Microsoft Lumia 640 XL review

It’s been almost 18 months since we last saw a Lumia phablet, but Microsoft’s Lumia 640 XL brings back big-screen Windows phones with a bang. The 5.7in display is a lot more manageable than the 6in Lumia 1320 and 1520, and it’s a lot cheaper too, with SIM-free prices starting at just £186.

What’s more, it shares the same excellent build quality as the smaller 5in Lumia 640. It’s a fraction fatter, measuring 158x81x9.0mm and weighing 171g, but it’s just as easy to hold thanks to its rounded corners and angular sides. Reaching across the other side of the screen is a bit of a stretch when using the phone single-handed, but its flat matt rear provides plenty of purchase.

We’re particularly glad the orange and new cyan shades have the matt rear in this case, as these were glossy on the Lumia 640 and didn’t provide as much grip as we would have liked. Instead, it’s the white and black models which get the glossy finish on the Lumia 640 XL, which were matt on the Lumia 640. The Lumia 640 XL isn’t merely a carbon copy of its petite sibling, though, as it’s received a number of upgrades to justify its higher price.

DISPLAY

The most obvious is the larger 5.7in display, which is great for web browsing and composing Office documents – particularly handy considering Microsoft is throwing in a year’s free subscription to Office 365 with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage with every handset. You can also use it on your PC and Windows tablets as well.

It still has a 1,280×720 resolution, so it understandably won’t be as sharp as the Lumia 640, but from a normal viewing distance we couldn’t really tell the difference. Peering in close reveals marginally more jagged letters and Live Tile icons, but everything was still perfectly legible and it didn’t cause any problems during everyday use.

Image quality outstrips the 640, as the 640 XL is both significantly brighter at 581.79cd/m2 on its highest setting and produces more accurate colours. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 93.2% of the sRGB colour gamut as opposed to just 90.7%, and its overall coverage was much more evenly spread across the gamut as well, resulting in richer, more natural looking images.

The display also had much better contrast levels, measuring 1,102:1, which provided more detail in our test images. Viewing angles were also much wider, allowing us to see the screen clearly from multiple viewpoints. The only downside was slightly elevated black levels, which measured 0.52cd/m2. However, thanks to Microsoft’s ClearBlack IPS technology, blacks actually looked just as deep, if not deeper, than those on the Lumia 640. This really helped colours stand out on the Start screen, and it also made text that bit easier to see and read at higher brightness levels.

CAMERA

Another advantage the Lumia 640 XL has over its smaller sibling is a higher-resolution 13-megapixel camera. We weren’t particularly impressed with the murky images we took on the Lumia 640, but the 640 XL’s sensor is far more capable, producing bright, crisp images without a hint of haze or blurry edges.

Shadows could be a little dark, but there was still plenty of fine detail present and we couldn’t see many traces of noise, even in large expanses of sky.

^ The Lumia 640 XL produced much clearer and more detailed images than the Lumia 640

^ Shadow areas were perhaps a little dark, but noise was kept to a minimum

Extra camera modes are sadly in short supply, but it is compatible with the Lumia Refocus app, which lets you adjust the point of focus after you’ve taken an image. You’ll need to download and install it, but there’s a direct download shortcut within the camera settings menu alongside the Lumia Selfie app. It’s a fun addition, but focusing on the background tended to make images appear quite noisy, so we’d recommend sticking to close-up macro shots rather than far-away landscapes.

^ The Lumia Refocus app is a fun way to get creative with macro photography

^ However, it works best when focusing on objects in the foreground, as focusing on background objects increases the level of noise

PERFORMANCE

Unsurprisingly, the Lumia 640 XL also has a bigger battery than the Lumia 640, and it showed in our continuous video playback test. With the screen set to 170cd/m2, the 3,000mAh battery lasted an impressive 14h 45m, which is more than 4 hours longer than its little brother. It’s also one of the best battery lives we’ve seen from a Lumia phone in general, so you should have more than enough juice to get you through the day.

Inside, though, both the Lumia 640 and the 640 XL share identical components, including a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and 1GB of RAM. We’re a little disappointed that Microsoft chose this over the newer, faster Snapdragon 410 chipset, but the Lumia 640 XL is still quick enough for everyday tasks.

Admittedly, it didn’t rank particularly high on our BrowserMark tests, scoring just 627 overall, but Windows Phone 8.1 felt snappy and responsive when navigating its system settings and it handled complex web pages with ease. There would often a second of delay when loading pictures, but scrolling was judder-free, ensuring a very smooth web browsing experience.

WINDOWS PHONE 8.1

The Lumia 640 XL comes with the latest Windows Phone 8.1 Lumia Denim software, which includes Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant, and a newly revamped settings layout. Cortana’s still in beta at the moment, so its search function isn’t quite as efficient as Apple’s Siri, but we do like its Quiet Hours option.

This automatically puts the phone on silent during set hours of the day so you won’t be disturbed, such as late at night or weekend mornings. You can still allow favourite contacts to get through, though, as well as anyone who calls twice in three minutes, just in case there’s an emergency. Alternatively, you can tell Cortana to send a text message to non-favourite contacts during these hours saying you’re busy.

The new Settings menu also makes it much easier to find individual options, as Microsoft’s finally grouped everything into sensible categories rather than simply listing everything in a seemingly random order. There are still a few options that seem out of place, though. We can see no reason why Display, which houses the phone’s brightness profiles, colour profiles and sunlight readability features, is stuck down in Extras as opposed to System where you’ll find the normal brightness settings. Still, it’s a welcome improvement and hopefully Windows 10 will iron out these kinks even further when it’s made available for free later in the year.

CONCLUSION

We thought we’d seen the last great Windows phablet, but the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL has proven to be a more than worthy successor to the Nokia phones of old. Its size won’t be for everyone, but its superior battery life and capable camera make it by far the better travel companion. Its big screen is also arguably much better suited to Microsoft’s Office 365 offer, as you get more space for editing your documents. All that extra value does come at a cost, though, as the 4G version of the XL is almost another £70 on top of the SIM-free Lumia 640. Still, if you have the budget and want a phone that can go the distance, the Lumia 640 XL is an excellent choice.