Microsoft takes aim at iPhone6 with Lumia 640

MICROSOFT’s latest Lumia phones offer most of the bells and whistles of high-end devices, just not the premium bells and whistles.

MICROSOFT hopes that its affordable mid range phones will capture the attention of the masses. So today it announced another one: the Lumia 640, a 5-inch display model with a polycarbonate backplate, and a larger 640XL model, with a 5.7 inch display. Their sizes mirror the iPhone 6 and 6S.

It was the familiar face of Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO and now a Microsoft vice president, who led Microsoft’s presentation at the Mobile World Conference at Barcelona.

He extolled the benefits of the upcoming Windows 10 operating system, along with a concept that Microsoft is keen to promote — universal applications that will run across all Microsoft device platforms.

Mr Elop said 2.8 million people had registered with the Microsoft Insider Program and were accessing developer versions of the new OS.

In the mobile space, Microsoft’s challenge has been to attract users to a Lumia device, and at prices starting at 139 euros ($200), they are trying hard.

The mid-range Lumia phones offer most of the bells and whistles of high-end devices, and are fast and functional. They just lack some of the premium bells and whistles.

In the case of the Lumia 640, it doesn’t have Lumia’s PureView camera system, a dedicated camera button, nor a full HD 1080p display — it’s 720 p HD instead.

But it does have an 8 megapixel camera with a dynamic flash and HDR, and a front facing camera with a wide-angle lens.

And it does have two features that are progressively missing from high end smartphones — a removable battery and microSD card port which can add 128 Gigabytes of storage to the 8GB internally available. There’s also two SIM 3G and 4G LTE versions.

The XL version has a bigger 13 megapixel snapper, a 3000 milliampere hour battery, and is 9 millimetres thick.

The phones are due to debut next month. Initially they will ship with Windows 8.1 but Microsoft says ithe 640s hardware is built for Windows 10. Microsoft said it intended to shift all existing Lumia handsets running Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.

Microsoft demonstrated some of the Windows 10 phone features at the congress. Recently used apps bubble up to the top of the application menu list, and recently used settings appear at the top of that list too.

The new software includes a hub that combines messaging from various sources, such as Skype, into a single feed.

Microsoft showed off its Project Spartan, the code name for its new cutdown mobile browser with an uncomplicated, minimalist design. It described it as a reader for your browser. Selected fonts reformat website text into a more pleasant, readable form. It’s a feature found in competing ecosystems.

Microsoft demonstrated other examples of Windows 10 universal app integration.

Microsoft corporate vice president of phones Jo Harlow said Windows 10 would be the turning point for Microsoft. The advent of universal apps would aid its growth across platforms.

She said the mid-range phones might lack some premium hardware features but they brought a flagship experience through software. The phones also offered Microsoft opportunities in emerging markets.

Microsoft has a practice of rotating the available colours on its phones, so yellow phones are out and orange ones are in. And there’s black, white and cyan — which it regards as a corporate colour.

Chris Griffith travelled to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona courtesy of HTC.