The Nokia Lumia 610 is the baby of the company's Lumia family and aims to bring a Windows Phone device to the low-end of the market.Nokia is aggressively pushing its Windows Phone strategy and part of the plan is to have a full range of products at all price points. The new Lumia 610 effectively gives the company just that, it's the baby of the Lumia family and will be one of the cheapest Windows Phone devices on the market.
Technical Specifications of Nokia Lumia 610
- Windows Phone 7.5 Tango OS
- 3.7″ LCD Display
- 8GB Internal Storage
- 5MP Camera with Autofocus
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G
- NFC Enabled
- Nokia Public Transport
- Nokia Drive
Introduction:
The Nokia Lumia 610 is a budget smartphone so it obviously doesn't have impressive specifications. It's powered by a modest 800MHz single-core processor, has just 256GB of RAM and only 8GB of internal memory. While many often get caught up in specs (guilty as charged!), users contemplating buying the Lumia 610 simply won't care: as long as the phone is slick and responsive, the speed of the processor and the amount of RAM are simply irrelevant on a phone likely to retail cheap.
Interestingly, the Lumia 610 is the first Windows Phone to break the previously strict hardware requirements set by Microsoft. When the Windows Phone platform was launched, all phones were required to have at least a 1GHz processor. Microsoft relaxing this requirement for the Lumia 610 can only mean it is confident performance will not suffer as a result.
Part of the reason for these low specs is the new Windows Phone software the Lumia 610 will run, codenamed "Tango". Microsoft has described the software as a project rather than an update — its prime aim is to reduce the cost of Windows Phones. Though it’s not a traditional update, the Tango software will including some minor additions, such as the ability to attach more than one picture to an MMS message.
The Nokia Lumia 610 won't win any awards for its display, but at 3.7in it’s larger than the far more expensive iPhone 4S and has a respectable resolution of 800x480 pixels. Compared to most low-end Android phones that often have tiny screens with a low resolution, the Lumia 610 looks like a far more enticing option if you're on a budget.
The Nokia Lumia 610 is constructed from plastic and will be available in white, cyan, magenta and black colors. At 135.5g the phone is relatively light, while a thickness of 12mm should make it comfortable to hold and use.
Software:
Sporting the signature Lumia Live Tile interface that allows one to pin applications or webpages to “tiles” on the home screen for easy access, the Lumia 610 is designed for convenience and ease-of-use. Adding, rearranging or removing tiles is a simple 2-second process – pressing and holding until an option menu pops out. Customizing the color of the background and tiles is possible too.
However, what we found was most impressive was the inbuilt People tile, which allows you to add your social media accounts – be it Facebook, Twitter or Windows Live – together, giving a constant, updated feed of all the different platforms on a single stream. Compared with the Iphone, which needs different applications to view the various feeds, the Lumia pulls ahead as a clear winner.
Signature applications such as Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive are also included in the phone, as well as an Xbox Live application that syncs your achievements and avatar from your Xbox at home to the phone through one’s Windows Live ID. The Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive applications can provide clear and straightforward directions in both 2D and 3D, while the Xbox Live application easily syncs and brings up our familiar Xbox avatar and achievements.
The Lumia 610 comes in 4 different colors: black, white, the funky cyan and magenta.
Running Windows OS 7.5 and sporting 256MB of RAM, the Lumia 610 is perfectly capable of running several applications like the popular Angry Birds game and the inbuilt Microsoft Office smoothly despite only having a single processer clocking at 800 MHz.
With a 3.7 inch display screen, surfing the web and watching videos on the Nokia Lumia 610 is slightly easier on the eyes than if you’re using an Iphone, which comes with a 3.5 inch screen. However, the Lumia only has 8GB of storage space, and Micro SD cards are not supported, limiting the amount of media you can fit into the phone. For those without extensive music or movie collections (1GB can store around 220 songs), the 8GB will be more than enough space.
The Nokia Music application on the Lumia 610 lets you browse through music online and immediately purchase the desired track, or listen to a 30-second preview of it before purchasing. The Lumia 610 also allows one to listen to music tracks being broadcasted in the nearby vicinity – though they may be free to listen to, one doesn’t have control over which song is broadcasting. Furthermore, only 6 tracks can be skipped every hour, which results in even less control of what one wants to listen to.
One other capability that users might find handy is the flip-to-silence function – it allows one to instantly and intuitively put the phone into silent mode by literally flipping the phone face down. Another useful feature that can be tried is Contact Transfer, which transfers all the contacts from our old phone to the Lumia 610 via Bluetooth in under 2 minutes.
Despite heavy usage of 3G web browsing, music, and calls, battery life seems to be better than expected and the Lumia 610 can last a night (on standby) and the entire day without a need for charging. Nokia touts the phone as having 10.5 hours of talk time, 35 hours of music playback and an impressive 670 hours of standby time before needing to be charged.
The Verdict:
The Lumia 610 is a phone that packs a punch for its specs and price, offering an excellent social networking platform, convenient interface, stylish exterior and good battery life. A worthy pick for anyone who wants a decent smartphone with a sleek design and good features.
The phone is expected to be released in late June in India for around 11,000 bucks. Samsung Omnia M is also expected to be released around the same time. Let’s see if the budget smartphones are up to the mark.
