Microsoft Lumia 650 review: Great design, terrible chipset

In recent years, Lumia phones have been a lot like buses, you wait a year and then a few come at once. In December 2015, the flagship Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL arrived with their incredible Windows 10 Continuum capabilities – allowing you to transform a phone into a portable PC.

In February 2016, the Lumia 650 came to the market – a more wallet-friendly smartphone that aimed to replace the fantastic Lumia 640 and 640 XL. Originally reviewed at £160, it can now be found for under £125 on Amazon.

Microsoft Lumia 650 review: Design and build quality

Unlike the Lumia 640 that had a plastic chassis, the Lumia 650 has a gorgeous metal frame and a matte plastic rear. Measuring just 6.9mm thick, the diamond cut edges can sometimes feel a little rough on your palm, but they provide plenty of grip (unlike say the Galaxy S6‘s slippery sides) and it feels very well made for a £160 smartphone. The aluminium sides twinkle in the light, too, making sure the metal frame, which is pretty rare on a phone this cheap, is always visible. Lift off the plastic back and you’ll find a replaceable 2,000mAh battery, as well as a microSD card slot and a nano SIM card slot.

It’s a very handsome smartphone, although I’m sad to see that Microsoft’s decided to drop the eye-searing fluorescent orange and blue colour options that made its predecessor so striking, as the Lumia 650 is only available in either white or black. Microsoft told me this is partly because it’s hoping to make it a viable phone for businesses as well as consumers, but it’s a shame nonetheless, as the bright colours were always part of what made Windows phones so appealing, as there simply wasn’t anything else like them at this end of the market.

Microsoft Lumia 650 review: Display

Still, I’m willing to put this aside, as the Lumia 650’s most important upgrade is its gorgeous OLED display. The 5in screen still has a 1,280×720 resolution, which provides plenty of clarity on a screen this size, but the OLED panel makes the phone an altogether more attractive proposition, delivering bright, punchy colours and dark, inky blacks. My colour calibration tests confirmed as much, as it covered a full 100% of the sRGB colour gamut and delivered pitch-perfect 0.00cd/m2 black levels. Likewise, with a contrast ratio of infinity:1, there was plenty of detail to be see in photos and images.

Whites were perhaps a little yellow at times, but a peak brightness of 356.61cd/m2 makes the screen perfectly legible outdoors. Likewise, if you leave the brightness on auto, it will shoot up to around 400cd/m2 in bright light, giving you an extra brightness boost if you get caught in direct sunlight.

Microsoft Lumia 650 review: Camera

The 8-megapixel camera hasn’t changed much either, but I still managed to take some very reasonable shots both inside and outdoors. Considering the relatively low-pixel sensor – most budget phones are starting to come with 13-megapixel sensors these days – there was a decent amount of detail present, and colours looked neutral and accurate.

^ Images could be a little brighter, but colours still look decent and there’s a good level of detail present

It did struggle to focus on landmarks further away, though, and none of my photos were particularly bright, especially when viewed on the phone’s screen. There are white balance, ISO, shutter speed and brightness settings which you can tweak, but I didn’t find any of these made much of a different.

Indoor shots could also be a little smeary at times, particularly in low lighting conditions, but there was a surprising lack of obvious noise and our still life arrangement once again had plenty of detail. For best results, though, you’ll want to shoot with as much light as possible, as colours looked far richer once I’d turned on our external lamp.

^ Indoors, the camera sometimes struggled to focus correctly, but colours were nice and rich when there was plenty of light

^ Noise started to creep in when I switched off our external lamp, but this is still a pretty respectable shot for an 8-megapixel camera on a £150 phone

Microsoft Lumia 650 review: Performance

Sadly, all the Lumia 650’s hard work comes completely undone by Microsoft’s choice of processor. Running on just a quad-core 1.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 and 1GB of RAM, performance is decidedly below par, even for a phone at this price. Even your average smartwatch can match up to the Lumia 650, and I haven’t seen a phone with a Snapdragon 200-series chip since Microsoft’s terrible Lumia 535, which came out in 2014 and was by far the worst Windows phone I’ve ever tested.

Admittedly, even the Lumia 950‘s hexa-core Snapdragon 808 couldn’t quite run Windows 10 Mobile as smoothly as I would have liked, but the OS’s sluggish tendencies are only exaggerated by the Snapdragon 212. While I couldn’t run our normal Geekbench 3 benchmarks to assess its single and multi-core performance levels, it was clear from everyday use that it struggles with even Microsoft’s basic suite of apps.

The Photos app in particular took an age to load, and I had to wait a while before the Windows Store became usable as well. Drilling down into the Settings menu was equally laggy and menu animations often jerked and stuttered.

It redeemed itself slightly when it came to browsing the web. Despite a measly Peacekeeper score of 303, most web pages loaded reasonably quickly and even media-heavy sites weren’t too troublesome to scroll up and down while it was still loading pictures.

However, it’s definitely not equipped to deal with games. In terms of benchmarks, it didn’t support GFX Bench DX’s Manhattan test, and even the offscreen T-Rex test only returned a pitiful score of 184 frames, which equates to just 3.3fps. In practice, I couldn’t even play a game of Threes, as the frame rate almost ground to a halt when a new number card appeared onscreen. 3D racer Beach Buggy Racing was also nigh-on unplayable due to its chugging frame rate, and even Candy Crush proved rather taxing. The actual game was fine, but the menu screens between each level were very slow to load and animate.

It’s also worth noting that since the Lumia 650 only has a Micro USB port for charging rather than a USB Type-C port like the Lumia 950 and 950 XL, it’s not compatible with Microsoft’s Display Dock accessory and doesn’t support Continuum, which is arguably one of the best features in the entire Windows 10 operating system. However, given that Continuum was still a little juddery on the Lumia 950 XL, I doubt that the 650’s processor would be able to handle it even if it did come with a USB Type-C port.

Microsoft Lumia 650 review: Conclusion

This is such a shame, as this would have been a great Windows phone if only it had a decent processor inside it. Battery life was very respectable at 11h 36m in our continuous video playback test with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2, and its screen and build quality are practically second to none in its price range.

However, when it’s so crippled by its bad choice of chipset, the Lumia 650 just can’t measure up to its infinitely superior predecessor. If you’re looking for a cheap Windows handset, the Lumia 640 is still your best choice, as you can now pick one up for £120 SIM-free or £90 on pre-pay. The only silver lining is that this could be the basis for a great mid-range Windows phone just around the corner.

Buy the Lumia 650 now from Microsoft