Forget flagship phones, Microsoft’s back with the $70 Lumia 430

By Andy Boxall Published March 19, 2015

Hooray! Microsoft has given us a new, and even lower priced smartphone over which to fawn. Forget about high-spec hardware, the Lumia 430 is here, and boy, is it cheap. It’s priced at only $70, making it the cheapest Windows Phone device available. Microsoft has been churning out budget Windows Phones for a while, and launched the $80 ad $90 Lumia 435 and Lumia 532 in January.

Here’s what the Lumia 430 is all about. It has a 4-inch touchscreen with a 480 x 800 pixel resolution, and is powered by a Snapdragon 200 processor, running at 1.2GHz. There’s good news on the memory front, as the phone has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, plus a MicroSD card slot to up this by a whopping 128GB. For a phone that costs $70 unconnected, that’s pretty good.

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Windows Phone 8.1 with the Lumia Denim update is pre-installed, and the little phone will be upgraded to Windows 10 when the time comes, although Microsoft warns that not every feature will work on the humble Lumia 430. Still, at least it’s getting an upgrade. Microsoft has added a few of its apps on to the phone, including Skype and Office, plus there’s 30GB of OneDrive storage space.

The orange or black rear panel can be popped off to reveal a removable 1,500mAh battery, and there are a pair of modest cameras onboard — a 2-megapixel rear camera, and a VGA front cam. Finally, the Lumia 430 has a smart dual-SIM mode, where individual profiles can be assigned to each. That’s the primary difference between the 430 and the 435, aside from the price.

While we may joke about Microsoft’s race to the bottom with the Lumia range, on paper the Lumia 430 is a bargain — making us question why it bothered to make and announce the Lumia 435 at all. Right now, unless you’re a big spender, there’s something for everyone in the Lumia range. Except anyone who wants a cheap, decent phone is going to buy the cheapest, most decent option, and that’s the 430.

Microsoft will launch the 430 in many countries this April.

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Senior Mobile Writer

Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…

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