Microsoft Lumia 640 review: Still a great Windows phone

The first Lumia phone to bear Microsoft’s name after it bought Nokia back in 2013 was a huge disappointment, and we were worried we might never see a decent Lumia Windows phone ever again. Indeed, the company’s latest efforts, the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, have been equally underwhelming.

Thankfully, its entry-level Lumia 640 (in addition to the excellent Lumia 640 XL) is the shining light in its Windows phone portfolio, and is arguably still the best Windows phone you can buy today. It’s getting on a bit, having been originally released in 2015, but you can still pick one up for around £125 SIM-free from Debenhams, or as little as 

, making it a great buy even today.

It’s a big step up from its 4.5in predecessor, the Lumia 630, as it now has a huge 5in screen with a 1,280×720 resolution. It’s still available in the same eye-popping shade of orange, though, along with a gorgeous new cyan shade seen here. There are also more traditional white and black models, but unlike the glossy orange and blue, these have a matt finish. We’d actually prefer to see them all with a matt chassis, as our glossy review sample quickly became a magnet for fingerprints and felt quite slippery around the back.

That said, the Lumia 640 is still a beautifully made phone. Measuring 141x72x8.8mm, it’s pleasingly slim and its angular edges allow you to grip it securely even when you’re using it single-handed. It’s a much smarter handset than its overly chunky plastic predecessor, and it’s easily as good looking as its more expensive big brother, the Lumia 735.

DISPLAY

The display also looks fantastic. This is thanks in part to Microsoft’s ClearBlack IPS display, as the Start screen’s dark inky black background almost blends seamlessly into the phone’s surrounding bezel. It’s not completely perfect, as our colour calibrator measured a black level of 0.34cd/m2, but there’s no denying it’s pleasing to the eye.

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Colour accuracy was equally impressive, as previous Lumia phones tended to fall down here. The Lumia 630, for instance, only covered 84.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, but the Lumia 640 sailed past this with a very evenly spread 90.7%, leading to more natural looking images. Colours were perhaps a little flat compared to some of the more saturated screens you’ll find on Android handsets, but we were very pleased with the overall quality of our test images.

The only downside is that the screen isn’t particularly bright. With a peak white level of 376.11cd/m2, you’ll need to keep it on maximum brightness when using the phone outside, but Auto and the Medium brightness profile were perfectly adequate for using indoors. Each brightness profile is fully adjustable, too, so you can easily tweak each setting should you want to conserve a bit more energy. Contrast was also a little low at 833:1, but this is to be expected on a lower-end smartphone, and there was still plenty of detail present in our test images.

PERFORMANCE

We were pleased to see the Lumia 640’s big screen didn’t put too much of a strain on the 2,500mAh battery either. While it couldn’t match the 12 hours we saw on the Lumia 630, its score of 10h 11m in our continuous video playback test is still more than acceptable for such a cheap handset.

The one disappointing thing about the Lumia 640 is Microsoft’s decision to stick with last year’s quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset instead of the newer Snapdragon 410. It’s not much of an issue in daily use, though, as Windows Phone 8.1 is still plenty fast enough, with smooth menu transitions and quick loading times.

It didn’t score particularly highly in our BrowserMark test, scoring just 510, but in practice we had few complaints when browsing the web. We were able to scroll up and down pages virtually judder free and pinch-zooming worked much more effectively than the disastrous Lumia 535. It was still a little tricky to pan round the page, but the phone as a whole is much less frustrating to use. Continues on Page 2

WINDOWS PHONE 8.1

Microsoft’s mobile operating system has come on leaps and bounds with the Lumia Denim update, and we particularly like the revamped Settings menu. Rather than simply listing every option in one big, confusing list, each one has been reorganised into categories such as Network & Wireless, Personalisation, System and Privacy.

This makes things much easier to find, although there are still a few rogue options. Display, which lets you adjust the brightness and colour profiles, is stuck in Extras instead of System, where you’ll find the ordinary brightness settings.

Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant, also comes as standard, and you can launch it either using the onscreen Search button or through the traditional Live Tile app. While not quite as efficient as Apple’s Siri, it is still in beta at the moment, so there’s every possibility that it will get better in the future.

^ Cortana isn’t only good for searching the web, as it also controls your diary and various alarms

As well as being able to search the web and answer questions for you, Cortana can control your phone’s ‘quiet hours’. This is one of our favourite features, as it effectively puts the phone on silent during set hours of the day, such as late at night or weekend mornings, so you can get on with your home life undisturbed. You can still allow favourite contacts to get through, though, and anyone who calls twice in three minutes, just in case there’s an emergency.

Another handy bonus is a free one-year subscription to Office 365, with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. This offer will be valid across all your Windows PCs and tablets, too, allowing you to seamlessly sync your Office docs on the move across all your various devices.

CAMERA

On the back is an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash. On paper, this is a welcome improvement over the Lumia 630’s 5-megapixel snapper, but in reality we weren’t particularly impressed with the quality of our shots. There was plenty of detail present, but all of our test shots looked quite hazy and out of focus, even in bright sunshine, and lighter objects suffered from too much overexposure.

^ There was plenty of sunlight present when we took this shot, but it still ended up looking a little hazy and disappointing

CONCLUSION

The Lumia 535 may have been a big disappointment, but the Microsoft Lumia 640 certainly paves a much brighter future for Windows phones going forward. With a great-looking screen, snappy performance, decent battery life and loads of extra features, it’s clearly punching above its weight for an entry-level handset, and it’s a more than a worthy upgrade for existing Lumia 630 owners.

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What’s more, the 4G version is just £120 SIM-free, with contracts starting around £16.99 a month for 500MB of data, 500 minutes and unlimited texts. The larger Lumia 640 XL may have more stamina over the course of a day, but the smaller, Lumia 640 is our new budget Windows phone of choice.

See all of the best Microsoft Lumia 640 deals on uSwitch