Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an affordable phone with a 5 inch, 720p display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 quad-core processor, and a rather affordable price tag.
The Lumia 540 Dual SIM should be available in May for about $149.
As the name implies, the phone supports two SIM cards so you can use the phone on multiple networks. That’s not a feature that’s common for phones sold in the US, but it comes in handy in many parts of the world — and Microsoft plans to offer the Lumia 540 Dual SIM in the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Italy.
The phone has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and 15GB of free cloud storage with Microsoft OneDrive (or 30GB if you enable auto-upload for your camera roll).
The Lumia 540 Dual SIM has an 8MP rear camera with LED flash and auto-focus, and a 5MP wide-angle front camera. The phone has a 2200 mAh battery.
Microsoft will launch the phone with Windows Phone 8.1 software, but a free Windows 10 update will be available later this year.
This is what Microsoft publicizes today :), the same day Nokia announced they bought Alcatel for 16.6B, and is now effectively back in the handset manufacturing business, having left Microsoft holding a very ugly bag. Can anyone tell the difference between a 2011 Lumia, and a 2015 one ? Everyone else in the industry, is jumping over backwards with new materials and design, and they still make the same God awful plastic unibody nonsense.
You are factually incorrect. Nokia aquired french Alcatel-Lucent, which is a Manufacturer of Network Equipment, not Alcatel OneTouch, a Handset Maker owned by China’s TCL Communication. So in essence, 2 Companies that have Brandrecognition in the Mobile Handset Space from Days gone by, who both sold their Handset Division to other Companies, merged to work on, and i quote the Press release here “5G, IP and software-defined networking, cloud, analytics as well as sensors and imaging.”
Yes, you are correct. TCL apparently owns the label now. I taught they were just a manufacturing partner. It was actually pretty stupid and presumptuous of me to think that a multy-billion deal between two enormous companies, would be so poorly put together, it would allow for such a ridiculous thing, to circumvent what I imagine is a 1000+ page non-compete. 🙂
Snapdragon 200? I think this is the first time I have heard of anyone using it. The Snapdragon 400 seems to the be cheap series these days. 8 GB of RAM? At least it has a microSD card slot. 720p doesn’t bother me on a budget phone but the rest of the specs are rubbish. There are better smartphones (including Windows phones) out there for close to the same money.
While I’m not thrilled about the prospect of MS succeeding in mobile space, I am pleased that the low priced lumia hardware pushes down the entry level prices for smartphones in general.
Yuck, those Lumia colors look kind of lame.
$150 is way too much for s200.