MWC15 – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

I’m not going to blog much about the actual happenings at the Mobile World Congress event since just about every other tech blog on the planet does so. If you want to read up on the Windows side of things, www.wpcentral.com has you pretty well covered. What I am going to take a peek at is what Microsoft actually delivered during their presentation late last night. Fortunately, it’s going to be rather short…

The Lumia 640 and 640 XL

These two little guys, well one little guy and one pretty big guy, continue Microsoft’s assault on the entry to mid-level handset market. It’s almost as if Microsoft expected others to do the flagship lines and they could just clean up what was left over. The bigger of the two handsets has mid-range written all over it. The street price should be around $250 US. It has a 5.7” display, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. It also has a 13MP rear shooter and a 5MP front camera. Overall, the 640 XL is a nice device and a good follow up to the 1320 that was out last year.

The Lumia 640 features a 5” display and the same 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. The 8MP rear shooter is matched with a 1MP front camera. It is rumored to be headed to T-Mobile and their affiliate carriers in April for around $150 US.

Spartan Browser

For the first time, Microsoft started showing off their Spartan browser. The lighter weight, redesigned browser really looks to be the highlight of the day. If it renders out half as well as they say with the data savings and increased speeds, Spartan may be a killer addition to Windows 10.

I’m going to drop coverage here for a minute since those two items were really the major consumer items from the first day of announcements. There was quite a bit about the universal App platform, developing for Windows and how it is very profitable for those that do, but honestly, to the consumer, that’s all pretty boring.

The End Game

Microsoft didn’t wow me, but they didn’t disappoint me either. The news that a flagship would be coming and that Windows 10 is on schedule was really about all that I expected to hear. Thank goodness I wasn’t one of the many that expected the 1020 follow-up or the successor to the 930 to be announced. Of course, going to the x40 series makes sense for both the 10xx and the 9xx now doesn’t it? I have a feeling that there will be many more fun announcements at the developer conference in April, and probably more of the exciting things that we all hoped we would see at MWC, but for now, the 640 and 640XL look like solid devices to continue the Lumia lineup in the mid-range.