Microsoft is really going after budget shoppers with its Windows Phones. Lately, most of its Lumias cost $300 or less unlocked, which is less than half the price of most flagship smartphones nowadays. The latest Lumia to enter the fray is the Lumia 540, and it’s incredibly cheap, at just $150 unlocked.
The Lumia 540 currently runs Windows Phone 8.1 with the Lumia Denim update, but it will upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as Microsoft releases the update. The phone sports a 5-inch HD screen with a pixel resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and pixel density of 294 ppi. While that’s certainly not super high-res, it’s decent for a phone that cheap. A 2,200mAh removable battery keeps the phone going, and with the low appetite of that 720p screen, it should last you quite a while.
Inside the bright candy-colored shell of the Lumia 540 is a 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor and 1GB of RAM. As with the screen, this processor won’t win any awards, but it’s reasonably fast for a budget phone. Although Microsoft only put 8GB of storage onboard, it’s offering 15GB of OneDrive cloud storage, plus 15GB more once you set up auto-upload to OneDrive, and, to top it all off, the device takes a MicroSD card for up to 128GB of extra space. In other words, you shouldn’t run out of room for your selfies and cat pics anytime soon.
The main camera is a decent 8-megapixel shooter with auto focus and an LED flash, while the front-facing camera is a 5-megapixel wide-angle lens. The front-facing camera in articular is much better than the ones found on flagship phones like the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6, but that’s really the only spec that’s better on the Lumia 540. Still, it’s a pretty important one.
The Lumia 540 costs $150 unlocked, features dual SIM card slots, and should arrive in May. You can get it in cyan, orange, white, or matte black. However, you’ll have to live in the Middle East, the Asia Pacific, or Italy to get one. Check out more details on Microsoft’s website.
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