Microsoft Lumia 650 is now official: a $200 5" phone with good looks and miserable specs

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The Lumia 650 has leaked out so many times that we're surprised it took Microsoft so long to finally make it official. Well, the day has come: the new member of the affordable phone class, a thin and good-looking 5" phone with a metal frame and Windows 10 on board, the Lumia 650 is now official.

And put simply, the Lumia 650 is a little absurd: a $200 phone with the paltry Snapdragon 212 chip, a miserly 2,000mAh battery and a camera that is not even capable of recording 1080p video, the Lumia 650 looks outdated when compared against most Android phones of its class. 

At the absolutely same price, you can get the 5.5" honor 5X, a stylish phone made out of metal with a fingerprint scanner, the multiple times faster Snapdragon 615 system chip with 3GB of RAM, a good 13-megapixel camera (yes, with 1080p video!), and support for 4G LTE.

At the same time, here is a quick look at the most important specs of the Lumia 650:

  • 5” OLED display with 720 x 1280-pixel resolution
  • Snapdragon 212 (quad-core, 1.3GHz) 
  • 1GB of RAM
  • diamond cut and anodized aluminum frame
  • comes in matte black and matte white
  • thin 6.9mm profile, weighs 122 grams
  • 8MP rear-facing camera with rich capture more and living images
  • 5MP wide-angle, front-facing camera
  • 16GB of storage, supports microSD cards for expandable storage
  • 2,000mAh removable battery

As most Lumia smartphones, the 650 has the latest Microsoft Office apps installed right out of the box, which is a nice bonus. As the phone runs on Windows 10, it supports new third party Universal Windows Applications like Uber, which is also good.


Made for enterprise, not for you


It's no surprise that given these quite unattractive specs (from a consumer's stand point), Microsoft says loud and clear that this is a device made for the enterprise. It declares the Lumia 650 "secure by design and [it] keeps company and personal data safer with features like device encryption and device wipe."

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The list of enterprise features include:

  • built-in support for Microsoft business applications
  • one click setup of common everyday tools like Office 365
"It also allows IT to test the latest Windows 10 Mobile updates against critical line of business systems and apps, before you distribute to end users via MDM," Microsoft says.

Price and release date


The Lumia 650 will first be available in select European markets starting February 18th, with a suggested retail price of around $200 before taxes and subsidies.

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