the phone display.

However you have your Lumia 950 XL set up, it will look exactly the same here. It lets you open up all compatible apps, and if something isn't able to be used on Continuum it'll have a shadow over it.

The problem is what you can actually achieve with Continuum right now. It's simple to write on Microsoft Word and use a spreadsheet within Excel, which is a great feature for those business minded consumers who want everything ready to go on a portable device.

But the rest of the apps on the system are still limited. Not even Microsoft's own Skype app is available yet.

While using Microsoft Word, I did find there was a slight lag where the phone was struggling to keep up with what I was typing on my phone. But all in all, it was a pleasant experience.

As the feature expands to other phones away from the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL we will likely see more apps and features brought into Continuum – but it's difficult to recommend Display Dock unless you think you'll be using those key Microsoft programs a lot.

You can watch movies through Continuum so if your phone is stocked full of video clips you can just put them up on a main TV. But setting up a Display Dock in your living room will likely mean putting it on the other side of the room next to your TV, and you don't always want your phone to be out of action like it is there.

Sometimes when watching a film you want to have a fiddle around on your phone as well, like you can with Google Chromecast. If you get a phone call you'll be able to pick it up while using Continuum, but it's tethered into the dock so you'll likely have to get up off the sofa to do so.

And I didn't find Continuum to be all that reliable either. While I was using the feature I was mid-way through writing an part of my Windows 10 Mobile review and Word crashed on me. In fact, everything crashed and meant I had to wait for the phone to sort its stuff out.

Luckily Word saves in real time so I didn't lose anything, but it's still not the most strenuous program so you'd hope that the Lumia 950 XL and Display Dock wouldn't struggle with this key feature.

If you're in the middle of some important last minute changes to a business document, you wouldn't want to lose that just because your phone isn't capable of doing it.

If you won't be using a keyboard and mouse you can use double fingers on the phone screen to move around the screen and open up individual apps. I found this to be reactive and work really well, but it's not going to be an accurate way to get around your phone.

The truth is, Continuum doesn't make your phone a PC. It helps the phone to be a little more likes a PC by being able to run some key apps on a big screen. Right now there aren't any games to play and the lack of apps really restricts what is possible.

If you're looking for a portable word processor or spreadsheet creator this is a good way to do it.

If Microsoft had offered up some of the best games that I could put up on my TV it'd be a different experience, but right now I'm not in the market for such a limited productivity device. And whether you want one comes down to that.

• Read our Windows 10 Mobile review

Typically phablets enjoy battery life than their smaller cousins, thanks to the bigger power packs manufacturers are able to squeeze in their larger bodies.

Unfortunately, that trend is not evident in the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, which I generally found to be quite unpredictable in terms of battery life.

Throughout an average day of use – starting at around 8am, listening to some music, browsing the internet for around an hour or so, watching a show on BBC iPlayer and streaming via Spotify for a while – I generally found that I had around 30% of the battery left by the end of the day.

Typically this would change if I encountered a bug that required a hard reset, or when the device would occasionally randomly heat up before cooling down. Though the 3340mAh battery is substantial, it nonetheless isn't quite enough to keep the Lumia 950 XL going from one day into the next.

One other issue I encountered was standby time. To put this in context, upon receiving this unit for review I retired my 930 for a while, leaving it on a table with 70% charge. Four days of pulling notifications later, it was still going, with around 20% of battery left.

Over one night, by contrast, I found the Lumia 950 XL had lost around 30% of its battery. This is due to the difference in efficiency between Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile, and is something that will no doubt be addressed in the coming months, but it's still something of a disappointment.

A battery saving mode is available, which is configurable by the user and which can help to eke out a little extra juice when required. And at least there's the option to hot-swap in a fully charged battery, which is especially useful if you're travelling.

Google Nexus 6P

Google took the world aback earlier this year by partnering with lesser-known Chinese manufacturer Huawei to deliver the latest iteration of the larger device in its Nexus lineup.

Mountain View's confidence in its new partner proved to be well-founded, with the resulting effort now making many 'smartphone of the year' lists.

Compared to the Lumia 950 XL, the Nexus 6P has a better battery life, more apps and a nicer design. The XL sports a better camera, better options for productivity and, crucially for some, expandable storage where the 6P has none.

In the toss-up between the two, the 6P is the better option for most prospective purchasers, especially given the fact that it comes in cheaper.

• Read our Nexus 6P review

Samsung Galaxy Note 5

The Note line is typically Samsung's most feature-packed, and 2015 is no exception. With the release of the Note 5, the Korean firm has sought to prove that it can compete in any form factor and still take the top spot.

Between the Note 5 and the 950 XL, the former certainly has the brighter screen, as well as better overall build quality. The more powerful processor in the Note 5 also makes for snappier performance, while the famous S Pen will be a significant draw for some.

Yet, offering only average battery life and a famously unremarkable interface in TouchWiz, the Note 5 isn't quite perfect. The Lumia 950 XL has just as good a camera, offers expandable storage and a removable battery, and is cheaper.

• Read our Samsung Galaxy Note 5 review

iPhone 6S Plus

The largest iPhone form factor appeared last year, and has claimed a high-profile position in Apple's release schedule. Essentially just a bigger version of the 'normal' iPhone, it has nonetheless carved out an identity of its own.

Compared to the 950 XL, the iPhone has a much better ecosystem of apps, better build quality and a faster processor. It also benefits from the inclusion of 3D Touch – essentially a right-click option for smartphones that enables a greater degree of interactivity.

However, with a high price and no options for expandable storage, the story isn't entirely positive, and there are also currently few apps that really take advantage of the extra screen space offered by the form factor. This makes the Lumia 950 XL arguably the better choice for the productivity-focused, and the iPhone better for, well, most other people.

The Lumia 950 XL is certainly a strong effort on Microsoft's part, but does it really do enough to compete with the rest of the 2015 flagship lineup?

We liked

Firstly, it has to be said that the Lumia 950 XL has a great camera. In almost every situation it coped admirably, nearly always turning in great shots, and a few particularly stunning examples.

In terms of general performance, the XL is also a champ. No matter what I threw at the device, it was able to handle every app and game with aplomb. With an lovely 2K screen, watching videos and reading for extensive periods was a treat, and the ClearBlack coating really works well to improve visibility in bright sunlight.

As ever, the Live Tiles of the Windows 10 Mobile operating system are a real draw, presenting glanceable information in an attractive way, and offering something different in what is increasingly becoming a sea of copycat and me-too devices.

With expandable storage I was never in danger of running out of space, even when I exceeded the 32GB built-in limit.

We disliked

As has been the case for years, recommending Microsoft's mobile OS to anyone comes with a massive caveat: the app gap. Though some strides have been made, many top apps have yet to make their way to Windows 10 Mobile.

What's more, the apps that are currently available tend to be rather poor, and are only infrequently updated; Instagram is a prime example, being still in beta after several years.

Battery life is also something of a let-down. Given the size of the unit, and the general efficiency of Windows Phone in this area, I had great hopes for the endurance of the 950 XL. Unfortunately battery performance was only ever middling at best.

To top things off, the very, very plain design is a let-down set alongside the design pedigree of the line as a whole. Past Lumias defined what was capable with polycarbonate, with interesting, insistent lines and an almost iconic look. By comparison the 950 XL is drab, and more likely to be seen in the pocket of a used-car salesman than a trend-setter.

Final verdict

It's fair to say that I'm something of an apologist for Windows Phone, having flown the flag for the operating system even when things hit rock bottom. And yet, for all the waiting, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL doesn't feel like it's making the most of the potential offered by Windows 10 Mobile.

The hardware definitely has its highs and lows. Build quality isn't the best around, but handling is great. All of the lovely pixels on the AMOLED screen, along with the exceptional colour accuracy, make it one of the best around, but the speakers are a bit of a let-down.

Only the camera proves to be a real stand-out feature – alhough many of the former staff of the PureView team went over to Apple, clearly enough stayed around to make a difference. As someone who values the camera over almost everything else on a smartphone, for me the 950 XL was a real gem of a performer.

And yet, that app gap will likely be a problem for many users, while the buggy nature of Windows 10 Mobile is likely to test the patience of even the most dedicated Windows fans.

The real question is: after at least 18 months out of the game, has Microsoft done enough to earn a place at the top division once more? And the answer is yes, but with an enormous proviso.

As a device, the Lumia 950 XL, along with its slighter sibling, has been carved out as a tool for the purist. And to that end Microsoft has delivered, and has shown a promise that will likely be glorious when fully delivered on.

For those not sold on the Lumia dream, however, it's a much harder sell. The stark truth is that, for most people, there are better phones out there, especially the likes of the Nexus 6P.

For the faithful, this will likely be enough to keep them going while rumours of the 'Surface Phone' fly around, and perhaps of a replacement for the Lumia 1020.

First reviewed: December 2016

Update: Lumia 550 is on sale now thanks to early Black Friday deals, a discount from its original launch price. Here's how it performed in our review.

Microsoft Lumia 550 is the budget-friendly Windows 10 Mobile phone that doesn't suffer from high expectations, and that's a good and bad thing.

That contrasts with the Lumia 950 and 950 XL – the first flagship smartphones with the Microsoft's new operating system – bearing the weight of expectation.

Unfortunately, despite significant efforts on the part of Microsoft, their arrival was heralded by persistent software bugs and lukewarm reviews.

Things have gone rather more smoothly, however, for the Lumia 550, the budget entry in the Windows 10 Mobile lineup.

While some retailers even chose to postpone the release of the 950 and 950 XL, mainly due to the aforementioned software problems, the 550 has sailed onto the market virtually unannounced.

And at £99.99 (US $139.00, AU$199.00) direct from Microsoft and as low as $109 in the US from B&H Photo, the phone has a price to set it apart from the likes of the dominant Moto G, competing directly with the likes of the Moto E, which can be found for a similar price.

Is this alone enough to see the 550 succeed? And can it garner some desperately-needed positive press for the Lumia camp?

Design

Over the years Microsoft has gained something of a reputation for products that scream 'productivity'. And any mention of productivity, in turn, tends to suggest phones that aren't likely to set pulses racing when it comes to design.

Sure enough, with its preponderance of straight lines and matte plastic, the Lumia 550 is likely to be greeted by phone fans who place a premium on style with an audible "meh".

There's a distinct lack of original features on the handset. Aside from the different camera modules on the back there's almost nothing to distinguish the Lumia 550 from its more expensive siblings, asides from the apparently superior build of course.

The Lumia 550 has a more solid overall feel in the hand, and the few flaws that are present are made tolerable by the price. And there may be a rather simple explanation for this.

While the Lumia 950 and 950 XL are made for the most ardent of Windows Phone fans, the Lumia 550 is made for a different market altogether: IT managers. These are devices made to be bought in bulk by those looking for lots of bang for their buck.

The look of the handset may seem familiar, however. Weighing in at 142g and with a 4.7-inch display, in the hand the Lumia 550 feels identical to the Lumia 630 in almost every respect.

Indeed, with the two devices side by side, the only immediately noticeable difference is in the branding, with the newer handset being a product of Microsoft rather than Nokia.

On the top edge of the phone is the 3.5mm headphone jack. At the bottom is the micro USB port for charging and data transfer. Mercifully, Microsoft hasn't made the leap to USB Type-C just yet, which means you won't have any problems when you need to charge the device.

The right side of the handset is standard issue for a Lumia, with the power button at the mid-way point and the volume rocker above.

On the rear are an understated silver Windows logo, and the 5MP rear-facing camera with a single LED flash. The back of the handset is removable, enabling access to the 2100 mAh battery, nanoSIM slot and the microSD slot.

The front is home to the comfortably-sized 4.7-inch screen, which proves to be a nice compromise between maximum screen real estate and easier one-handed use. Above this is the 2MP front facing camera, along with a brightness sensor.

The screen on the Lumia 550 is one of the highlights of the device. Over the years, as components have become less expensive, high-quality screens are one of the features that have found their way down the pecking order from higher-end handsets.

With a resolution of 720p stretched across those 4.7 inches, the Lumia 550 boasts a pixels-per-inch count of 312, bringing it comfortably into 'retina' territory.

Although it's 'only' an LCD panel and not AMOLED, such as on the Samsung Galaxy S6, contrast and saturation are very pleasant overall. Whether watching videos, browsing the web or reading long-form articles, I was perfectly happy with the display quality.

Although it doesn't boast the greatest range of viewing angles, suffering from flat colours at the extremes, the Lumia 550 is nonetheless comfortably bright in a variety of viewing environments.

The ambient brightness sensor can, however, be a little finicky; I found that I had to manually adjust the lighting on several occasions.

While corners have inevitably been cut to help keep costs down, in terms of its screen the Lumia 550 strikes a reasonable balance between price and quality.

• Thanks to Carphone Warehouse for supplying the review unit

A new Outlook

Along with the latest Lumia handsets comes the mobile version of Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 10 Mobile. But this isn't merely a phone - and tablet-friendly version of the desktop variant – Microsoft envisions a grand scheme under which its entire ecosystem of hardware and software will be unified.

For the moment, however, the reality is a little more mundane, with Windows 10 Mobile mostly limited to visual overhauls of the existing Windows apps baked into devices, and a refresh of the start screen.

Usefully, given the productivity-minded target audience of the Lumia 550, the apps that have received the biggest changes are the former Inbox and Calendar apps, reborn as Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar.

Outlook Calendar is the most welcome improvement. Windows Phone was developed with a specifically 'trendy' design language in mind, which was fine in most situations but could negatively affect the visual presentation of some apps, and the former Calendar app on Windows Phone could often be a little cluttered.

Outlook Calendar now offers a plethora of different views and options for arranging appointments and different calendars, and syncs nicely with everything you throw at it. It makes working with several busy schedules much easier than previously.

This is also the case with Outlook Mail, although to a lesser extent. The existing app was excellent, but again the visual overhaul has mostly been implemented in a common-sense way, and proves to be practical in everyday use.

However, while these improvements will no doubt be appreciated by the productivity-focused, there is still once massive caveat: the absence of support for the Google app ecosystem. Anyone who regularly uses Docs or Hangouts will be left wanting, with the only workaround being to use the web browser.

It's not completely out of the question, but it's far from ideal if you've invested previously in Google's way of life. Of course, if you're already embedded in Microsoft's ecosystem the offering on the Lumia 550 makes much more sense.

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge is the successor to Internet Explorer, and the native browser for the latest Windows phones. Pitched as something of a fresh start by Microsoft, it boasts a number of notable upgrades over its predecessor.

One area in which Edge can't hold up alongside the venerable IE, however, is branding. When moving to start up the browser, having used a Windows phone for well over a year I found the absence of the Internet Explorer icon in my app list jarring.

No matter how hard I tried, tapping on Microsoft Edge when I wanted to get online never came close to becoming second nature.

Nomenclature aside, at least Edge is far faster at rendering pages than its predecessor, which makes browsing the web a far more pleasurable experience.

New features include Reading List, which works a little like the Pocket app, enabling you to save articles to read offline, and a much improved tab layout that makes it easier to manage open pages; those using the desktop version of Edge can also sync their tabs for a seamless browsing experience.

The browser does still have its weaknesses, however. Edge works by essentially enabling the Windows Mobile device in question to 'pretend' it's running Android.

Although for the most part this ensures smooth performance, there are occasionally compatibility issues with sites, and small bugs still abound, with the app randomly closing at odd moments.

Whether this is due to the app itself or the operating system, it was nonetheless annoying.

Like Windows Phone before it, Windows 10 Mobile is an exceptionally resource-efficient operating system, which makes for mostly smooth performance, no matter the device specification, due in part to significant processor optimisations on Microsoft's part.

Despite this, the decision to use a Snapdragon 210, clocked at 1.1GHz, in the Lumia 550 comes as something of a surprise. Recent low-end Lumias, such as the 630 and the more recent Lumia 640, have tended to use more powerful chips.

In general use browsing through the user interface is mostly lag-free, although this is something of an illusion generated by omnipresent animations.

When it comes to opening and closing apps, the chip quickly reveals its limitations. Though backed up by a healthy 1GB of RAM, moving from app to app could be quite slow on occasions, and I found that the Lumia 550 struggled with almost any game.

Predictably, higher-end titles such as Asphalt 8 run at barely playable frame rates, but again this isn't a device built for intensive mobile gaming. However, when titles such as Crossy Road and Timberman begin to lag, then you know you have a problem.

As such, performance on the Lumia 550 is something of a low point for the device overall, which is unfortunate given the relative strength of the handset in other areas.

Another issue to note is that although the 550 has 8GB of built-in storage, only 3GB of this is available to the user, making a Micro-SD card an absolute necessity for most.

Battery life

With a 2100mAh unit powering the Microsoft Lumia 550 I didn't have high hopes for the battery life of the device, and my suspicions proved to be well founded.

Thanks to its combination of such a small battery and a (relatively) power-hungry HD display, I found that the handset needed charging up to three times a day during intensive periods of use.

Moreover standby time, previously a high point of the Windows Phone ecosystem in general, was also disappointing, with the device losing at least 40% of its charge over most nights. This is certainly not up to the high standards set by the likes of the Moto X Play.

At least a reasonably fully-featured battery management app is provided. This enables you to see which programs are consuming the most power, and also offers a battery saver mode, which limits connectivity to eke out a little extra juice when you really need it.

And ultimately the Lumia 550's battery is replaceable, enabling users to 'hot-swap' in a fully-charged unit should they have one available.

Speakers

Typically, more expensive handsets will come with various new or exclusive features to make them stand out from the competition. Budget devices come with only one real distinguishing factor: price.

As such, any feature that's included beyond the bare minimum is worthy of note, and the Lumia 550 has one such high point: the rear-firing speaker.

Typically, stellar audio reproduction is not a priority for phone manufacturers; even HTC, with its vaunted BoomSound speakers found on the likes of the One M9, has opted to dial back its efforts in this area.

The Lumia 550, pleasingly, manages to far outperform its price point in this area.

As someone who enjoys a little impromptu shower karaoke ('Firework' by Katy Perry, if you must ask), it's crucial that whatever speaker I use for my backing track must be able to be heard above the running water – and the Lumia 550 succeeded with aplomb.

In quieter environments I found that high and low tones were quite faithfully reproduced. While it's not likely to impress the devoted audiophile, the 550 is nonetheless a very capable performer for the price.

Things are a little better with it comes to the cameras. The Microsoft Lumia 550 sports a 5MP rear-facing camera with autofocus and a single LED flash, along with a serviceable 2MP selfie camera.

Images shot with the main camera, using the excellent Windows Camera app, are perfectly respectable for the price point. Detail reproduction is acceptable, as are contrast and saturation.

Microsoft has resisted the temptation to overdo the image smoothing in a bid to reduce noise in photos, a common mistake of smartphone manufacturers, and this means images look a bit more natural than they otherwise might.

The selfie camera captures images that are fine for social media, and the video mode will be perfectly sufficient for blurry Skype sessions.

As for the Windows Camera app itself, it offers something of a neat trick in the shape of a Rich Capture mode, which is essentially Microsoft's version of HDR, but with a twist.

With the mode active, before a photo is taken, the software will analyse the scene, and afterwards will apply effects appropriate to the lighting and so on.

The HDR function itself is a pale shadow of the modes seen in more powerful snappers on more expensive handsets, only merging three exposures rather than up to seven, but it will proved valuable in certain situations.

Meanwhile, having the ability to 'change' the level of flash in a picture by blending two photos, one taken with flash and one without, is a neat party trick.

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

Click here for the full-resolution image

With an attractive price, a great screen and surprisingly good speakers, the Microsoft Lumia 550 is a surprisingly charming device. However, it's let down somewhat by poor battery life and anaemic performance.

We liked

The screen on the Lumia 550 is quite lovely, especially given the price of this handset. With faithful colour reproduction, strong contrast and excellent sharpness, it's a pleasure to use.

Although placed on the rear of the handset, the speaker boasts decent sound reproduction, offering good volume and very little distortion at the higher end.

The rear-firing camera is another capable performer, turning out eminently shareable images, which is more than can be said for many devices in this price category.

We disliked

Given its miserly battery pack it was a virtual certainty that the Lumia 550 wouldn't have much staying power. And despite optimisations the weak Snapdragon 210 processor means overall performance is poor, with apps taking forever to load and games suffering from dropped frames.

The Windows 10 Mobile operating system is also still unfinished, suffering from random crashes on multiple occasions.

Lastly, with just 3GB of built-in storage available to the user, a microSD card is an absolute necessity. With 16GB of storage becoming the minimum in most phones, even at the budget end of the market, this seems a little stingy on Microsoft's part.

Final verdict

The Lumia 520, released several years ago, is the best-selling Windows phone ever. Its party trick was to offer solid performance at a low cost, and the punters loved it.

With the Lumia 550, Microsoft is clearly attempting to pull off the same trick, clearly having put more thought into its lineup than simply releasing more variants of the divisive Lumia 530.

Windows 10 Mobile needs a saviour to bring Microsoft's mobile ambitions back from the brink. Unfortunately, the Lumia 550 is not the device to do it.

This is mainly due to the state of the market – even at the budget end it's no longer enough to be merely 'good' or even 'great'; true excellence is expected.

The competition is getting tougher all the time, and set against the likes of the Moto E, which offers better battery life, far more apps and stronger performance, the Lumia 550 is a hard sell.

That said, given such a low starting price discounts are likely to come into play fairly soon, and the Lumia 550 could potentially be a nice little bargain for undemanding users.

For Windows die-hards looking for a cheap backup device this is also an easy pick. For everyone else, better value can be found elsewhere.

• Thanks to Carphone Warehouse for supplying the review unit

First reviewed: February 2016

Microsoft is still making a lot of money, but the company is doing it with Surface, Windows 10 and its cloud platform, and definitely not Windows phones.

In fact, Lumia phones sales are down by more than half compared to a year ago, according to the Redmond company's latest financial earnings, in all totaling $6.3 billion (about £4.39b, AU$8.89b) in profit and $20.4 billion (about £14.21b, AU$28.80b) in revenue.

Microsoft sold 4.5 million Windows phones in the second fiscal quarter of 2016, down from the 10.5 million it sold during the same 90 days a year ago. Contrast that with the record 74.8 million iPhones sold by Apple.

All of this is despite the fact that Microsoft launched two Windows 10 Mobile phones at the end of 2015, the Microsoft Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL.

Microsoft Surface sales spike

Fortunately for Microsoft, those declining Lumia sales aren't its bread and butter. That distinction belongs to the Surface tablets and new laptop, as well as its cloud platform and Windows 10 software.

Microsoft Surface revenue was up 29% year on year, totalling $1.35 billion (about £94m, AU$1.91bn). Office 365 subscribers grew to 20.6 million, and Windows 10 is now on more than 200 million devices.

The launch of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, Surface Book and the new operating system helped offset the declining sales of its Lumia line.

Interestingly, there have been rumors that Microsoft will retire the Lumia brand name and launch a fully featured Surface phone in hopes of turning around that unceremoniously halved sales number.

• This is what the LG G5 probably looks like

Windows 10 may have had a solid launch on desktops and tablets, but the story on phones is quite different - the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL are currently the only handsets you can get running Windows 10 Mobile.

A new rumour from Windows Central says those two phones will be joined by the Lumia 650 on 1 February. Apparently there'll be "little fanfare" for the handset, which is going to be aimed primarily at business customers.

According to sources speaking to Windows Central, the Lumia 650 will feature a 5-inch 720p display, a Snapdragon 210 or 212 processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of on-board storage. A 5MP front-facing camera and 8MP rear-facing camera complete the unofficial specs.

The end of the Lumia road

But that could be it for the Lumia line: Windows Central says both the Lumia 750 and Lumia 850 have been cancelled, which means the Lumia 650 would be the last of its breed, with Microsoft planning a low-key Mobile World Congress this year.

What we might see is a flagship Surface Phone sometime later in 2016 - that's a rumour we've heard before, and it would make sense considering the enthusiastic welcome that the Surface Book has had.

If Microsoft is going to continue fighting the might of Android and iOS, it looks like it's going to be pinning its hopes on a new premium handset under the Surface brand. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for the last of the Lumias at the start of February.

• The Lumia 950 and Windows 10 Mobile won't save Microsoft's phone business

Microsoft's new Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL are the first phones to run the new Windows 10 software, but neither are the fastest or most powerful handsets on the market.

Both phones still boast an impressive spec, so we decided to pit them against each other in a showdown of speed. This is where we test how well the phones can juggle multiple apps, among other things.

We don't spoil all the results, but when it comes to startup time both handsets are quite slow compared to their rivals. The iPhone 6S came out fastest, followed closely by the Samsung Galaxy S6. Both the Lumia phones did manage to beat out one big competitor, however.

To find out which phone was fastest and whether it's powerful enough for you, watch our speed test video below.

• We've tested all the best smartphones – which is the fastest?

Microsoft is preparing for its first phone release in over six months, but it's not going to come cheap: a new pricing leak suggests the Lumia 950 XL will be the same price as the iPhone 6S in Europe.

According to Spanish retailer Ecomputer, the Lumia 950 is set to cost €659 while the larger Lumia 950 XL will cost €749.

That's not cheap though – it's the same as the going price for an iPhone 6S in France, and it's likely to be a similar price in Spain when Apple announces its pricing.

Would you buy it?

Leaks suggest the Lumia 950 will have a 5.2-inch display with a resolution of 1440 x 2560, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 chipset and 3GB of RAM. That's alongside 32GB of internal storage and a 3,000mAh battery.

The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL looks like the more attractive proposition, with a 5.7-inch display with a resolution of 1440 x 2560, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, 3GB of RAM and a 3,300mAh battery.

On top of that is 32GB of storage, a microSD slot, a 20MP PureView rear camera and a 5MP front-facing selfie shooter.

Considering the state of Windows Phone right now, it's interesting that Microsoft believes it can keep its phones priced at the same point as Apple's latest flagship.

It'll be interesting to see how it's priced in the UK and US – and even more interesting to see how it fares in terms of sales when it arrives.

• Our review of the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL

Via Phone Arena

The Microsoft Lumia 435 is an odd little phone. Immediately recognisable as a Lumia, given its bold colours and polycarbonate body, yet boasting sharper lines, a more boxy design and a Microsoft logo, this is a different breed of Windows Phone.

As the first 400-class device in the Lumia family, the Lumia 435 is designed to appeal to a different audience from its older siblings. It's for those graduating from their first feature phone, those looking for a device to hand their child, or those seeking a back-up.

Given the price point, this is clear to see. Available from under £60 ($95, around AU$12), and as low as £40 (around $62, AU$80) SIM-free and a mere £24.99 on PAYG in the UK, this is a low-risk investment. Yet, for this price, what do you get?

Typically, buying a 'good' smartphone for less than £100 ($150, AU$200) has been a difficult proposition. With every increment, more features are dropped. The 435 is competing with the likes of the ZTE Kis 3 Max, Vodafone Smart 4 Mini and not really much else. Regardless, the spec sheet is reasonably beefy.

The device touts a 4-inch 480 x 800 pixel screen (with 233ppi), a dual-core Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz, a healthy 1GB of RAM, HSDPA+ connectivity and 8GB of internal storage. For the price, this is quite decent.

Despite this, for just a little bit more the Moto E (2015) has a better, bigger screen, more battery life, a better processor and 4G. The same is true of the Honor Holly - better specs for a little more money.

Both of these devices also have access to the superior Android app ecosystem. With such fierce competition, can the Lumia 435 successfully prove its worth?

Despite its budget price you won't be left with an ageing operating system as Microsoft has revealed that the Lumia 435 will be one of the first handsets to get Windows 10 Mobile when it launches later this year.

This should mean that the Lumia 435 will get a new lease of life when Microsoft drops its new mobile operating system, and it means this budget phone will remain somewhat future proof for the time being.

Design

At first glance the Microsoft Lumia 435 has an unmistakable shape about it, almost unlike any other Lumia. I could see distinct design influences from Nokia's ill-fated X-series of forked Android devices.

After a long stare, however, it hits you: this is the successor to Nokia's Asha line of advanced feature phones, with their odd, angular aesthetic – especially the Asha 503.

Despite this unusual first impression, the Lumia certainly impresses. For the price, this device is solidly crafted.

With a tiny 4-inch screen, the 435 sits comfortably in almost any hand. The sides hug the palm snugly, with no sharp edges to be found. At 134g, the phone is light but not insubstantial, and the even weight distribution ensures that it has a nice balance, making texting on the go a pleasant experience.

With a removable back cover users have the option of a number of different colours; my unit came in a blindingly radioactive orange. The shell is constructed from a sturdy matte polycarbonate, meaning the 435 feels as though it can take hits in its stride.

When the back is removed, the MicroSD slot can be accessed to add in some supplementary storage, while the MicroSIM holding mechanism is hidden under the 1560 mAh battery.

The sides are relatively uncluttered in the normal Lumia style, with the power and volume keys all clustered on the right side of the phone, which is potentially something of a problem for left-handed users. All of the buttons have a nice click and are easy to tell apart, revealing some nice attention to detail.

As usual the USB is hidden away on the bottom, while a 3.5mm headphone jack is placed on top.

From the sides, the back rises in a gentle curve, much like the Lumia 930, with the contours easily hugging the palm. Sporting a single rear-firing speaker, the Microsoft branding and a fixed-focus 2MP camera, this is a mostly minimal affair.

The screen is where the first obvious sacrifice has been made, as it lacks Gorilla Glass. It doesn't have the distinct oleophobic coating that would otherwise allow it to shun fingerprints. Within minutes of using the Lumia 435, the screen hoarded my fingerprints as if they were going out of style; with regular use it will require the odd wipe.

This phone isn't going to win any style awards, nor will it be carried by Dolce & Gabbana any time soon. It is a comfortable utilitarian box, that's completely unthreatening.

As such, for the price and its intended audience, the Lumia 435 is something of a quiet triumph.

Screen

The four-inch screen of the Microsoft Lumia 435 is standard for devices of this price class, and unfortunately it does not impress a great deal, even by such low standards.

With 233ppi pixellation on small text is quite noticeable, meaning that reading web pages can be quite a difficult proposition. Outdoor lighting also presented a number of problems, and the milky blacks on offer meant that holding a WhatsApp conversation while on the go required the use of a second hand for shade.

Despite this, auto brightness is available, something omitted from last year's budget Lumia models. It isn't the most sensitive, but its mere presence meant that I wasn't constantly forced to manually adjust the screen lighting throughout the day, making things a little more convenient.

As might be expected, viewing angles on the Lumia 435 are poor. Colours fade away and light levels drop rapidly when viewed from odd angles, though overriding the auto-brightness can occasionally make things a little better. Back-lighting is also a little uneven, and this becomes very noticeable under certain lighting situations.

Despite these issues, the screen is nice and sensitive; I had no problems with touch responsiveness.

Apps

Though much improved from years ago, the Windows Phone app store still lags behind its rivals. Microsoft likes to trumpet the gains made in this area, and indeed progress has been quick.

But Windows Phone 8.1 still lacks the app 'culture' that draws in developers and ensures quality native apps, rather than poorly coded ports.

When apps do arrive, they are often updated irregularly, and with the introduction of universal apps and Windows 10 Mobile later in the year, things are set to change again.

Navigating through the Windows Phone store on the Lumia 435 helps to compound the problem – despite typing 'Wordpress' verbatim in an attempt to find that particular app, I was presented with a number of completely unrelated options, finding the app in question involved a mobile web search.

Apps may come to Windows Phone when Microsoft's grand vision of Windows 10 Mobile comes together, but, for the moment, the platform still struggles.

As the Lumia 435 has been confirmed to be one of the first handsets to get Windows 10 Mobile, it will be interesting to see if universal apps will cause a renaissance for the Windows Phone app ecosystem - which the Lumia 435 will benefit from.

OneDrive to rule them all, one Office to bind them

Part of Windows Phone's appeal as a mobile operating system has been the promise of easy, integrated connectivity with all of Microsoft's software offerings.

OneDrive has long been Microsoft's answer to the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive, and bundled with the Office functionality baked into Windows Phone 8.1 on the Lumia 435, this made working within my Microsoft ecosystem a very fluid experience.

The OneDrive app itself has a very clean interface and is laid out sensibly. When camera upload is activated, images are launched into the cloud with a moment's notice, with a minimum of waiting.

Images uploaded to the camera roll folder do not count against the storage limit, meaning that keen shutterbugs can get quite a lot of mileage from this service.

Working with Office, it was easy to create, edit, upload and share files on the go, including Powerpoint and Excel files. Though the appeal of this is admittedly niche, having the option was certainly pleasant and offered a tangible improvement to my daily routine.

With the likes of Dropbox being the only real cloud-storage competitors in the Windows Phone space, it is easy to dismiss OneDrive, yet this is a real bonus for users.

Owners of the Lumia 435 will receive 30GB of free OneDrive storage from Microsoft, making this potentially quite an attractive offer for some.

Cortana

Cortana, Microsoft's little nod to Halo fans, is touted as a main selling point of Windows Phones such as the Lumia 435. Is 'she' worth the attention? The answer is complicated.

• Cortana vs Siri vs Google Now

In daily use, Cortana makes for a pleasant comparison. Lacking the robotic sterility of Google Now and possessing a few more features than Siri, Cortana is certainly entertaining. Ask her for a joke and you will most likely laugh.

However, her insistence on using Bing for search is unfortunately seemingly incurable.

The app launches quickly on the Lumia 435, displaying relevant news for the day based on what interests you have selected. From there, you can type or speak a command or search request, after which you'll be taken through the depths of Bing to lands (often) unknown.

By selecting the hamburger menu on the top right, you are given access to various options in Cortana's Notebook, where all of the information on you is stored. There, you can edit things such as interests, quiet hours and frequent places to personalise the experience of using Cortana.

She also sports a reasonably accurate music recognition functionality, something which should occasionally come in useful when a catchy song comes on that you don't know.

By far the most useful feature is quiet hours, which allows you to specify times that you do not wish to be disturbed. As default, this will come on during meetings detailed in the calendar, but can also be triggered manually, making a good night's sleep a little easier.

Cortana is still in beta, and there are still a few growing pains (not least when trying to understand my Scottish burr) for her to get through. For the moment, however, it is a solid feature, though whether a voice assistant alone can sell phones is an unknown.

Music

Given the price point and the youthful demographic this device is aimed at, music playback is a major concern, and luckily the Lumia 435 does not disappoint.

Though lacking the high-end Dolby audio options of other, more expensive, Lumia models such as the Nokia Lumia 930, the 435 makes for a great little music player. With a good pair of in-ear headphones inserted, bass and treble were nicely layered and volume was excellent.

As the speaker is rear-firing, it would be a reasonable assumption to make that audio reproduction would be poor. This is mostly true, but for the price it is difficult to beat.

Definition is lost in higher treble and lower bass frequencies, but this speaker can really crank up the volume.

If you like to host impromptu back-of-the-bus parties, the Lumia 435 is likely a phone for you.

When Windows 10 Mobile comes along the Music app will be turned into Microsoft's new Groove Music application. Despite its slightly cringe-inducing name, the app offers some nice new features, and allows you to upload your songs to a OneDrive cloud account for your own personal music streaming service.

With a dual-core Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz, it would usually be a safe assumption that the Microsoft Lumia 435 would be something of a weakling. This is only half true.

A fluid user experience has always been the hallmark of Windows Phones. From Windows Phone 7, which could easily have run on a waffle iron, the OS has been a lightweight, tight affair.

With the introduction of Windows Phone 8.1, however, things have begun to change.

For the most part, swiping through the OS on the Lumia 435 was snappy. Apps open and close without complaint. Coming from another operating system, especially from Android with developer animations removed, reveals the extent to which Windows Phone relies on these.

Almost every action prompts a swoop or a fade, making for a pretty transition and masking the sometimes annoying loading times.

Despite this, performance on day-to-day tasks was mostly solid, the average user, and indeed the target market for this device, will find very little to complain about.

Gaming on the Lumia 435 is a different matter, however. As might be expected, light titles such as Angry Birds and Jetpack Joyride ran easily and remained eminently playable. When moving to a more intensive class of titles, things began to change.

Though Asphalt 8: Overdrive mostly achieved playable framerates, textures were quite jagged and loading the app took several minutes. Subway Surfers and Temple Run 2 also suffered, becoming unplayable as the processor struggled to handle the increase in pace as the games progressed in difficulty.

Multitasking, not a strength of the platform to begin with, is also something of a chore. Apps are closed when not in use, meaning that navigating between a text conversation and the music app involves constant reloading.

Having 1GB of RAM, this phone is being sold by Microsoft as upgradeable to Windows 10 mobile later in the year, meaning that this device is more future-proof than most others in this price class.

Battery life

At 1560mAh the battery on the Lumia 435 is hardly the most substantial in the world. Yet, when coupled with the low-power dual-core CPU and the sub-HD screen, things are evened out a little.

In everyday usage, the Lumia 435 fares quite well. Across a 16-hour day, checking and updating social media accounts, texting, listening to music on headphones for an hour and a half, watching a few YouTube videos, indulging in some light gaming, making around an hour of calls and browsing the internet on HSDPA+ for around half an hour, the battery lasted until the end with 12% spare.

However, utilise the phone more sparingly and you are likely to see around two days of light usage, as Windows Phone standby times tend to be quite strong.

As you might expect, the situation changes when it comes to more intensive tasks, such as heavy gaming or browsing the web while on the go. In these situations, the battery almost seems to drop in real-time, meaning that if you want an extended session of Asphalt you will have to fork out for a spare battery.

Windows Phone does have a Battery Saver app included, and this does a reasonably efficient job of telling you what is eating battery life.

If needed, there is a power-saver mode available, which (mercifully) does not throttle CPU performance but merely restricts background app usage even further.

Activating this will typically see at least an extra hour of estimated battery life added, which is mostly backed up by real world usage.

Road warriors will want to pump out for an extra battery, for although the Lumia is a solid performer, it is certainly of its price class.

This isn't a massive 3,000 mAh battery as is seen in many modern flagships such as the LG G4however, as such expecting similar performance isn't a realistic proposition.

As is very important for most people who want to use their phone as a phone, the Lumia 435 is excellent for making calls. Call quality was rock solid, with voice reception clear on both ends, with very little distortion.

The in-built microphone also did an excellent job of separating the noise of a busy street from my voice, something which I did not expect at this price point.

The People Hub also remains one of the finer points of the Windows Phone OS and Microsoft has done a good job of building a 'smart' contacts list.

In the hub, all contacts are pulled together in a neat little list, and in a nice twist information is pulled from social accounts, making the People Hub a great way to stay updated.

Internet connectivity proved to be strong. HSDPA+ performance across the Bath and Bristol area on the O2 network proved to be strong, without any major hiccups.

Being a country bumpkin, having no 4G proved not to be an issue, certainly not at this price point.

Using the internet never proved to be an issue. Internet Explorer, Windows Phone's native browser, proved to be a fairly swift guide through the darkness of the net, however Flash heavy-sites did cause some stuttering. Pages mostly loaded quickly, and I had no major complaints regarding the Lumia 435's performance in this area.

The Windows Phone in-built email client also proved to be quite useful. As a native offering, it is relatively feature-rich, pulling three email accounts into one inbox proved to be a very easy process and it worked fluidly throughout the review process.

As for text editing, the Windows Phone keyboard remains an excellent option.

Though the platform doesn't have the ability to select from a host of different option, the keys are well spaced, the feedback is nice, gesture typing works well and auto-correction is mostly faultless.

Finding a better option elsewhere is certainly possible, but when compared to the default keyboards of certain Android OEMs, the Windows Phone offering is solid.

GPS performance was adequate, achieving a lock within a reasonable time frame.

Camera

The last, and biggest sacrifice to cost, asides from the processor and the screen, comes in the form of the rear-facing camera of the Lumia 435. It is a 2MP fixed-focus effort, seemingly transported straight from a candy-bar phone in 2005. Needless to say, images are not excellent.

Even in bright lighting, with good visibility, the images produced by this tiny sensor are very soft, with little fine detail. As might be expected, when viewed on the smaller screen of the phone, this is less apparent; when blown up, it is a completely different story.

Given the fixed focus of the lens, shots are often very blurry and must be aligned correctly for acceptable results. As might be expected at this price, there is no flash.

For such a cheap phone, this is hardly surprising. Yet as 5MP auto-focus efforts are slowly working their way down the pecking order into more and more budget handsets, it is unusual to see such a poor snapper, especially in a range which is known for its camera performance.

However, very unusually for such a budget device, a front-facing camera has been included. In addition to allowing for the ever-important selfie, this facilitates video-calls.

With a VGA resolution, however, Skype calls eventually begin to resemble conversation through cataracts. This is a good effort for the price, yet remains essentially unusable. Those looking for a better selfie cam are best advised to look at the Lumia 535, which has a nice wide-angle 5mp front-facing sensor for only £30 more.

Video from the rear-camera was similarly poor, with footage being very shaky, though recorded audio was surprisingly decent. Footage can either be recorded in FWVGA or VGA resolution.

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The Microsoft Lumia 435's incredibly low price means that it doesn't face too much competition, as it's a lot cheaper than many so-called budget smartphones. However, there are a few handsets out there that offer similar features for a similar price. But how do they compare?

ZTE Kis 3 Max

The Lumia 435's incredibly low price point means there's not much out there to compete with it purely on cost, but one of those handsets is the ZTE Kis 3 Max. This handset can now be had for as little as £50 (around $79, AU$102), which means for the price at least it gives the Lumia 435 a run for its money.

The ZTE Kis 3 Max also looks pretty good, despite its budget origins, and when put side by side with the Lumia 435, it's likely many people would think that the Kis 3 Max was the more expensive handset.

The Kis 3 Max also has a slightly larger screen (4.5-inches compared to the Lumia 435's 4-inches), but a similar resolution, which means the smaller Lumia 435 screen looks a little sharper.

The Lumia 435 is a much better performer, however, with 1GB of RAM (the Kis 3 Max has just 512MB), and a more generous 8GB of storage. That's not a huge amount, but it beats the paltry 4GB offering from ZTE.

The biggest difference between the two is their operating systems, with the ZTE Kis 3 Max running Android, which means it has a much broader selection of apps, while the Lumia 435 has Windows Phone 8.1, which misses some key apps.

However, the ZTE Kis 3 Max is running an ageing Android 4.4 KitKat, and it's not too likely to be upgraded to the newer Android 5.0 Lollipop.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has indicated that it wants most, if not all, Windows Phone 8.1 devices to be upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile, which means the Lumia 435 could end up with a more modern and feature-packed operating system.

Because of this, and the better performance, we'd recommend getting the Lumia 435.

• Read the ZTE Kis 3 Max review

Vodafone Smart 4 Mini

The Vodafone Smart 4 Mini is another one of those rare handsets that can match the Lumia 435 on price. While there's a certain charm to the design of the Lumia 435 with it's bright colours, the Vodafone Smart 4 Mini is a handset that looks and feels cheap.

Both handsets have the same size screen and resolution, and neither particularly impress, though that's to be expected with phones as cheap as these.

Performance wise, the Lumia 435 again takes the edge, thanks to it's 1GB of RAM – twice the amount that the Vodafone Smart 4 Mini has.

The 8GB storage space of the Lumia 435 is also bigger than the Vodafone Smart 4 Mini's 4GB, so you have a bit more space to save photos and music.

Both handsets allow more space to be added via microSD cards, though the Vodafone Smart 4 Mini only supports capacities up to 32GB, with the Lumia 435 being able to handle up to 128GB.

If you want to carry a lot of songs and videos around, and don't mind splashing out on a microSD card, the Lumia 435 is a clear winner here.

As the name suggests, you're locked into the Vodafone network with the Vodfafone Smart 4 Mini, so if you're with another provider, you'll be better off with the more flexible Lumia 435.

• Read the Vodafone Smart 4 Mini review

Motorola Moto E (2015)

Putting the Motorola Moto E (2015) head to head with the Lumia 435, when Motorola's handset is almost twice the price of the Lumia, might seem unfair but even when double the price, the Moto E still offers an incredible amount of value.

This is in part due to the fact that the Lumia's low price means even when doubled it's still relatively cheap, as well as the fact that Motorola has packed a decent amount of power and features into the Moto E.

The design of the Moto E is solid, and though unglamorous, looks decent. The Lumia 435 also looks good for such a cheap handset, so design wise it's a bit of a draw, though if you like colourful phones the Lumia might just pip the Moto E. Although Motorola's device comes in different colour options, it's just the surrounding edge that changes – so the Lumia 435 looks like a more vibrant phone.

Both phones perform well with similar specs, though the Moto E's 4.5-inch screen has a cleaner picture quality thanks to a higher resolution.

The Moto E (2015) also comes with the latest version of Android, 5.0 Lollipop. Although the Lumia 435 seems to be in line for an upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile, it means Lumia is lumped with an older operating system at the moment.

As it comes with Android 5.0, it means the Motorola Moto E (2015) also has a much more diverse collection of apps and games to choose from.

If you're willing to spend a little extra, the Motorola Moto E (2015) is a great choice, though it doesn't quite match the Lumia 435 when it comes to the price tag.

• Read the Motorola Moto E (2015) review

The story of the Microsoft Lumia 435 is one of sacrifice. Coming in with a sub-par screen, a small battery and poor camera, this phone isn't going to please the high-end crowd.

Yet at roughly a 10th of the cost of a new iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy S6 or LG G4, competing at such a level is not a priority for the Lumia 435.

As more budget devices arrive touting 4G, Quad Core processors and 720p screens, it is difficult to tell if the Lumia 435 will continue to have a place in the mobile phone market.

We liked

The build quality of this device, for the price level, is excellent. The unit feels very solid and could most likely survive the extended attention of a clumsy child. With no flex or give, and the ability to buy new back-plates, this would make a great companion for the accident-prone.

Despite the device's lower-end specs, using the Windows Phone OS was a fluid and enjoyable affair. Juggling various email accounts with texting and instant messaging proved to be a good experience overall, with the battery lasting through a busy day of communicating.

Music playback proved to be something of a treat. As an MP3 player, this device is a strong pick, especially with the option to add more storage via MicroSD. The speakers reach satisfyingly loud volume levels, making rocking out all the easier.

We disliked

Gaming performance, as a whole, is under par. Subway Surfers, which has been optimised for budget devices, becomes unplayable in its later stages, when faster reaction times are required, as the processor simply can't keep up.

The screen is very difficult to view in sunlight, often whether it is bright or not. This is made worse by the auto-brightness sensor, which is confused very easily. Viewing angles are also poor, and reading text can become a little difficult on certain webpages.

Apps on the Windows Phone store remain sparse. What options are available are rarely updated, navigating the store remains a chore, and with universal apps on the way later in the year, it is yet to be seen how many developers will choose to port their apps over.

Final verdict

The Microsoft Lumia 435 is a funny little phone. With its eye-catching looks and a sturdy, comfortable design, it makes a great first impression.

In day-to-day use, this mostly remains. Navigating the OS is a relatively painless affair and listening to music is something of a treat. The fact that this phone will receive Windows 10 also makes it a tantalising offer for those who want to try something a little different later in the year without breaking the bank.

Yet with a poor screen, bad cameras and laggy performance in many tasks, this is a device that has many drawbacks.

What it all boils down to, however, is price. The Lumia 520 became the most popular Windows Phone handset not because of its obvious superiority or wonderful good looks, but because of its price. By the end of its shelf life, Microsoft was practically giving them away. This is where the 435 is intended to sit, and as a phone meant to be sold in shovels, it is well worth a look.

First reviewed: April 2015

While we wait for Windows 10 Mobile to show up later this year here's another affordable, decent-looking, unfussy Windows Phone 8.1 model to tide us over.

Since Microsoft bought Nokia's phone division at the end of 2013, we've seen quite a few perfectly adequate handsets that aren't going to burn too big a hole in your pocket or get your pulse racing all that quickly.

And so to the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL, the bigger brother to the Lumia 640, which was also announced at MWC 2015. Overall, It gives the impression that Redmond is just killing time before Windows 10 Mobile, but it's still worth a look if you're in the market for a competent Microsoft-powered handset right now.

A SIM-free Lumia 640 XL will set you back £219 in the UK and AU$399 in Australia, with US pricing to be confirmed (it's around US$324 with a straight currency conversion) direct from Microsoft's online shop.

As usual, you can shop around for different prices on and off contract, with some online stores selling the Lumia 640 XL for as little as £147 (around $228, AU$294). The phone is available in cyan, orange, black or white with a matte finish, or glossy white.

That affordable price and the 5.7-inch screen size (it's Microsoft's second-biggest handset after the 6-inch Lumia 1520) are the most notable features here.

As with every other Windows Phone 8.1 device out there, Microsoft is promising a free upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile when the time comes, so you're not limiting yourself to outdated software.

Behind the scenes, there's a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage (expandable via memory card, as we've already said).

The Lumia 640 XL sports a very large 3000mAh battery and an Adreno 305 GPU powering its 720 x 1280 pixel screen. There's a rear-facing 13-megapixel camera and a 5-megapixel snapper on the front.

Design

Pick up the Lumia 640 XL and it feels like the budget phone that it is: lightweight, plastic, nondescript. The bright plastic backing (mine was orange) is pleasing to the touch, and the workmanship is solid, but you won't mistake this for a premium device.

The back pops off, so you can replace the battery, add the SIM and slot in a microSD if you want to. It's a sign of the device's robustness – this is not a phone that's going to mind a scratch – though if you often swap cards out, it has the potential to become annoying.

From the removable back to the volume and power buttons, the Lumia 640 XL has a feeling of cheapness, but it's not quite as negative as that sounds. It's solidly put together, despite the low-grade materials, and no doubt some users will enjoy having a phone that can get bashed about a bit.

It's also distinctly Lumia, with a raised camera lens module, edges that are curved and rounded, and a choice of colours for the back casing.

As usual, the 3.5mm headphone jack sits atop the device, while the microUSB connector port is positioned underneath. The power and volume buttons sit on the right, with the power button lowest, as is the norm for Lumias.

Like the 5-inch Lumia 640, the 5.7-inch Lumia 640 XL has a screen resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. That takes the PPI sharpness down to 259, but it's not a bad screen to look at: like most Lumia displays I've seen, the colours are bright and engaging and everything on the interface looks sharp enough.

With that large screen and dimensions of 157.9mm x 81.5mm x 9mm (6.22 inches x 3.21 inches x 0.35 inches), you're going to need two hands to operate this properly (like the iPhone Plus 6 and Nexus 6). It weighs in at 171g, but feels pretty light in the hand.

OneDrive is now firmly established as Microsoft's great hope for consumer cloud storage, and of course the app is built right into the software on the Lumia 640 XL.

Microsoft has confirmed that buyers will get a year's subscription to Office 365 with their purchase – that's a £59.99 (or US$79.99) saving straight away, and also includes a handy 1TB of OneDrive space.

The key selling points of the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL are its price, its size, and the fact it runs Windows Phone 8.1 (and will eventually get Windows 10 Mobile).

As for its price, it feels like a phone that's good value – Microsoft has said it's targeting business users with the handset, and for people glued to Office and Outlook all day it makes a lot of sense.

Large, phablet-sized phones may be awkward to use with one hand, but they leave more room for spreadsheets, websites, photos and everything else.

There are benefits if you're watching movies on the go, too, though of course you don't have the solid ecosystem offered by iTunes or Google Play. Netflix and BBC iPlayer are on Windows Phone at least.

That brings us to Windows Phone and a story we've had to lay out a hundred times before: app choice is its biggest weakness. Some people might be able to live without Snapchat and Crossy Road, but to not have anything official made by Google – from Gmail to YouTube – is a real problem.

That's not to say there aren't big names in the app catalogue. Spotify, Evernote, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and (a beta version of) Instagram are here, but in terms of the big picture you're still a second-class apps citizen if you plump for Windows Phone.

The development of those big-name apps often lags behind the iOS and Android versions and most of the best new apps, as well as the majority of mobile games, never make it to the platform. Will the situation change with Windows 10 and 'universal apps'? We'll have to wait and see.

On the flip side, integration with Microsoft services is excellent. Outlook, Skype, Office and OneDrive all run smoothly and appear as soon as you sign in with a Microsoft account.

The Windows Phone interface has matured over the years, with improvements to live tiles and notifications, and it's not that far behind iOS and Android if you take apps out of the equation.

Performance

With specs such as those in the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL, you're never going to get blistering performance, but it's debatable whether or not you need it on a smartphone anyway (unless you happen to be a hardcore mobile gamer, perhaps).

A quick blast of Subway Surfers proved to be no problem for the Microsoft handset, and we'd expect you wouldn't have issues with most apps.

Windows Phone 8.1 was snappy and responsive on the handset, and I didn't notice any issues with lag or stuttering while I was using it.

One area where it perhaps has the edge over iOS and Android is in the uniform design style adopted by all of its apps – it's strange but actually quite appealing to see everything from Spotify to Facebook making use of the same look.

I should also mention Cortana, which mixes in some of the best features from Google Now and Siri to create an app that can control your phone's settings as well as schedule your meetings. It shows a lot of promise and it's only going to get better.

The well-respected – if a little outdated – AnTuTu Benchmark app gave the Lumia 640 XL a score of 11,671. Compare that with the 67,520 points raked in by the Samsung Galaxy S6 and you can see the kind of market segment we're in.

The Windows Phone benchmark app hasn't been updated for three years, but it gives you a broad idea of this phone's capabilities – it's not right at the budget end of the field, but it's close.

We had a few goes on Asphalt 8, one of the more demanding mobile games out there, and though it wasn't the most fluid or high-resolution experience we've ever had with the game, it performed well without any lag or stutter. What's more, the handset didn't heat up at all.

And Windows Phone is Windows Phone, which you probably know all about by now. It has its quirks, such as the live tiles, and despite the advancements it's made recently it still feels less polished than iOS or Android. Over to you in the summer, Windows 10.

Battery life

I was impressed with the battery performance of the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL in the time I had it, performance no doubt helped by that lower resolution display and mid-range internal components.

I was regularly finding 25-30% left at the end of the day, though of course it depends what you're doing.

A spot of intense Asphalt 8 gaming and I was seeing drops of around 15% an hour, which is still very good (some other Microsoft phones drain twice as fast). Even if you're absolutely hammering the battery, it's going to last you for several hours, which isn't something you can say about every smartphone on the market with a 5.7-inch screen.

Even with sync ramped up and plenty of music listening and maps checking, I never felt panicked about the phone running out of juice.

Like most phones, you'll be charging this every night, but if you forget you should have some battery life left to see you through the morning – and that's out of the ordinary in today's market.

The TechRadar video test (a 90-minute high-definition clip on loop), the great leveller around these parts, saw the Lumia 640 XL dropping from a full charge to 86%. That's substantially better than the Lumia 630 (77%), the Lumia 520 (66%) and the HTC One M9 (69%).

If you're willing to plump for lower specs you can often feel the benefit through the resulting battery life, and that's certainly the case with the Lumia 640 XL – the large 3000mAh battery really impresses.

The essentials

Let's not forget the old phone calling and text features either – in both areas the handset performed solidly, with no drops in signal or broken calls. Speakerphone volume and quality was fine, as was music playback through the single speaker sat near the camera – nothing to write home about, but by no means a disaster.

The Windows Phone keyboard still feels as if you're playing around with a kid's toy, but at least it's bold and clear with keys that are easy to hit.

The phone was able to take full benefit of the 4G speeds offered by O2 in Manchester, with pages loading promptly over a data connection or Wi-Fi.

It's not going to let you down as far as the basics go, and in some ways the sparseness of Windows Phone as a mobile OS makes for a more straightforward experience. You certainly wouldn't pick the dialler or messaging apps ahead of their iOS or Android equivalents, though, whether you were basing your choice on looks or functionality.

Ultimately, Windows Phone 8.1 just isn't as refined as iOS 8 or Android 5, mobile OSes that look as though they've been through eight (or five) iterations to get where they are today. It's not without its charms, but speaking objectively it's difficult to see how you would choose this over its rivals if you were picking based on software alone.

The obligatory Settings app does the job nicely, and I like the battery saver feature as well as the built-in utilities for managing phone storage and data usage. The quiet hours feature is an intuitive take on shutting off interruptions and notifications at certain times.

Speaking of storage, though, you are going to want to buy a memory card — after installing Asphalt 8 (around 1.5GB) and snapping a few photos, we had less than 1GB of the 8GB internal space left. It's another reason why power users will pass on this handset.

Music and video playback is very good, provided you have enough storage to keep your files with you. Like the minimal apps in the desktop version of Windows, everything is easy to navigate around and control. The MixRadio app is a definite highlight, playing a jukebox of bands you like, and there's an integrated FM radio here, too.

The overall narrative of the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL continues with the camera's capabilities: it's decent but not much more than that. Good lighting conditions lead to good shots, albeit a little under-saturated and noisy when you get right down to the details.

Low-light performance was impressive, though, and shutter speed relatively fast, so when you consider the price I'd say this is a 13-megapixel camera that overperforms for the section of the market it's in.

Weigh it up against the iPhone 6 and you're likely to be disappointed; compare its pictures with snaps taken by similarly priced Android phones and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

The integrated LED flash deserves a mention, too, managing to add light to shots quite nicely without washing them out. Of course, there are better mobile cameras out there, but the Lumia 640 XL holds its own in the photo-taking stakes and isn't going to have your Facebook friends laughing at your attempts to take a nice beach or landscape shot.

The Lumia Camera app that comes as standard with Windows Phone 8.1 offers basic manual controls for ISO, shutter speed, white balance and brightness, so if you want to play around with these settings then the option are there.

I'm not sure the quality of the lens is up to it, but if you know your photography then these settings can help you get better shots.

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With the usual Windows Phone caveats, the Lumia 640 XL is a strong device from Microsoft. Not a terribly powerful handset but the lacklustre internal components and a slightly cheap feel are made up for by a nice big screen, good battery life and that appealing price point.

As for Windows Phone 8.1, not everyone wants the latest must-have app – for some of you, Office is probably far more important than Periscope. It's still playing catch-up to iOS and Android but you do get Office for a year and Windows 10 Mobile is imminent.

We liked

Using the Lumia 640 XL for a week was a surprisingly pleasurable experience. It's solid if unspectacular in its build quality, the display pops nicely and the camera isn't going to let you down.

Having a phone with battery life that you don't need to worry about is a refreshing change, too - especially when the screen is as big as it is on the Lumia 640 XL.

We disliked

You don't get the fine craftsmanship of something like the iPhone 6 or the Nexus 6 here, with the plastic body feeling cheap, yet sturdy in the hand.

The screen is low-res by today's standards and the internal storage space isn't really adequate – factor in the cost of a microSD card when you're working out if you want to make a purchase.

Final verdict

Microsoft promises it has some Windows 10-powered flagship phones in the pipeline, and it's unfair to compare the Lumia 640 XL to the Galaxy S6 and the best models on the market.

If you're on a budget and you want a big phablet-style handset, then give the Lumia 640 XL some serious consideration. The only unknown is how much of a difference Windows 10 is going to make, so you might want to hold off for a few months until the first reviews appear.

Hardware-wise, it's a very good value handset for the price. In terms of software, iOS and Android still have the edge in several areas, so be sure to weigh up the pros and cons before you decide this is the phone for you.

First reviewed: April 2015

It's been almost a year since the last flagship Windows smartphone - the Nokia Lumia 930 - was launched, so the platform is certainly due a new addition. Say hello to the Microsoft Lumia 940XL.

There have been a few rumours flying around about this handset, but we've now had the most comprehensive spec leak to date thanks to NokiaPowerUser.

While the site notes it's unsure whether the 940 XL name will stick for launch, it seems a little more confident with the specs it has.

The Lumia 940 XL is said to pack a 5.7-inch QHD display, octa-core Snapdragon 810 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 20MP rear camera, 5MP front snapper, microSD slot and a slim, metallic unibody design.

That would see it comfortably compete with the Samsung Galaxy S6, HTC One M9, LG G4 and Sony Xperia Z3+.

Look into my eyes

The report also suggests the 940 XL will pack iris scanning tech (for what we assume will be added security) and a USB-C slot, allowing you to plug your charger in either way, much like Apple's Lightning connector.

It's also expected to arrive with Windows 10 on board. The main reason we've not seen any top-flight handsets running Microsoft's software over the past few months is because manufacturers are waiting for the new version to arrive.

There's no word on when the handset may launch, but with Microsoft confirming Windows 10 will land on July 29, a smartphone launch could well coincide.

Via WMPowerUser

If you've handled one of Nokia's vast array of Windows phones in the past few years twirling the Microsoft Lumia 535 round in your hands will feel instantly familiar.

It's a plastic shell, with rounded corners and an anonymous black front. Slippy but able to take a few knocks, this screamingly orange device is yet another in a succession of absolutely unsubtle Lumia devices – and it's goshdarned cheap too at around £75 (roughly US$120, AU$160).

But this isn't a Nokia phone. Well, for all intents and purposes it is, but no mention of the Finnish brand can be found anywhere on this bargain priced smartphone. Where the old familiar logo was, the Microsoft branding now sits proudly above the 5-inch display.

This is one of the first phones to come with the Microsoft Lumia branding, after the software giant completed its buyout of the phone maker earlier this year. While the Nokia name will live on with other products, notably the iPad mini-esque N1 tablet, Microsoft has started to completely remove it from all its phones.

Though, nothing much has really changed. With Android and iOS dominating the high-end of the market, Windows Phone 8.1 devices tend to offer decent specs in an affordable package and the Microsoft Lumia 535 is no different. For your low outlay you will get a 5-inch display with a resolution of 960 x 540, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, 8GB of internal memory and 1GB of RAM.

For the budget cost, those specs are definitely nothing to complain about.

In the past few months we've seen some impressive budget conscious smartphones, including the Android toting Moto G (2014) and fellow Windows Phone 8.1 devices like the Nokia Lumia 635 and 530 – so does the Microsoft logo mean that Windows Phone can now neatly compete in the low-end smartphone war?

Design

Microsoft might have slapped its logo on the front and back of the phone, but this is unmistakably a Nokia Lumia.

The rear plastic shell pops off, revealing a removable 1,905 mAh battery and a space for a SIM card. Some regions will get the dual-SIM variant, but the UK at least will get the single SIM handset. There's also a microSD slot here, a necessary inclusion as the 8GB of internal storage will soon run dry when you start packing in apps.

The shell itself feels sturdy, but if you start to bend it the volume rocker does pop out of the shell, so… maybe don't play about with it too much or put it in your back pocket.

But even if you were to break or drop it, you could just swap the shell out for another one. Same goes if your eyes start to tire of the bright orange hue.

Almost as soon as I started using the Lumia 535 I knew it was going to be an absolute fingerprint magnet, and it soon proved to be a correct assumption.

The plastic picks up smudges all over, oily residue sticks to it and after about an hour of use I had to wipe it clean. An hour later, another wipe down. Corning's Gorilla Glass 3, which protects the screen, is also prone to picking up grime – so be ready, this is a high maintenance device.

Aside from the volume rocker and standby switch, both of which are suitable clicky and responsive, the phone is free from other buttons. This is down to Windows Phone 8.1 following Android's lead and allowing the use of on-screen controls.

A 3.5mm headphone jack sits on the top, while the ubiquitous microUSB charging takes its place on the bottom.

For a £75 (US$120, AU$160) device, the Lumia ticks all the boxes in terms of design.

No, it doesn't possess a premium finish like the iPhone 6 or HTC One M9, but it also doesn't feel like a Fisher Price 'My First Smartphone'. It's fun, durable and well built and I've dropped it a few times with no damage, which is always a plus, especially when you're a clumsy tech journalist trying to avoid the wrath of angry PRs.

Packing a 5-inch display into this low cost device is an impressive feat, even if the panel on the Lumia 535 is far from perfect.

The 540 x 960 Gorilla Glass 3 coated display has nice colour reproduction, deep blacks and a decent hit of brightness, but it lacks detail. The blocky Windows Phone icons look fine, but text is jagged. Reading a web page is a strain and photos lack vibrancy. It's a shame, but at this price I wasn't expecting much better.

Viewing angles are also poor. Tilt the phone even slightly to the side and all you'll get is a faceload of reflection. I had to jack the brightness setting all the way to high, and I left it there for the entire time I had the device, just to make sure I could read the display.

Auto brightness always underestimated things, turning it down too far when the lighting was less than optimal.

If you've used Windows Phone 8.1 or WP 8 before, then you'll feel at home here, as everything is exactly the same as on previous Microsoft-powered smartphones.

After swiping up from the lock-screen you reach the main display, which is made up of tiles, all varying in size and functionality.

Live Tiles can display info and act like widgets on Android, flipping over constantly to display handy tidbits. The Cortana (which I'll cover further down) tile for example shows a news overview, while the Facebook one flips over to display any notifications you might have waiting.

These tiles can be customised into three different sizes and you can add as many of them as you want. Pull down the top and Action Centre pops down, bringing with it some quick settings and an overview of your most recent notifications.

Action Centre is the Windows Phone 8.1 equivalent of Notification Centre on iOS and the notification pull down on Android and while it doesn't quite match the feature rich version in Google's OS or the seriously updated iOS 8 one, it's a good first attempt.

Cortana

First introduced in Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana is, just like Action Centre, an attempt from Microsoft to play catch-up with Apple and Google's already established digital assistants.

Named after the classic AI character from the Halo game series, Cortana is a really well-made feature that I've found myself using far more than I've done with Siri on the iPhone.

You can launch it either from the homescreen icon or from the search key and once it pops into life there are a few things it can do.

Tap the music note and it'll listen out and tell you, just like Shazam, which song is playing. It was accurate too. I tested on 10 different songs, some obscure and some obvious, and it proved very accurate, delivering results in about 20 seconds.

An overview of the latest news stories is accessible with a swipe up, while clicking the microphone icon lets you chat directly to Cortana. It works just like Siri; ask Cortana to set your alarm or call your Mum and she'll oblige.

Niftily though you can also type your request, which is great if you're in an environment where you shouldn't be having a chin wag with your phone.

It's great to see that Microsoft didn't exclude Cortana from this phone just because it's low-end. It performs just the same as it does on a high-end Lumia like the 1520, responding to my commands quickly and accurately, barely getting even a tricky to pronounce name wrong.

The location based reminders are great too…in fact, almost too good; a reminder for me to pick up beers when I got inside Tesco worked every time.

A full suite

Along with including Cortana, just about every other staple feature of Windows Phone 8.1 is here too, including OneDrive, the full Office suite and Nokia's Here Drive + maps.

Office is great for quickly pulling down documents from Office 365 or OneDrive and having a brief scan through, but I never felt an urge to do any editing on the phone.

This is in some part down to the keyboard, which simply takes up far too much space on the screen. Granted, it does feature some nice Swype-like flow typing tech, but the autocorrect is a pain and its accuracy is poor.

One app I really appreciate is Data Sense, which tracks all your data usage whether it's mobile or Wi-Fi. It even breaks it down app by app and you can set a limit if you only have a certain amount of data per month, either mobile or at home.

A battery saver app is equally useful, showing which apps run down your juice the quickest.

App-less performance

One constant criticism with Windows Phone has been how far it lags behind Apple, Android and to some extent Amazon when it comes to apps.

While the response of 'we now have Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and so on' will no doubt be called, for me it's still not up to scratch.

Take Instagram for example: while its true you can download it and scroll through snaps of Starbucks cups and droolworthy food just like any other phone, it's not the same.

The app feels so far behind its iOS and Android counterparts, there's not even video support.

I get the feeling that once a developer releases a Windows Phone app they feel the job is done and just leave it to pick up some downloads and for Microsoft to prove how many of the top apps they have. Yes, the apps are there, but it's not on the same playing field as Apple and Google.

I've always found performance on low-end Windows Phone 8 devices to be very impressive, often much better than similarly priced Android devices.

While this has changed somewhat with phones like the Moto G (2014) and Moto E, which are excellent performers, I still think Windows Phone 8.1 is the best operating system for a budget device.

Saying that, it hasn't been all smooth sailing. While general performance is fine, I've often run into slight issues that seem a bit out of place.

The Snapdragon 200 processor in the Lumia 535 makes swiping through menus and running the majority apps a mostly fluid experience, (helped by the generous 1GB of RAM), but performance on the highly graphical Asphalt 8 was a bit spotty and I had the title crash on me a number of times.

More issues come from waking the phone from sleep. Often I was left with just a black screen for a few seconds before the phone came to life, then another pesky pause when I swiped up from the lock-screen.

Opening directly to a game also resulted in a blank screen, with some leftover sound in the background.

Screen responsiveness is also not the best here, with many taps going completely unnoticed until I jabbed my finger repeatedly on the icon. Same goes for the on-screen buttons, which suffer the same shortcomings.

Battery life

Using the Microsoft Lumia 535 as my main phone for a week gave me a good idea on how the battery fares, and it's not bad.

While doing all the normal things you'd expect a smartphone addict to be doing it managed to just get through to the end of the day.

To paint the picture: I take it off the charger at about 8am, have three email accounts constantly pulling down data and I use it pretty solidly throughout the day with a mix of calls, video, browsing and a minute or two of gaming.

After work I'd have about 40% left, with it draining down to about 10% when I plugged it in at around midnight. I'd say that's pretty good going, though a daily recharge is always necessary.

That's only if you're using it for general tasks; using the Lumia 535 a bit harder and you'll see a much faster drain.

Hammering a graphically intensive game, GT Racing 2 for example, slurped up the battery very quickly. A 30 minute session drained 20%, while using Here Maps to navigate to a pub about 20 minutes away took another 20%.

Thankfully, I never had the phone die on me and the battery saver app I mentioned earlier is there to help if you think something is taking too much juice. That app also included a mode that conserves battery when you drop below 20%.

To eke out that extra juice it shut downs functionality that isn't especially vital, so you'll notice a slowdown in animations, your email inboxes will check for new message less frequently and overall performance will be stunted. But, if you really need your phone to last until you get to a bar to let your mates know where you are, then I'd suggest switching on the mode when your battery is starting to drop.

I found I got about an extra 45 minutes of juice with this mode turned on, so it's definitely a nice addition, but it lacks the suite of customisation features you'd see on Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6.

There's no crazy super battery save mode that turns everything black and white and you can't really tailor it to your tastes aside from turning it on or off.

The essentials

I've grown accustomed to using 4G data for all my mobile browsing needs, but the lack of it on the Lumia 535 means I was back to 3G speeds.

On 3G the device performs well, with it picking up a strong signal everywhere and calls coming through with a nice, crisp tone. You'll also have to make do with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi networks, as it's not compatible with 5GHz versions, due to only being Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n compatible. This leads to apps and web pages taking more time to download than on a device boasting the faster AC and N Wi-Fi standards.

In reality, it probably won't be noticeable unless you're putting it head to head with a device that packs the faster speeds, but it is important to note that if you use a router at home that splits the signals you'll have to connect to the 2.4 GHz version.

I was pleased to see that browsing the web was smooth, even when multiple tabs were loading image heavy sites slow down was minimal and the general messaging, phone and contacts apps are were solid performers as you'd hope from this budget-friendly OS.

Inputting text into the messaging app is straightforward, thanks to a fairly large keyboard that had plenty of space for my fingers and keys that were well sized. The messaging app itself is personally one of my favourite text message apps on any device, thanks to its deep integration with social networks, but since the Windows Phone 8.1 update, the majority of that functionality has been killed in favour of a simpler experience.

Still, the interface is pretty and it's quick, but it lacks any sort of iMessage features (like chat, read notifications and efficient group chat), for those you'll have to switch to Skype or Facebook Messenger.

Again, the Phone dialler is also very basic. If you've come from the fantastic smart dialler in Android 4.4 then you'll know what I mean. Once you open the app you're met with a dialler, though typing in a name of your contact here will get you nowhere, it's simply for making new calls.

While the dialler on Android searches the web for matching numbers when you get a call, the Windows Phone 8.1 version is much closer to iOS, so you won't get any added information unless you've already got the person in your phonebook.

Camera

Normally, I'd sit here and mention the rear facing snapper first, leading into a nod about the front facing version. I'd do this because on 99% of smartphones out there the rear camera takes the headlines and packs more megapixels, more features and gets more use.

That's not so on the Microsoft Lumia 535, as both the front and back shooters boast 5MP sensors and in many ways the front-facing one is more interesting.

Jumping on the selfie bandwagon, Microsoft has added a special Lumia Selfie app, which is all about getting the most from your portrait snaps. The app lets you take a shot and then add numerous filters, enlarge your eyes (why?) and even make yourself look slimmer. Though all this did was make me look rather skeletal and ill.

The 'selfie' camera also has a wider angle lens so you can cram more folks in, which is actually quite a useful addition if you want to spread the narcissism.

There's also the Lumia Camera, a separate app that lets you use both cameras, take video and alter all the settings from white balance to ISO.

It's nice to have these options, but with a camera of middling resolution, it's overkill. Altering the settings doesn't really leave you with better pictures, just far worse ones. I'm also a bit confused as to why there needs to be two separate camera apps. Just bundle all those selfie features into the main app and be done with it.

Snapping a shot was quick though, despite autofocus often being a little hard to pin down. Pictures themselves were about what you'd expect from a budget phone, probably Instagram-worthy if you're in good light, but nothing that'll make you want to do away with a proper point and shoot.

Contrast and detail were both severely lacking, while it always looked like my snaps were taken on a miserable day, even when there is plenty of sun out. Selfies were better, but I couldn't really notice those extra megapixels over competing devices.

Video was poor and limited to 480p recording at 30fps; most cheap tablets can do better than that. It stuttered and looked like I was purposely shaking the phone, which I wasn't.

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Living with a Windows Phone 8.1 device is both an enjoyable and frustrating experience, whether that device is a high flying flagship or, like the Microsoft Lumia 535, a £75 (around US$120, AU$160) entry level model.

Certain things about it I really love, from the tiled interface with those tidbits of useful info flipping into view to the fantastic digital assistant Cortana.

We liked

I also really appreciate how Microsoft has not diluted the software experience here, even though it's a cheaper handset. You get full Office access, full Cortana support and because it packs 1GB of RAM, you won't run into games incompatibility like you would if it was only boasting 512MB.

While it's far from premium, the fun, durable and sturdy build, along with the removable back and bright colours combine to make something that is perfect as an entry level smartphone.

Having a wide-angle front-facing camera makes a great amount of sense, whether it's for selfies or Skype chats. It stops everyone feeling like they have all squeezed in and ensures you don't accidentally miss someone out of the picture.

We disliked

Performance on the whole is good, but I did suffer frequent annoyances that refused to go away. Screen sensitivity issues plagued my time with the device and I hate nothing more than jabbing away at an icon multiple times before it responds.

Even though apps like WhatsApp and games like Minecraft are available on the Windows Store, it annoys me how developers release an app and then let it lay dormant without any updates and new features. As mentioned, the Instagram app still doesn't support video, which simply isn't good enough.

While the screen is perfectly acceptable for a phone of this price and having a 5-inch display is obviously a plus point for some, I just think it stretches an already low resolution too far. I didn't enjoy reading or viewing pictures on the screen and the lack vibrancy made everything look a bit dull.

Final verdict

The Microsoft Lumia 535 has a good build, packs a large screen that, while it hasn't got the highest resolution, produces good colours and operates for the most part with ease, plus you get the full Windows Phone 8.1 experience.

But to achieve the low price sacrifices have to be made. There's no NFC for example, no faster AC/N Wi-Fi and no 4G.

These points could be forgiven, but the screen issues I suffered with the Lumia 535 are not easy to overlook. Yes, they could (maybe) be eradicated with a simple software update, that is if the issues aren't hardware related, but only time will tell if that ever happens.

Grievances aside, there's lots to like here. The wide-angle 5MP selfie shooter captures decent pics, Cortana is a fantastic virtual assistant that is just as fully featured here as in top of the line Windows Phone 8.1 devices and the replaceable, colourful shells add a dash of fun.

The Microsoft Lumia 640 is among the first in a new breed of Windows Phones. With a larger screen, more RAM and a different design language from its predecessor, this is Microsoft stamping its logo (literally) on the Lumia range. And what a change this proves to be.

The old Nokia did things a little differently. Budget devices made by the Finnish firm were notoriously bare-bones; this could be seen in the decision to omit Gorilla Glass and limit RAM in models such as the Lumia 520 and 630, among others.

Value was added for the consumer through access to services such as MixRadio and HERE Maps. Microsoft takes something of a different tack.

Those who purchase a Microsoft Lumia 640 will receive several sweeteners, such as 30GB of free OneDrive storage and a one-year subscription to Office 365. These in themselves are nice, especially for the price. However, when paired with a phone that rivals (and exceeds) the ever-popular Moto G in many areas, even in its newer incarnation, heads will start to turn.

When it comes to specs, the Microsoft Lumia 640 does not disappoint. The device has a 5-inch, 720p screen with 294 PPI, a quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. These are exceptionally healthy specifications for the £130, $250 (around AU$320) SIM-free price point.

Though these specifications might appear exceptional, the competition is quite fierce. Devices such as the Honor Holly, Moto G (2014) and EE Kestrel all offer unique advantages at the same price point, while also being able to access the more than one million apps available on the Google Play Store.

As such, the question is, can an Office and OneDrive subscription sell the Microsoft Lumia 640? Will this be the budget hero device that Windows Phone needs?

Design

When I received the Microsoft Lumia 640, I was not especially impressed. My review device was constructed of a glossy cyan plastic, which was unpleasantly reminiscent of older Samsung devices.

I don't have the greasiest fingers in the world, however after five minutes of using the Lumia 640, it looked as if I had wiped it with a pepperoni pizza.

Luckily, the back cover of the device is removable, allowing you to switch in a number of different options, meaning (mercifully) that matte covers are available for those who might want them, along with other suitably 'Lumia' options, including black and orange.

Coming from a smaller device, as I had, it took a little while before I was confident enough to use the phone one-handed. The glossy plastic back meant the phone had a tendency to skate across tables with reckless abandon, so a case might be a wise investment for some.

Though well-balanced in the hand, the shell itself does not feel especially sturdy. Coming from a device such as the Lumia 435, which could sink a ship, the Lumia 640 LTE does not impress overly.

Looking at the side of the device, the black of the inner portion was clearly visible through the plastic, looking as though it might crack easily were it to fall.

Once the back has been removed, access is given to the Micro-SIM slot, the removable 2500mAh battery and the MicroSD slot, which takes cards up to 128GB in size.

The sides of the Lumia 640 LTE are clean and uncluttered, and in the traditional Lumia fashion everything of note is thrown to the right of the phone. No sharp edges are to be found, and using this phone either one- or two-handed is a pleasant and comfortable experience.

The power button and the volume rocker have a decent travel and a nice click to them, meaning everything is easy to find.

A single Micro-USB slot is tidied away on the bottom of the device, while the ever so slightly roughly hewn 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top, as might be expected.

On the back of the Lumia 640, there is a single rear-firing speaker, a neatly displayed Microsoft logo, a single LED flash and the 8MP rear-facing camera.

The front of the device contains the 5-inch screen, a 0.9MP selfie camera and the usual additions of a call-speaker and microphone. With Gorilla Glass covering the front panel, the oleophobic coating immediately makes itself known, feeling very pleasant to the touch.

Overall, this is a utilitarian but nice device for the price. Though Microsoft doesn't take any great gambits with the design, the phone is light, well balanced and pleasant to use both one- and two-handed.

Screen

It is interesting to see how far phone screens have progressed in the budget range. Whereas a few years ago, spending less than £200, $300 on a smartphone doomed you to excessive pixelation, now things are very different.

The Moto G (2013) wowed the world with a 720p screen at a less than flagship price several years ago, and now the Lumia 640 joins the club.

With a 5-inch panel, the Lumia 640 certainly sports a comfortable amount of real-estate on which to consume media and play games.

And at 294 PPI, though not quite 'Retina' in its quality, the screen should please everyone (pixel peepers aside). Web browsing was an enjoyable experience, as was viewing HD video.

In the best Lumia tradition, the abilities of the Microsoft Lumia 640's panel do not end there. As mentioned, the Gorilla Glass protection makes using the device a very easy experience.

The nice 'ClearBlack' polarisation filter used previously by Nokia has been applied, meaning that the device has very nice black levels for an LED screen; this makes it easy to use outdoors.

As it is an IPS panel, viewing angles are also excellent. Unusually, for a budget device, the Lumia 640 LTE sports both double-tap to wake and the ever-useful Glance mode, which is configurable to allow for a number of different notifications to appear.

Automatic brightness is also a nice addition, seeing as this was omitted on the Lumia 630; this makes daily use a little easier, while extending the battery a little.

Nokia always had a strong reputation for the quality of the panels it produced, and if this is anything to go by, Microsoft intends to continue the tradition in style. The screen on the Lumia 640 LTE is one of its main highlights, and is easily one of the best available at this price point.

Office suite

Since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft has made a strong play for its cloud services. Lumia owners have long had access to Office and OneDrive; however, with the Lumia 640 Redmond has made its strongest push.

Included with the Lumia 640 LTE is a free one-year subscription to Office365 and 30GB of free OneDrive storage. On paper, this is an enormous saving, and it definitely adds value to the device.

OneDrive is certainly a pleasure to use. I found that pictures I took uploaded to the cloud with a minimum of fuss, easily beating Dropbox for speed.

The same was true when accessing files online; the service was consistent and functional, if not remarkable in any regard.

It has long been a necessity for Windows Phone owners to deal with OneDrive in one form or another if they wished to make use of cloud storage, and with 30GB free it is likely that many more will make the jump.

As for the Office 365 subscription, this is where things become a little more difficult. If you are a business owner, the ability to easily sync Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, along with editing them on the go, will no doubt be attractive.

For the average user, however, productivity is as sexy as ever, but Excel will most likely struggle to sell phones. Despite this, it is a nice addition. The Office app for Windows Phone is laid out sensibly and has a number of basic editing options, which remain a little more advanced than their Android and iOS counterparts.

Though typing a 3,000-word essay on a 5-inch screen is as attractive a proposition as ever, for basic tasks on the go, it is more than sufficient. As Microsoft clearly wishes to demonstrate, this is a phone for business as well as pleasure. However, the divide can sometimes be a little too stark.

Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2

The Microsoft Lumia 640 and the Lumia 640 XL are the first devices to arrive toting the latest update for Windows Phone – the drably titled Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2.

Typically, when Windows Phone has been updated, exciting names have been dreamt up, and with the new software came a number of new features. Yet, with Windows 10 on its way later in the year, all focus has been diverted to the task at hand, and this latest update has suffered as a result.

Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2 brings with it a number of bug fixes and stability improvements, and one feature that has been missing from Windows Phone from the start: the ability to pin setting options to the Home screen.

In the past, users had to be content either arranging and using the notification tray or swiping through to the settings menu if they wished to access options such as Wi-Fi or mobile data. Aside from a few third-party app options that could solve the problem partially, this could mean on occasion that using Windows Phone was a pain.

As such, I immediately pinned brightness, Wi-Fi and mobile data to the Home screen, which made general use far easier. Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2 also comes with a rearranged setting menu.

Windows Phone no longer has an endless list of random settings, and different options are grouped according to their functions.

I am something of a Windows Phone veteran, and I found these changes all much to my liking. And though newcomers to the mobile OS may find these changes to be simple common sense, they will most likely be welcome nonetheless, making this a quiet triumph.

Cortana

What is there to say about Cortana that has not already been said?

Microsoft's virtual assistant has been available for Windows Phone owners in the UK since the rollout of the Lumia Denim update in late 2014/early 2015, and it is safe to say that she has been met with a mostly positive reception.

Combining some of the personality of Siri with some of the pre-cognisance of Google Now, along with a little Microsoft secret sauce, Cortana is generally a pleasure to use.

Cortana can perform web searches, compose messages, create reminders – everything that has become the bread and butter of voice assistants everywhere.

In addition to this, she can also interact with select third-party apps, although this function must be baked in by developers, and as such support is somewhat limited at present.

Everything Cortana knows about you is bundled into her 'notebook', which also contains a list of all of her permissions. Here, in a nice departure from the relatively opaque confines of Google Now and Siri, it is easy to control the information that Cortana can access about you.

Though it isn't possible with the Lumia 640 LTE to turn on 'always listening' voice activation, as it is with the likes of the Nokia Lumia 930 and the Lumia 1520, by pinning a tile to the Home screen, I found Cortana to be useful.

Though she is limited to searching through Bing, Cortana is fast becoming the big-value add-on that Microsoft so clearly wishes the service to be.

With the Lumia 640, Microsoft has held true to one of the proudest traditions of the 600 range: a healthy processor. Purring away under the hood of the polycarbonate slab is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, clocked at 1.2 GHz. This is the very same processor found in the Moto G (2013), and as such is a tried and true performer.

I found that swiping around the OS was a pleasant experience. The usability of Windows Phone at the lower end of the price spectrum has often been touted as excellent. Approximately 50% of this general impression is based in reality – in my experience the operating system masks app loading times with myriad animations.

As such, it is a pleasure to say that, on the Microsoft Lumia 640, I did not find this to be the case. The best test of OS responsiveness is a measure of the 'app rehydration', or app refresh times when multi-tasking.

When loading apps such as Spotify from sleep, there was functionally no delay, whereas on a device such as the Nokia Lumia 540, this could easily be upwards of five seconds. The Lumia 640 is a scorcher, at least when swiping around.

Happily, this general level of performance continued into gaming performance. Whatever I threw at it, the device mostly took it in its stride. Games such as Subway Surfers, Sparkle 2 and Timberman ran without a hitch.

Though Windows Phone has often lagged behind in the processor department when compared to supercharged Android phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the HTC One M9, at least in the budget range Microsoft appears keen to catch up.

Battery life

To put it simply, the battery life of the Microsoft Lumia 640 is excellent.

With a relatively low-resolution display, a power-sipping processor and the efficient Windows Phone OS, the ingredients were all there for the success of the Lumia 640.

When matched with a large 2500mAh unit, all of these factors virtually guarantee that the device will last comfortably through a long day of work and play.

Unplugging the device at around 7:30am, listening to a few hours of Spotify, catching up with a few shows on BBC iPlayer Radio, browsing the internet for around an hour on HSDPA+ and whiling away dull moments with a little gaming saw the battery drop to around 45% by 6pm.

Leaving the device unplugged throughout the night, I saw a further 2% drop, leaving ample charge for the next day.

In all, regardless of your use case, this device has great battery life. And, as a bonus for those who travel frequently, and power users, it is removable, allowing for 'hot-swapping' a new unit in to top things up.

To help last through the day, Windows Phone comes bundled with a battery saver app, which comes with a powerful power-saving option. When activated, this allows background tasks to be shut down completely, except for whatever app is being used directly, limiting connectivity significantly, but proving useful in a pinch.

For me, activating this option dependably added around two to three hours to battery time. Typically, this gave an estimated 28 hours of power, and with power saver it increased to 31. Though it doesn't include any fancy greyscale power-saving options, as found on the Samsung Galaxy S6, this is a dependable and practical alternative.

Overall, I was very pleased with the battery life of the Microsoft Lumia 640 LTE. I came to the device with high expectations, given its screen, processor and the size of its battery unit, and yet was pleasantly surprised.

The essentials

One thing, among many others, that Nokia phones were always known for was the (relatively) crystal clarity of voice calls its devices were capable of.

Throughout the Lumia line, this has been something of an understated, but crowning feature, and happily the Microsoft Lumia 640 continues in this tradition.

Calls made from the device were pleasantly loud and rounded, and callers remarked on the quality at the other end. Though not quite up to par with the likes of 'HD' voice calls offered by some network providers, the Lumia 640 is a pleasant call-making device indeed.

Radio performance also proved to be something of a high point, with clear HSDPA+ performance across the Bath, Bristol, Swindon and Cardiff areas. This proved to be true even in areas where I have often found it difficult to gain reception.

Pages loaded quickly on the baked-in Internet Explorer browser, though the app has some issues with 'pop-in'. Microsoft has tinkered with the code behind this to mimic Safari, and as such performance is similar on many sites to Apple's native browser.

With a configurable reading mode, desktop mode and many other settings, the browser is moderately customisable, which will no doubt please tinkerers. And with a bottom-mounted address bar, one-handed use is a very practical option.

Aided by the generously spaced keys of the on-screen keyboard, along with the fluid and reliable gesture mode and predictive text functions, the Windows Phone typing experience remains a joy. This remains true even in the face of increasingly serious competition in the Android space from the likes of Swiftkey and Swype.

The rear-facing speakers on the device produced a satisfying level of volume, with noticeable distortion not making itself known until the highest levels.

Finding apps on Windows Phone remains something of a problem. If they are available at all, apps are often a little more limited or buggy than their counterparts on other mobile operating systems, very rarely receiving updates.

Lastly, but not least, GPS performance on the device was acceptable. No matter where I found myself, getting a lock and navigating elsewhere was always a quick experience, with little in the way of jitters or lag.

Camera

With higher-resolution sensors quickly becoming the norm, even at the lower-end of the mobile market, on paper the 8MP sensor of the Lumia 640 fails to impress.

Yet, in most real-life situations, the camera unit in the Lumia 640 is a strong contender for the best snapper in the budget space.

In good lighting, the sensor produced strong levels of detail, along with colours that had a pleasing 'pop' without excessive saturation.

Coming with Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2, the Microsoft Lumia 640 is also privy to another exciting feature that first made its debut on higher-end phones in the Lumia line: 'Rich Capture'.

For the uninitiated, this is simply HDR (high dynamic range) but rebranded. When activated, this allows the camera to compensate for high levels of contrast; for example, pulling more detail out of dark shadows on brightly lit days.

With Microsoft's example of the service, however, this also allows you to select 'how much' flash you would like in your low-light shots, improving performance somewhat. The sensor captures two images, one without flash and one with, and combines the two afterwards to achieve the most pleasing result.

Despite this neat trick, low-light photography is not a highlight of the device. Although there is a decent level of brightness in most shots, noise constantly rears its ugly head in almost every scene.

There's a single 0.9 MP selfie camera on the front of the device, and this – as might be expected – is perfectly acceptable for the odd Skype call, but not for much else. It is certainly not on a par with the likes of the 5MP wide-angle effort on the Lumia 535 and the Lumia 735.

Video is also of decent quality, with the camera handling differences in contrast well and with decent sound levels. Footage can be recorded in 1080p and 720p at 24, 25 and 30 FPS.

At such a low price, and with such competitive specifications in so many other areas, Microsoft might have been content to produce something merely average. However, the Lumia 640 is a good all-round smartphone snapper.

Click here to see the full res image

Click here to see the full res image

Click here to see the full res image

Click here to see the full res image

Click here to see the full res image

Using the Microsoft Lumia 640 LTE was an experience that I did not expect to enjoy quite so much. Coming from a Nokia Lumia 930 as my daily driver, I was surprised at how much of the overall quality of the Windows Phone experience could be found at the lower end of the market.

We liked

With a 720p screen that boasts wide-viewing angles and a pixel density of 294 PPI, the Microsoft Lumia 640 is excellent for reading text on the web, gaming and watching movies on the go. Colour accuracy is strong, given that it is an LCD screen, and Glance mode is supported, along with double-tap, which are nice add-ons for the price.

Boasting 2500mAh, the battery life of the Lumia 640 is consistently excellent. It is easy to make it through a full day of work with enough juice to spare for a gaming session on the commute, along with some reading along the way.

The 8MP rear-facing camera is excellent. In most situations, colours are accurately represented and detail is even throughout, with good sharpness levels present consistently. This is supplemented by the clever Rich Capture mode, which makes shooting in low light easier.

We disliked

Though the Microsoft Lumia 640 is an attractive device, the signature build quality of the Lumia line seems to have been found somewhat lacking, The plastic shell running around the device betrays its budget origins and doesn't feel as though it could take a knock as easily as its predecessors were able to.

While the Snapdragon 400 is a strong performer, as Qualcomm releases newer chips not only in the 400 line, but others in its budget range, it is a shame to see Windows Phone stuck in the past once again. With the likes of the Moto E (2015) receiving the Snapdragon 410, along with all of its improvements, Windows Phone is once again in danger of looking as though it is stuck in the past.

And, as ever, the app situation on Windows Phone still lags behind. Apps are updated infrequently, if they are present at all, with the store lacking most of the vibrancy that has become a hallmark of the Android and iOS app stores.

Final verdict

Despite its somewhat cheap design and the occasional quirk, the Microsoft Lumia 640 is a remarkably well-rounded device. With an excellent screen, a nice camera, strong battery life and good general performance, this is a phone that should easily suit the lifestyles of most.

This is Microsoft's challenge to the Moto G, and with sales of the latest device in the line failing to hit the heights set by its predecessor, the time is right to strike.

With 30GB of free OneDrive storage and a year's subscription to Office 365 for those who purchase the device, the Lumia is an easy sell for most people.

Despite this, two major question marks hang over the device, the first being Windows 10. Set to debut later this year, Microsoft's major update to its operating ecosystem will bring major changes, and whether these will wash away the tentative footsteps made by Windows Phone into the mobile market is yet to be seen.

The second is simply that of future proofing. As other devices are becoming cheaper and more powerful, especially the likes of the Honor Holly, for how long will besting the Moto G be a true measure of success?

For the price, unlocked and with access to 4G, along with all the other bells and whistles, this is a remarkably complete package from Microsoft, which bodes well for later in the year. This is a smartphone for anyone, and as such is well worth your hard-earned currency.

First reviewed: April 2015

Microsoft has unveiled the latest handset in its burgeoning Lumia range - the Microsoft Lumia 640.

There's been plenty rumours about the handset so there wasn't too much surprise when Stephen Elop took to the stage at MWC 2015 to revealed the Microsoft Lumia 640.

The Microsoft Lumia 640 won't come with Windows 10 straight out of the box, but Elop noted that it will be fully upgradeable to the new mobile OS later in the year.

Full specs include a 5-inch screen, 1.2Ghz quad core chip inside, 3G & LTE functionality, an 8MP camera, 2500mAh, gorilla glass, Windows 8.1 and it is also NFC enabled. There will also be single and dual sim variants of the device.

The phones will be available later this year in: orange, blue, white and cyan

Lumia 640 XL

If five inches is just too small for your pocket, then you will be pleased to read that Microsoft has also released an XL version of the device.

Unsurprisingly, the bigger handset has been called the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL and it comes packing a 1080p 5.7inch screen, 13mp camera and LTE. The device will also come with a one-year subscription to Office 365 and the Windows 8.1 OS will be upgradeable to Windows 10 when it is released.

You get all this for 189 Euros. Microsoft said that, among others, Carphone Warehouse, T-Mobile, O2 and Orange will be stocking the device in Europe. AT&T in the US will stock the Lumia 640 and 640 XL.

If this is all a little too middle of the range for you, then don't panic: Elop insisted that its flagship Lumia will be unveiled later this year.

• Check the rest of our MWC 2015 coverage

Qualcomm may be having issues getting its Snapdragon 810 into the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S6, but the chip maker has hit back with a lengthy press release detailing all of the manufacturers that it most definitely will be working with during the rest of 2015.

Companies quoted in the release include Sony and Microsoft, which means that the next-generation processor is almost certain to be appearing inside this year's Xperia and Lumia phones. LG, Xiaomi, Motorola and Oppo also get a mention.

Sony Mobile's Gen Tsuchikawa said he was "excited" to have the Snapdragon 810 coming to Xperia products "later this year", while Microsoft's Juha Kokkonen said that "best in class Lumia smartphones" powered by the Snapdragon 810 are on the way.

Up and coming

We've covered the Snapdragon 810's performance and power improvements before, improvements which should make a substantial difference to everything from 4K video recording to mobile gaming.

The next flagship we're expecting to see from Sony is the Xperia Z4, which we think will be announced at MWC 2015 before going on sale in April. As for Microsoft, we know that Windows 10-powered Lumia phones are on the way later this year, and it looks like the high-end ones will use the Snapdragon 810.

This time next month we should know much more - including whether Qualcomm's mobile processor made the cut for the first run of the Samsung Galaxy S6.

We don't all necessarily want to blow hundreds of pounds on the latest and greatest smartphones, and if you're shopping around for something a little more modest, you've got two new mobiles to pick from: the Lumia 435 and Lumia 532, just announced by Microsoft.

"Pricing will vary by market and operator" says the firm, but the baseline figure is 69 euros before tax for the 435 and 79 euros before tax for the 532. That's a smartphone for about £54/$81/AU$101 or £61/$93/AU$115 based on a basic conversion.

Both phones are running Windows 8.1 complete with Cortana, Skype and Outlook integration and 30GB of OneDrive space as soon as you upload your first pictures from the device. Both phones offer a single or dual-SIM configuration.

Spec savers

The Lumia 435 features a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal space, a 2-megapixel rear camera and a VGA front-facing camera. If you opt for the Lumia 532 (which essentially picks up where the Lumia 530 left off), the CPU gets a quad-core upgrade and the rear camera is boosted to 5 megapixels.

Both handsets are rocking a 4-inch WVGA 800 x 480 pixel screen, and bright green and orange colours will be available alongside white and black.

The target market here is very much those who are upgrading from a feature phone to a smartphone for the first time: think grandparents or kids picking up their first proper handset.

Microsoft says the phones are rolling out from February everywhere except the United States, though it seems Brits will only get the 435 for now. "There are no current plans to launch the Lumia 532 in the UK; however, the Lumia 435 is expected to come to the UK in March," a Nokia spokesperson told us.

• This could be the new Lumia 1330 phablet

We've been expecting a sequel to the Lumia 1320 for a long while now, and it looks like we have our first glimpse at its casing, courtesy of a couple of leaked photos from China.

This large blue shell, which comes from a member of Baidu, (and is holding a Lumia 535 for some reason) could well be the foundation of the Lumia 1330.

If we put on our detective hats for a moment it seems reasonable to assume that the upcoming handset is going to pretty sizeable and feature a hefty camera too, as it dwarfs the 5-inch 535 in both respects. Microsoft's logo now takes the space once filled by the Nokia label.

Early rumours about the device, codenamed RM-1062, suggest that the large hole you can see on the back of the blue casing will be filled by a 14-megapixel snapper, a nice jump from the Lumia 1330's 5-megapixel model.

MWC cometh

Other insider whispers point to a 5.7-inch 720p display, a Snapdragon 400 processor, 1GB RAM and 32GB of storage. We'll know for sure when the phone finally makes its debut, which should be at MWC 2015, kicking off in March.

For those just arriving to the party, the 1300 series Windows Phone devices are the mid-range editions of the 1500 series models. Once it finally does see the light of day, the Lumia 1330 should be the second Microsoft-branded Lumia phone after the 535.

While the leaked pictures don't offer much in the way of cold, hard information about the next Lumia phone, they do at least suggest a launch is imminent — watch out for further leaks trickling out in the near future.

• MWC 2015: what we want to see

The transition from Nokia to Microsoft may be complete, but the Lumia brand isn't going anywhere just yet.

A new leak has appeared, reportedly showing the next handset in the Lumia line-up - called either the Lumia 1052 or Lumia 1030, depending on which source your read. It appears to be a follow up to the Nokia Lumia 1020 and sport an even more impressive camera.

Unnamed sources put the camera on the new Lumia at 50MP, with a shutter-less design and a 4th generation short pulse LED flash.

The body is set to get bigger to incorporate the camera upgrade, putting the screen size at 5 inches with a Full HD resolution. According to the leak, the chassis is crafted from aluminium apart from a small strip at the base.

Windows shopping

Like its Lumia bretheren, the Lumia 1052 or Lumia 1030 will run the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Phone OS. A report over at SlashGear contends that the handset could be Nokia's "McLaren" smartphone that was planned as a follow up to the Lumia 1020 last year.

That device was rumoured to have a "3D Touch" interface that worked like the Microsoft Kinect, using air gestures as well as touch ones.

Of course, this leaked image is likely to represent a prototype that could be refined and changed before a possible consumer release. Predictably, there's been no word from Microsoft on the authenticity of the image.

All we've heard from the brand is a few comments back in September that they were continuing to work on a successor to the Lumia 1020.

If we were betting types, we'd be willing to wager that Microsoft could have a new Lumia device ready for unveiling next year at MWC. Both in order to cement its ownership of the brand and push its operating system into contention for 2015.

• Meanwhile, does Nokia's PureView tech really make a difference?

Via: WMPoweruser.com

The first Lumia bearing Microsoft's name has officially been revealed as the mid-range 5-inch Microsoft Lumia 535.

Instantly recognisable as a Lumia, the 535 boasts a quad-core 1.2GHz processor backed by 1GB RAM and 5MP cameras on both the front and the back. The display is a qHD (960 x 540) affair while the plastic chassis comes in the bright array of colours usually associated with Lumias. There's blue, orange, green and black to choose from.

It runs Windows Phone 8.1 and is clearly aimed as an affordable, entry-level device. A UK/US release date hasn't been announced yet with Microsoft prioritising China, Hong Kong and Bangladesh, although Microsoft has said the UK should expect the Lumia 535 in Q1 of 2015.

When it comes to pricing, Microsoft has slapped an RRP of €110 (around £86, $136, AU$159) on the new device, although retailers and networks may alter this on release.

Windows shopping

Along with the low cost of the device, Microsoft is hoping that its homegrown software will sway potential customers. The Lumia 535 comes with five integrated Microsoft services: Skype, Office, OneDrive, Cortana and OneNote. Of course, all these - bar Cortana - can be had on iOS and Android as well.

Interestingly, Microsoft has given the Lumia 535 a fair bit of connectivity in the form of both microSD support and by creating a dual-SIM version. The former is pretty much a necessity though, as the device will only come with 8GB of native storage.

Microsoft is clearly avoiding a head-on clash with flagship smartphones like the iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S5, preferring instead to grow the Windows Phone user base with affordable devices. It's a tactic that served Nokia well and helped to get Microsoft's mobile OS a foothold in the market.

We won't know for sure how competant the Microsoft Lumia 535 is until we get it in for a full review, so stay tuned to find out our thoughts. In the meantime, Microsoft says it'll begin launching the device in selected markets in November.

• Here's what we'd like to see from the Microsoft Surface 3.

Since dropping the Nokia brand, it seems Microsoft has been hard at work building new Lumia devices. Not only are we expecting the first non-Nokia Lumia to touch down tomorrow, but we may have just seen specs for the flagship Lumia 940.

According to a list of specifications apparently leaked from a Nokia supplier factory, the Lumia 940 could be shaping up to be a pretty powerful handset.

The authenticity of the leaked spec lists hasn't been confirmed yet, so the information here should be taken with a pinch of salt. That said, the specs don't seem unrealistic.

Great specs, amazing camera

According to the leak the Lumia 940 will come with a 5-inch display with a 1080p resolution that'll be protected with a Gorilla Glass 4 protective screen.

Gorilla Glass 4 doesn't actually exist yet, but we know it's coming, so this new Lumia could be one of the first phones to make use of it.

The processor of the Lumia 940 will apparently be a 2.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 805 that will be backed up with a hefty 3GB of RAM.

The Lumia 940 will also allegedly come with a new PureView camera with a 24 megapixel resolution that will be able to shoot 4K video at 60fps. The front-facing camera will apparently be a decent 5MP snapper as well.

The dimensions will be 137 x 71 x 8.9mm and it'll supposedly weigh 149g. According to the leaked specs the Lumia 940 will run the as-yet unreleased Windows Phone 10 mobile operating system. If true, it means we probably won't be seeing this handset for a while.

• Read our review of Microsoft's current flagship, the Lumia 930

Via PhoneArena

A large number of images claiming to show off the new Microsoft Lumia 535 have leaked onto the internet giving us a detailed look at Microsoft's new handset.

The Lumia 535 is set to be Microsoft's first smartphone since the Redmond company ditched the Nokia brand name.

Both Microsoft and Nokia have teased a new Lumia launch on November 11, and these new photos unveiled by WMPoweruser might have just spoiled the surprise.

They also correspond with the teased image Nokia and Microsoft posted on Facebook, along with some earlier leaked photos of a new Microsoft Lumia device.

What do you get?

Microsoft might find itself all out of surprises for the launch event tomorrow, as along with these photos we also know a good deal about the specs of the Lumia 535.

It's tipped to pack a 5-inch qHD screen, a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 200 processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage.

It'll also have a 5 megapixel rear camera and a VGA front facing snapper, 1,900mAh batter and will support dual SIM cards.

Its dimensions are said to be 140.2 x 72.45 x 9.32mm and it will weigh 145.7g. With all this information out in the wild, will Microsoft still have any surprises up its sleeve for tomorrow's event?

• Read our review of the latest Lumia device, the Nokia Lumia 735

Via wmpoweruser.com

If you want a Windows Phone to take advantage of the new 700MHz spectrum otherwise known as Telstra's 4GX network, you'll be pleased to know that Nokia, er, Microsoft has just announced it will be launching its Lumia 830 flagship handset in Australia this month.

Available in bright orange, bright green, white and black colour options, the latest Lumia handset is set to launch for Telstra customers and Optus business customers this month.

You will also be able to pick it up from major retailers around the country for $579.

Affordable power

The Lumia 830 promises some impressively powerful specs for a bargain price. As well as boasting a 5-inch 720p display, the Lumia 830 will run on the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1.

The 10-megapixel PureView camera features integrated optical image stabilisation, with an LED flash and Zeiss optics.

The phone runs on a 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, and the 2200mAh battery is both removable and supports the Qi wireless charging standard.

• Why not find out which are the best mobile phones in the world?

Update: Microsoft has opened up a little about the transition to Nokia Lumia and revealed that a new Microsoft Lumia product will be coming soon.

"We are looking forward to unveiling a Microsoft Lumia device soon," said Tuula Rytilä, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Phones at Microsoft.

"This is of course a natural progression as all devices that once came from Nokia now come from Microsoft."

Speaking on the official Nokia blog, Rytilä explained Lumia's new standing alongside Microsoft's other brands like Xbox, Surface and Windows. Changes have already begun to appear with the company's apps and social media channels renamed and product packaging in line to follow.

The transformation may be complete but Microsoft wisely isn't doing away with current handsets. Rytilä confirmed that all existing Lumia handsets will continue to be supported by the big MS.

Original story below...

Microsoft is set to officially drop the Nokia brand in favour of Microsoft Lumia. The move has been expected for a while, with internal documents leaked last month explaining that the Redmond company would be ditching references to both Nokia and Windows Phone.

Now Microsoft has confirmed to The Verge that the change is official. This means that in future there will be no Nokia Lumia handset, but instead Microsoft Lumia.

Nokia France will be the first region to change to Microsoft Lumia, which will be reflected on its Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts.

Nokia won't completely disappear, with the Finnish company continuing to focus on mapping and network infrastructure. Just don't expect to see 'Nokia' printed on any new handsets.

What about Windows Phone?

While Microsoft confirmed it's dumping the Nokia brand, it didn't shed any further light on the future of Windows Phone.

In the same leaked documents that suggested Microsoft would be ditching the Nokia brand it was also hinted that the 'Windows Phone' brand would be dropped. But we'll just have to wait and find out.

• Read our review of the Nokia Lumia 530

We're anticipating that Microsoft will debut both the Nokia Lumia 730 and the Nokia Lumia 830 at IFA 2014 this September, and the latest photo leak has provided some new clues regarding one of these devices.

The photos appeared on Chinese site Baidu Tieba with watermarks claiming that they show not just the Lumia 730, but also a new Lumia 735 variant.

The Lumia 735 is reportedly the version with 4G LTE, while the 730 has dual-SIM 3G capabilities.

They appear here in black and white, though the release versions will likely come in more colors.

Middle of the road

As a successor to the Nokia Lumia 720, the Lumia 730 and 735 should fall in the mid-range of Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 handsets this generation.

As Windows Phone Central points out, these photos make it look basically like a mix between the Lumia 720 and the Lumia 800/900 series in terms of design.

The Lumia 730 is rumored to carry a 4.7-inch HD ClearBlack display, a quad-core Snapdragon chip, 1GB of memory, 6.7- and 5-megapixel cameras, and 8GB of storage with microSD support - and unlike other Lumia devices, no dedicated hard camera button.

Not the greatest specs, but that's why the term "mid-range" exists.

• Good thing it won't be competing with the iPhone 6

Well look what showed up in our inbox today - an invite to a Microsoft event in Berlin September 4.

This of course coincides with the kick-off of IFA 2014, and we're looking for Microsoft to unveil the follow-up to the Lumia 1020.

Several hints on the invitation lead us to believe this is the device the Softies plan on revealing. For one, it reads "ready for more" in prominent text, signaling a sequel is on the way.

The "o" in "more" also bears resemblance to the Lumia 1020's rear camera, a 41MP behemoth that one praise in our review.

The Lumia 1020 follow-up may be one in the same with the rumored "Superman" phone, a selfie-centric device that packs a 5MP front-facing camera. The invitation does coax attendees to "join us for more face time," which could be a reference to front camera-enabled video chatting features.

Bring it on

A new flagship phone comes at a fascinating time for Microsoft. Now under the helm of only its third CEO and with Nokia living under its corporate umbrella, the Redmond firm could stand to wow consumers with a standout device that boasts more than just a powerful snapper. This is especially important as the iPhone 6 launch looms large and Samsung continues to saturate the Android market with phones.

In fact, Sammy has its own event scheduled for September 3 where it will almost certainly unveil the Galaxy Note 4.

You can count on TechRadar to be on hand at the September 4 gathering to see whatever Microsoft has planned. Let us know - are you all in with a Lumia 1020 2 or do you want to see Microsoft show off something else?

• After IFA the next big thing is CES 2015!

Updated: It sounds like Microsoft isn't being too coy about its rumoured Android Lumia device. We're hearing that VP of Microsoft's Devices Group Stephen Elop has been chatting to people about the phone quite publicly.

Not only that, but TK Tech News (a pretty solid source) says Elop has even been seen in public with a "strange looking device" which is said to be the Android Lumia - and currently goes by the name of "Project Green".

Original story below...

Microsoft's already dabbled in Android with the Nokia X, but the relationship may be about to get more serious with rumours of an Android-powered Nokia Lumia phone beginning to swirl.

It seems that the X was to mark the start of something much bigger, if word from @evleaks is to be believed. The tipster posted: "Big news: Android-powered Lumia incoming, from Nokia by Microsoft."

Though recently caught out by a hoax claiming the existence of a OnePlus Tab, @evleaks has a pretty bang-on track record, so we're inclined to pay attention.

X-citing prospect

We also quite liked the budget Nokia X. While it placed Android at the centre, the handset had the unmistakable colourful design of a Windows Phone. All in all, it took the best aspects of both worlds.

An Android Lumia will hopefully do the same, giving us a taste of a more premium Google-Microsoft phone.

Meanwhile, a Nokia Lumia 830 render has seemingly surfaced, showing off a 13MP camera Pureview camera.

What's also interesting is the "Nokia by Microsoft" logo, hinting at how Redmond plans to transition to a Microsoft brand name for its phones.

But as this is just a render there's no guarantee as to what it is. Could it even be the rumoured Android-based Lumia? Who's to say...

• Nokia X review: Microsoft tries to own all the Google juice

Via Wmpoweruser

What do I think of the Nokia Lumia 1520? Well quite frankly I think it's pointless, it's nothing more than a glorified hand warmer. But it's OK, because Nokia will back me up wholeheartedly here.

Let's travel back almost two years, to January 2012. We were in a whirlwind of excess at CES in Las Vegas and it appeared Sin City was bringing the best out of Nokia boss Stephen Elop as he laid into quad-core handsets.

When quizzed about the upcoming flurry of quad-core toting Android smartphones Elop told TechRadar: "You don't need a quad-core phone unless you want to keep your hands warm in your pocket."

And for the next 20 months or so we saw Nokia continue to churn out single and dual-core smartphones while competitors delivered the likes of the LG G2, HTC One and Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

On the quad-core offensive

It's worth noting that Nokia couldn't actually match its Android rivals thanks to the limitations of the Windows Phone platform, which didn't support the four core technology, nor did it allow for phablet size displays until the launch of the Lumia 1520.

But just because the technology becomes available doesn't mean you have to use it, and a couple of months after his Vegas chat with TechRadar, Elop was on the quad-core offensive yet again.

Talking to the Yangcheng Evening News, Elop said quad-core phones were just a waste of battery life - yet here we are now looking a quad-core Nokia handset smack bang in the face.

What the hell, Nokia? Seriously. You bang on about how efficient Windows Phone is on single and dual-core processors and how it doesn't need all that wasteful processing power that four cores offer, just to backtrack and make yourself look silly.

Therefore I'm viewing the launch of the Lumia 1520 as Nokia admitting it was wrong on quad-core. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Third degree burns

That is, unless, it's launched a handset with atrocious battery life and a temperature problem which sees it overheat in a matter of seconds leaving you with third degree burns.

If this is the case then fair play Elop - your points will be well justified. Although you may end up in jail for launching a potentially dangerous smartphone.

I fear though Nokia hasn't included either of these "killer" features in its first quad-core smartphone and in fact has provided us with another run of the mill Windows Phone device which, apart from its full HD screen and sheer size, will be yet another carbon copy experience.

So can we trust anything that comes out of Elop's mouth? Well in the same Vegas-based TechRadar interview he also commented on rumors suggesting Microsoft was looking to take over Nokia.

"The rumors are baseless and it seems certain factions who like to generate rumors are running out of fresh material and [are] recycling the old," he said.

Hmm.

• Find out what else Elop had to say about tablets, Symbian and smartphones last year by reading the full interview with TechRadar

Microsoft built several Surface phone prototypes to safeguard against a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone failure, according to reports on Friday.

The software and devices giant developed the handsets as a back-up plan if Nokia proved unable to produce the goods with its early Lumia devices.

However, that scheme was put on the back burner, according to The Verge, as Nokia's handsets lived up to expectations and it became apparent that an acquisition might be in the pipeline.

Nokia aside, the company has struggled to convince other manufacturers to dedicate significant support for Windows Phone as the likes of HTC, LG and Samsung focus on better-selling Android offerings.

What if?

The reports surfaced on the same day it was claimed Nokia experimented with the Android OS, before deciding to throw its eggs into the Windows Phone basket.

The New York Times reported that the Finnish company has tested Android on an existing Lumia device and claimed the task of porting the OS to its existing was not "herculean."

The revelations leave Nokia hardware fans - and probably some shareholders - wondering what might have been if the company had pulled the trigger on its Android experiment.

You'd have to think, with Nokia's vastly superior hardware design history, it may have wiped the floor with the plastic-fantastic galaxy offerings from Samsung. Unfortunately, we'll never know.

• Read about Huawei still being on board with WP8 despite the Nokia buyout.

The headline-making Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone-cum-camera is now available for $100 less in the United States, potentially a sign that Microsoft is already ringing the changes at Nokia.

The Microsoft Store stateside is now selling the 41-megapixel Windows Phone 8 handset for $199 (around £127, AU$216) on a two-year contract, compared with Nokia's lofty $299 (around £191, AU$325) launch price.

The price is being matched by the AT&T network, but Microsoft is going one better (for a limited time) and chucking in the camera grip accessory for everyone who picks up the device.

Early indications are that the heavily-hyped Lumia 1020 hasn't been flying off the shelves, so perhaps this price cut can offer Microsoft a boost in the early stages of its Nokia stewardship.

Unrelated to sale?

The device is yet to enjoy a full launch in the UK, despite being on sale since late July in the United States.

So far, the device is only on sale in Britain through the independent Expansys site, for the not-insignificant SIM-only price of £599, and there is little support from networks as yet.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the price cut is unrelated to Microsoft's buyout of Nokia's devices and services unit, but the timing is rather convenient. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

• Can the Lumia 1020 really take on a compact camera system? We put the 41-megapixel master to the test.

Via Engadget

The Nokia Lumia 1020 may have changed the mobile photography landscape, but is it going to cause any disruption in the compact system camera class, too? If you aren't already familiar with the Lumia 1020's camera, it's basically a point-and-shoot or compact camera stuffed into a smartphone body. Sort of.

After reviewing Nokia's latest flagship smartphone, we were left wondering why the Finnish company would put a 41MP camera sensor into a device intended for messaging and making phone calls. Is it just to give phone a big number on a spec sheet? Or is it intended to replace your compact or compact system camera?

We've decided to put it up against the iPhone 5, which has a respectable 8MP shooter on board, and the Olympus E-PL5 - a nice compact system camera loaded with features and really good image quality.

The first comparison is obvious. The iPhone 5 is a smartphone that you'll find in most hands when you're out and about, and its camera has always performed well against other smartphones. Pitting it against the Lumia 1020 seems fair.

We were tempted to compare the 1020 to a full-frame DSLR given the smartphone's incredibly high megapixel count. Nokia also claims in its Lumia 1020 white paper that some of the features on the 41MP PureView camera were only found on DSLRs. But regardless of pixel count, a full-frame sensor from the likes of Nikon or Canon would stomp on any tiny, smartphone camera sensor any day of the week.

Instead, we decided to go with the Olympus E-PL5 because it seems more in line with what the Lumia 1020 is trying to be: a compact camera replacement. The Lumia's size and portability is much closer to a compact camera than a DSLR, and like many compact cameras, it has a fixed focal length lens. It's worth noting, however, that the E-PL5 is a micro four-thirds compact system camera that supports interchangeable lenses.

The E-PL5 has a 16MP sensor - a far cry from the Nokia's 41MP unit - but the sensor is much larger than the one found in the 1020. So we're going to find out whether megapixels trumps sensor size in this comparison, although if you're familiar with cameras and camera technology, you may already have your money on the bigger sensor.

In this image comparison, we're going to take a look at overall image quality, which takes into account color, contrast, details and dynamic range. We're also going to consider performance. How long does it take to fire up the device and snap a photo, and how quickly can you snap photos in rapid succession?

Another area we'll consider is low-light performance and how well each of the three devices handles noise.

Because of Nokia's claims, we're going to push each camera as far as they will go, even if one camera has capabilities that another doesn't (e.g. aperture controls and high ISO settings). This isn't going to be the sort of comparison where we try to get each camera's settings as close to each other as possible, then pixel-peep the photos. There will be a little bit of that, but for the most part we're going to push these cameras to see whether any can be considered a replacement for the other, or if they're truly in separate classes.

Up top is the Lumia 1020. Everyone loves taking flower photos in broad daylight for some reason, so we'll get it kicked off with that. Below is the iPhone 5.

Immediately, we can see that the Nokia Lumia 1020 looks slightly more favorable since it does a better job in this case of isolating the subject. That's because it offers slightly shallower depth of field, so the flowers behind the main flower are a little more blurry. With the iPhone photo, everything is a little more in focus, so the image looks more muddled.

The iPhone's color saturation and white balance might be too rich and warm compared to the Lumia 1020. So we're giving this one to the Lumia 1020.

At 900 pixels wide, which is how big these images are when you click on them, details appear similar, though the iPhone 5 seems a bit sharper.

The blurry image above is the Lumia's sad attempt at taking a macro shot. Whether you have it set to autofocus or manual focus, it just isn't meant to shoot closer than six or seven inches away from its subject. The photo below, however, is the iPhone's attempt at taking the same macro shot. It does much better than the Lumia here.

The next two photos are low-light shots taken at my desk.

The iPhone 5 is the first image, and it surprisingly did better in terms of exposure. However, it's obvious that the Lumia 1020 does better with focus and overall clarity--it has less noise than the iPhone image. Colors are accurate for both photos, but we're giving the edge to the Lumia here for its sharpness, focus and for being a little cleaner when it comes to noise.

The top ocean scene is shot by the Lumia 1020, and the one right below it is by the iPhone 5. Colors aren't that great for either photo, but the iPhone does a little better with exposure. You can see more detail in the shadows.

However, the Lumia's overall image quality and sharpness seems a little better, and it captured the sky color a bit better than the iPhone 5. Perhaps that's because the Lumia underexposed the photo just a little.

In this case, it's really hard to pick either one as a clear winner because it's a matter of preference. We like the Lumia 1020's photo overall because of its sharpness and clarity, and we really don't mind the underexposed trees and buildings.

The two photos above are with mixed lighting: tungsten indoors, with the door open and letting daylight into the room. As you can see, it's really a toss up, but the top photo is the Lumia 1020 and its colors are a little more rich than the iPhone 5. So we'll give the Nokia points for that.

iPhone vs. Lumia 1020 conclusion

No surprises here, really. The Nokia Lumia 1020 camera is better than the iPhone 5's camera. Though the iPhone 5 has bigger pixel sites than the 1020, 1.4 microns vs. 1.12 microns, it seems that the Nokia's bigger sensor and overwhelming number of pixels makes for better image quality.

We already know that you can "zoom" or at least crop in on the Lumia's images without much loss of quality. Its advantage over the iPhone 5, aside from general image quality, is the fact that you have so much room to play with when it comes to cropping.

However, it's not all in favor of the Lumia 1020. Before we forget, it's still on the Windows Phone 8 platform, which means it doesn't have nearly as many apps as the iPhone 5 for photo editing and sharing.

With the iPhone 5, you get Instagram, Vine, Snapseed, Camera+, Pro Camera and thousands of other image editing apps.

The iPhone's camera can also shoot faster and in rapid succession, whereas the Lumia 1020's camera is sluggish and slow to process images.

If you're looking for the best quality images out of your smartphone, and speed and timing are of no importance (like with landscape photography), then the Lumia 1020 owns the iPhone 5 all day long. But if speed and ease of use matters to you in capturing fleeting moments, the iPhone 5 will run circles around the Nokia.

Now comes the real test. The Nokia Lumia 1020 has been touted as a point-and-shoot killer by some blogs, and even a DSLR replacement by others. Give us a break. The 1020 is definitely easier to carry around and use compared to larger cameras, but it will never compare with a DSLR.

But how does the 41MP PureView camera on the Nokia stack up against a decent compact system camera like the Olympus E-PL5? Let's find out.

There's that sad Lumia 1020 macro shot again. Not much to say here besides the fact that the Olympus E-PL5 stomps all over Nokia in this category.

The first desk/phone photo was taken by the Olympus E-PL5, and it's pretty clear that the winner here is the Olympus. The image is brighter, cleaner, sharper and has better color accuracy than the Lumia 1020.

Now this flower shot is where things aren't so black and white. The Lumia 1020 did a bit better with color and saturation here, and it seems a bit sharper than the Olympus, too. We think we're going to give this one to the Lumia 1020.

In this ocean scene again, we can see that the Olympus has better dynamic range in the top image. The Lumia tends to underexpose, and as a result you lose some shadow details. The clear winner here is the Olympus because you have that much more flexibility if you want to edit the image.

The first image is from the Olympus E-PL5, and the second one is the Nokia. Because the Olympus does a better job of balancing the two sources of light, colors look a little better, too. The Lumia has better contrast, but overall we have to give this one to the E-PL5 for better balance, color and dynamic range.

Lumia 1020 vs. Olympus E-PL5 conclusion

So, it's obvious that the Nokia Lumia 1020 isn't going to be replacing a modern compact system camera. Megapixel counts generally don't mean much when it comes to sensor size and image processing. The bigger sensor and better image processor usually wins.

The Olympus, being a Micro Four-Thirds camera, also has interchangeable lenses and better controls and options. It has more in common with a DSLR than the Lumia phone, so there really is no sense in comparing the two.

If you want a compact camera for more serious still photography, don't count on the Lumia 1020 to handle that job for you. A nice compact system camera like the Sony NEX-6 or Olympus E-PL5 will do a better job, at a cost.

But if you just want the best images you can possibly get out of a smartphone, the Lumia 1020 is still the king of phone cameras.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 has shown us what the current limits of smartphone photography are. It has the best smartphone camera you can buy today, and it's a nice bridge between smartphones and compact system cameras. However, it isn't going to replace your dedicated camera system.

Below is a 100% crop of a flower taken by the Olympus E-PL5, Nokia Lumia 1020 and iPhone 5, respectively. As you can see, the Olympus didn't quite nail the focus on flower's stigma like the Lumia 1020 and iPhone 5 did. However, you can see that even with its lower pixel count, it reveals more detail than either of the smartphones. Just take a look at the fine, white hairs behind the star-shaped stigma.

The Lumia 1020, which did nail the focus perfectly, looks pretty incredible. We never would have imagined this kind of quality and resolution from a smartphone five or six years ago. In fact, it would've been hard to imagine this kind of performance from a phone camera just three years ago.

The iPhone 5 turns out to be a great all-around camera for snapshots and taken fun photos for filters and edits. It also does pretty well for prints up to a certain size. But if we are going to continue pixel peeping photos for their technical quality rather than their beauty and content, the Lumia is the better phone camera.

In the end, it turns out there is really no comparing the three cameras. The Olympus offers so much more flexibility and control, and its picture quality and performance is arguably better than either of the smartphone cameras.

The Lumia 1020 has its triumphs over the iPhone 5, but at the sacrifice of speed and performance, as well as operating system. After all, when you buy a phone, you're not just buying the camera, but the entire device and software as a package.

Whatever you take away from this comparison, we hope that we can shift focus away from all the technical stuff at the end of the day, and enjoy taking nice, meaningful pictures instead.

Given today's anticipated reveal of the Nokia Lumia 1020, both Microsoft and Nokia have plenty to say about the smartphone with the 41-megapixel camera.

For one thing, Microsoft made some changes to Windows Phone 8 to accommodate the extra-powerful snapper, Windows Phone Vice President Joe Belfiore and Nokia Vice President Kevin Shields said in a discussion posted on the Windows Blog.

• Check out our hands on: Nokia Lumia 1020 review

Shields said that the OS "played a critical role" in the creation of the Lumia 1020.

"It's easy to get fixated on this one feature - this terrific 41-megapixel sensor that we're shipping - but there was a lot of unseen work on the Windows Phone side that went into it: plumbing and UI changes to bring out the best of that component and make the camera experience possible," he said. "Our collaboration with Microsoft was super important to making the Lumia 1020 the great product that it is."

Sharing is caring

"Our goal is to work with our partners as if we were a single organization, designing hardware and software together," Microsoft's Belfiore said.

"Nokia came to us with the idea for building this amazing camera, and we had to find the right ways to improve the platform so they could deliver the best imaging experience on any phone, anywhere," he added.

Microsoft improved the zoom capability in its photo viewer and made other changes that the two execs say are "under the covers" but nonetheless vital.

Belfiore also influenced the development of Nokia's Pro Camera app, which is meant to replicate features found on high-end cameras, and he said that he wrote more than 10 pages of feedback for Nokia during development.

But can it beat a DSLR?

Shields also addressed a burning question: how is the Lumia 1020 different from Nokia's 808 PureView, a Symbian phone with a 41-megapixel camera that launched in 2012?

He said the Lumia 1020 is a combination of Nokia's past successes; it combines the 808's large sensor with the image stabilization of the Lumia 920.

He added that high-quality DSLR digital cameras, while they may match or surpass the 1020 in some ways, lack the processing power of the Windows Phone.

• What these dudes say is well and good, but want to know what TechRadar thinks of the new phone?