The new Lumia 650 is gorgeous, but it isn’t powerful enough for Continuum

Previous Next

1 of 14

Close

Microsoft’s pushing two aspects of the Lumia 650 — the design, and its overall suitability for business use. Described as a”beautiful phone,” in the release blog post, it’s hard not to agree when you actually get your hands on it. The Lumia 650 has a aluminum frame and measures just 6.9mm thick — that’s 0.2mm thinner than the iPhone 6S — and crucially, weighs only 122 grams.

That makes it very comfortable to hold, and it easily slips into a jacket or trouser pocket. However, the phone’s not made of solely high-end materials. The rear is plastic and very smooth. It’s also dull, with only the four-square Microsoft logo to break up the monotony.

There’s a 5-inch AMOLED touchscreen on the front, which sounds excellent, but sadly, it has a 720p resolution, which gives away its distinctly mid-range status. It’s the same story for the processor, which is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 quad-core chip with 1GB of RAM. The 16GB of internal memory isn’t much, but there is a MicroSD card slot ready to increase this by up to 200GB, so space should never be a problem.

If you’re a suit-wearing business type, keen to keep the Windows theme from the office running when you’re out and about, Microsoft wants you to buy the Lumia 650. It touts the inclusion of OneDrive for easy cloud syncing, Office 365, and various security features as reasons to pick one up. However, Continuum is probably the biggest draw for business customers, and the Lumia 650 isn’t powerful enough to support the feature.

In addition to all this, the Lumia 650 has an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 5-megapixel front camera, 4G LTE connectivity, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, and a 2,000mAh battery. Microsoft will put the phone on sale from February 18, but has only announced it for Europe — and no more precisely than that — at the moment. The price has been given in U.S. dollars though, and it’s set at $200, which suggests a U.S launch will come soon.

The price is reasonable, the build quality is excellent, and the aluminum body does give the Lumia 650 a certain style, but it’s still very business-like. It also lacks the one main feature draw of Windows 10, which is unfortunate.