Microsoft has announced the Lumia 650, and there’s already a review of the thing.
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 ^Alb120 SIM-free or ^Alb90 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.
I have no idea what Microsoft is doing with Windows Phone at this point. Nobody wants an underperforming Windows Phone device, and those that buy one without being aware of the bad chipset will just feel bitten.
Either give Windows Phone the proper love and attention it so badly needs in both software and hardware, or just kill it with dignity. What Microsoft is and has been doing to Windows Phone is a travesty.
Again MS is redoing the same line up. They just need the 750 and 850. There’s so little incentive to upgrade to a newer model.
What MS needs is a winning model. Something that can turn heads.
Just release a 5.7″ Surface phone complete with similar small magnetic keyboard.
Does Microsoft even want to win in mobiles? From releasing a WP7 that lacks features (1080p video recording, HD screens, Microsoft card) to not paying the top 200 debs to port their apps to WP8 and Win10 mobile, to releasing luckster hardware. Sell it at a loss like you did with the Xbox if you have to dammit! Sell it at a loss so even low end users can see the full benefits of continuum or whatever other features you have to offer. Don’t let Google monopolise mobile.
I guess the WinDiv has gotten used to every release they produce being a success by default and can’t get into the mindset.
Edited 2016-02-16 00:34 UTC
kurkosdr,
Yeah, I think MS really never knew how to be competitive without monopoly power. This hasn’t mattered much since MS got a monopoly strait out of the gate with the exclusive IBM deal. It’s that arrangement that allowed MS to buy/resell inferior tech at the time and make it a household name. From then on they could use that monopoly punish OEMs who didn’t obey their will.
If it hadn’t been for the antitrust lawsuits ~10 years ago, it’s very likely that today’s mobile landscape would be very different as MS continued to use it’s monopoly to buy & manipulate it’s way into new markets.
I have a Lumia 532 with the same chipset. It is very responsive.
The 650 is designed to be a reasonably priced smartphone with a nice screen. The potential buyers aren’t going to worry about some meaningless performance benchmark.
Considering the availability of the unlocked motoE and motoG phones for under 100usd I’m not sure I would call this phone “reasonably priced”.
Edited 2016-02-16 17:27 UTC
I think you will find those prices or only in the US. An unlocked Moto G costs AUD348 (~USD250) here in Australia.
The Lumia dual SIM phone, such as the 530, are designed for developing markets.
Microsoft wants to make reference phones, and get OEMs to deliver the real hardware. They’re a software/service company.
That plan has failed misserably, anyone who considers buying a Windows Phone (or Windows Mobile device) buys a Lumnia.
I am the happy owner of the 640XL, and having previously owned an iPhone and 2 different Android devices, this is the phone I love the most. I don’t mind the app gap. The thing that bothers me most is that Microsoft is so unclear about their direction.
Like Thom says: Just kill it, or make a really proper phone. I hope they don’t kill it: We need a third, and maybe even a fourth (Ubuntu?) mobile platform, otherwise Apple and Google get lazy and stop innovating.
That platform is Tizen, it just overtook BlackBerry as #4 mobile platform in late 2015. With only two big launches in India and Bangladesh. Given that Microsoft is rapidly approaching sub-1% market share it can’t take long to become #3.
That might be the first thing Thurrott has written that I agree with.
To save face.
Seriously; Elop screwed up Nokia and Windows Phone so badly that there only option was to buy it from Nokia because the platform didn’t just burn – it exploded all the way to hell.
Remember, Microsoft used Nokia’s WP usage as a flagship of how WP was doing. So when Nokia almost abandoned WP under the direction of a former Microsoftie….yeah, Ballmer had to save face. That’s all there was about it.
I have to admit, this time you are right – more than otherwise. I have bought a 640 LTE as a Christmas present, and it’s hard not to get impressed by the speed / smoothness / overall quality of the device. Why produce a poor copycat of it?
And most of all: which is the product strategy for Lumias now? Is there any sort of it? I wish MS would concentrate on a few selected models, each one clearly-positioned in its in market segment, and avoid confusing its userbase any more.
This phone is not a replacement for the 640. The ‘xx5’ model designation is for lower spec (usually dual-SIM) models. These designed to be sold in developing markets. They are sold outright without any carrier subsidy.
Edited 2016-02-16 08:06 UTC
What phone are you talking about? The 650 is an ‘xx0’ model and is the most obvious successor to the 640.
Dual-SIM Lumias (such as the 650) are usually based on cheaper hardware. They are not meant to be successors. They are more expensive because they don’t have carrier subsidy. The carrier subsidies are roughly USD50 or 50% (which ever is higher) of the retail price of a prepaid phone.
Here in Australia a Lumia 640 costs around AUD150 on a prepaid plan and AUD300 outright
I really don’t get what you are talking about.
Wrt the Lumia 640, there are single- and dual-SIM models for both 3G and 4G variants. Obviously the Dual 3G versions might be cheaper than their single-SIM 4G/LTE siblings.
Here in Italy we have 640 (130-140 EUR), 640 Dual (130-140 EUR), 640 4G/LTE (130-140 EUR), but there exists a 640 LTE Dual as well for other markets [1].
And at least here, the Lumia 650 on sale on official channels is single-SIM, not dual, and yes, it has the Snapdragon 212. [2]
[1] http://www.gsmarena.com/microsoft_lumia_640_lte_dual_sim-7083.php
[2] http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/mseea/it_IT/pdp/Microsoft-Lumia…
In the world of Lumia phones a ‘higher’ version number simply means it is a later model. In many cases the new model has lower specifications than an existing model. eg The Lumia 520 had much better hardware than the later Lumia 530. The real replacement for the 520 was actually the 532.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/review/windows-phones/nokia-lumia-530-vs…
i plan to buy the same phone in a few days
do you know if firefox, foxit and vlc run on it?
The MS phone strategy is very simple. MS makes cheap ‘computers’ in a phone form factor for the developing world.
MS doesn’t have any interest in making flagships or supporting some frivolous ‘essential’ social media app that has no relevance to Africa, India or Latin America.
Edited 2016-02-16 08:25 UTC
Yet if they are able to perfect ‘Continuum’ (like, being able to run x86 apps on your phone once you turn it into a desktop PC) even Lumia flagships could make sense.
( oh, and I totally agree on the frivolous ‘essential’ app part )
IMO Continuum is a long (5-10 year) term goal.
The reality is that Windows phones are a much better experience than Android models on low end hardware. The so called ‘app gap’ is pretty much a non-issue for the WP target market.
LMAO. It’s official, WP fans are the Amigans of the 2nd decade of the XXI century.
Some social media apps are actually essential in the third world. Social Media apps like whatsapp, get around the high price of texts and international calls.
Microsoft has historically done this with mobile. Invest a ton of resources and make splashy products. Then crappy products that insult their original vision. Give them another five years and they’ll suddenly be interested in mobile again after a hot new entrant into the field shows up.
This is why I don’t buy windows mobile.
The problem is the length of development cycles. The good products might be issued from one team, the crappy products from another team. But it’s more complicated, the first team might benefit from “unlimited” resources to create a great showcase product, while the second team might work on economy to compensate the cost of the first product. It’s never really easy at this level. Please don’t dispute people who have worked hard on the crappy products without the resources and/or the time to succeed.
Kochise,
Haha, I agree with your statements here. MS is a very top-heavy organization, and I imagine it must be frustrating as hell working on the bottom and seeing so many above you living the big life off of your back. Realistically though in my whole career budgetary constraints have always played a factor. It bugs me when projects with my name on them don’t live up to my standards because customers/employers are unwilling/unable to pay. Not once have I ever had the benefit of an overabundance of resources, and IMHO anyone who has is extremely fortunate. On the one hand, I do sympathize with developers operating under unfavorable constraints, but on the other hand this is the norm for a majority of developers and most have to make do with a minute fraction of MS resources, so it’s hard for me to shed a tear for MS devs specifically when I experience the same thing day in day out and I’m still expected to deliver.
By the time 5 years comes around, Microsoft is not going to have much influence left in the platform market – Windows will be an after thought.
Nadella knows this. That’s why he’s focused on a multi-platform goal set – supporting Android and iOS and even linux – in an effort to save Microsoft from becoming irrelevant.
As far as a future goes, Microsoft might remain big in enterprise, but when it comes to the desktop they’ll be losing it to mobile. It’s just a matter of time. They’ll hang on, but only by being a software company delivering software for multiple platforms, with Windows eventually going the way of Solaris – useful in some segments but generally and largely ignored.
Not if they don’t tread a lot more carefully around forcing Windows 10 down people’s throats they won’t, especially when old business software that company’s won’t replace will not work.
True, but I was more referring to the use of their server-side products that can be easily consumed by multiple platforms, and I very much assume that they will eventually lose even the desktop market among enterprise customers as the markets and tools become more mobile/cloud focused.
Forcing Windows 10 down people’s throats is a consumer thing, not an Enterprise thing.
And “old business software that will not work” is extremely rare on Windows 10.
Enterprise is entirely dominated with Windows. The only competitor to new Windows is old Windows. The only way this will change is if Cloud or Mobile take over, hence all the work Microsoft is putting in that (no matter if it is profitable for them or not at the moment)
That said, bringing out this phone as the “business phone” but not having any form of Continuum is bad. Otherwise this phone is about the right balance for Business. I am looking forward to seeing some actual performance issues on video. I am using a 1020 with Windows 10 and that chipset/cpu is ancient but performs very well.
Edited 2016-02-17 09:03 UTC
(cannot edit anymore and lost what I wrote. Thanks OSAlert)
Video that shows the performance issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VCDoS8EvNc
My opinion: Much better than what I expected after reading the article and certainly not a “horrible chipset”. (or actually it might really be a horrible chipset and proof that W10 runs quite nicely on that with nice batterylife as I have understood as well)
Guess you haven’t worked much with enterprise software. Very few packages outright fail, but they often don’t work as expected. Heck, Windows 10 still doesn’t know how to deal with some of Microsoft’s own group policy settings if not segmented into its own policy at the domain controller level. Feed it a setting it doesn’t understand, and you’ll be in a reboot loop faster than you can say “something happened.”
Just piping in again to try to dispel the notion that only large companies have issues with software packages. It happens in niche industries. POS systems for Medical offices, hardware dev kits, the random oddball CRM from 10 years ago that seemed like a good idea, but now all of your data is in it and the company doesn’t exist… Those sort of things affect small businesses as well.
It happens in niche industries a lot more than in Enterprises actually. Everything that is driver-related is more likely to break than things that are application related.
But it is still extremely rare that things that work on Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 don’t work on 10. Now if you have old XP stuff that is hardware related or relies on IE6….you are in for some trouble. But you would be in trouble if you would try to go to Vista/7/8/8.1 as well.
(compatibility is basically 95/98/ME, or NT4/2000/XP or Vista/7/8/8.1/10. If it works on one in these series it will work on the rest as well. Of course there are always exceptions)
Actually, I have worked as a software developer and in application support for the last 20 years. I just migrated our own company over to Windows 10 and the only thing that didn’t work immediately was a Navision installation that requires an old .NET Framework that wasn’t available on our WSUS server and a script that I wrote that stupidly sorted Windows versions in alfabetical order so it thought Windows 10.0.10586 was older than Windows 6.2.9200 and 6.3.9600.
As for customers there have been some tools that come with their machines (crapware) that don’t work anymore but Enterprise doesn’t install such tools anyway and they aren’t missed at all.
One of the oldest pieces of software that we keep updating (new law requirements) started with the Borland 9* C++ compiler and is still working on Windows 10. I just migrated it from an old XP machine with SQL 2005 to a Windows 10 machine with SQL 2014. The software worked but restoring the SQL backup took some effort because there are too many versions in between (backup restore in a SQL 2012 fixed that)
Basically, if it works in Windows 7 it will work in Windows 10 with minimal effort. Your example of group policies is just common sense that they will not work. They are about as OS-specific as can be. (Although my 8.1 unattend.xml just worked for 10)
Now for some more ontopic: Another review of the 650. Skip to https://youtu.be/y0sCitlthOw?t=410 to see the performance part.
Edited 2016-02-17 22:43 UTC
This is why after five years when a new market entrant comes along, they’ll suddenly say to themselves ” Hey we need to re-invest in mobile”. And two to three years after that they’ll have the solution they needed three years from now.
I mean its the forward thinking of the company that gave us the zune to compete with the ipod, while Apple was busy on replacing the ipod with something better – the iphone.
There was no competition between Zune and iPod…iPod won hands down. It’s not even a fair comparison – in part because the iPod was part of something so much bigger than itself, which is what really made the market.
But yes – Microsoft tends to be late to the table, and that’s no longer acceptable if you want to stay relevant. They can’t rely on the Windows+Office monopoly any more, and that is going to hurt them in many ways.
I think we are saying the same thing, and have similar opinions on the future of Microsoft.
They used to rely on the innovator having limited resources,and kneecaping them by cutting the price of the microsoft offering and other dirty tricks. While those worked in the 80’s and 90’s, it doesn’t work as well against Apple and Google.