Pros Amazing value for money. Great design. Good-looking, easy-to-use OS.
Cons No front-facing camera. No flash on rear camera. Fewer applications than Android.
Bottom Line The Nokia Lumia 635's style puts it way ahead of other inexpensive smartphones on T-Mobile, although its camera capabilities are seriously lacking.By Sascha Segan
Windows Phone is finding its niche. With Microsoft's sleek OS, you can get good-looking phones that are actually affordable if you're on a limited budget. The Lumia 635, available for T-Mobile and AT&T, is a great example. At $129 (8GB) up front direct from the Microsoft store, it's considerably less expensive than most other T-Mobile LTE phones. It's good looking and performs smoothly given the price. There's just one big catch: no selfies, since there's no front-facing camera.
Physical Design and Call Quality
Nokia makes the prettiest inexpensive phones out there. End of story. Nobody else can compete with Apple on design at a price under $200. The secret is Nokia's smart use of plastic: The company has a signature hard, matte polycarbonate shell that manages to be budget-friendly without ever looking cheap. No glossy, greasy black backs here. At 5.1 by 2.6 by 0.36 inches (HWD) and 4.73 ounces, the Lumia 635 fits perfectly into the hand and its soft, curved edges are very comfortable.
The Lumia 635's 4.5-inch, 854-by-480 screen is surrounded on three sides by a removable plastic shell. You can get yellow, green, orange, white, or black shells, and you can easily replace a cracked or discolored shell for $15.
The 218ppi screen looks a little fuzzy and isn't very bright, but that's par for the course at this price level. The $129 Moto E's display is brighter and tighter, but you lose the LTE. Everything's a trade-off when you're in the market for a budget phone. The Power and Volume buttons are on the right side. The flashless, 5-megapixel camera is on the back. There's a microSD card slot tucked under the removable 1,830mAh battery.
The Lumia 635 is a good voice phone. It supports T-Mobile's HD Voice when calling other T-Mobile phones. The speakerphone, especially, is very loud and very clear, both sending and receiving. The earpiece also goes very loud, but there's a little bit of clipping around the edges of words, and in noisy situations, the noise cancellation can make things sound a bit computerized. Everything's still quite intelligible, though.
See How We Test Cell Phones
The Lumia 635 supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n on the 2.4GHz band only. Microsoft's interesting Wi-Fi Sense uses Devicescape's database to sniff out public Wi-Fi hotspots on the street and try to connect to them. It works, sometimes, but it can't be relied on entirely. So it's good that the T-Mobile LTE speeds here are excellent: I got 15Mbps down in midtown Manhattan, a very solid result.
We got 12 hours, 44 minutes of talk time on the removable 1,830mAh battery, which is good for a battery that size.
Windows Phone 8.1
The Lumia 635 runs the same quad-core, 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor that you see in a lot of other midrange phones nowadays. But the sleek simplicity of Windows Phone 8.1 has a cost in UI and browser speed. There's a noticeable pause as applications load. On the Antutu cross-platform processor benchmark, the Lumia fell behind the competing Samsung Galaxy Light and Moto G. And Microsoft needs a browser update, stat. On the Browsermark browser speed benchmark, the Lumia 635 fell behind even the lower-end Moto E.
The OS has a lot to recommend itself, though. Check out our full Windows Phone 8.1 review for more details. The new Cortana digital assistant is pretty great, and the basic interface combines the strong graphical simplicity of iOS with better customizability.
Microsoft and Nokia could dial back all the Nokia and Bing apps, though. Do HERE Maps and HERE Drive+ (free, turn-by-turn navigation) really need to be different apps? Are you going to use Bing Food + Drink, Bing Sports, and Bing News? No? Luckily, Windows Phone lets you delete them.
Photos and Video
The Lumia 635 has no front-facing camera. That means no selfies and none of the built-in Skype video chat that Windows Phone supports. Don't think about turning your phone around, either. While Nokia's camera app has lots of great manual controls, the target area you need to touch to trigger a photo is too small to hit without looking, and there's no hard camera button.
The 5-megapixel camera isn't all that, anyway. Nokia has a very divided camera strategy: gorgeous 20-megapixel-plus imagers at the high end in phones like the Lumia Icon, and lackluster 5-megapixel cameras at the low end. Like the camera on the Lumia 521, the 635's camera blows out bright areas and sometimes takes very soft photos. Without a flash, low-light images were super-soft, even blurry, in my tests. The camera takes 720p videos at 30 frames per second, though.
Windows Phone has stepped up its game for music and video streaming and playback. Microsoft's desktop apps will convert all of your music and videos into Lumia-friendly formats to transfer them from your PC to the phones. The Lumia 635 comes with both a very good FM radio and Nokia's streaming MixRadio; Spotify and Pandora are also available. For video, you have Netflix and Microsoft's own downloadable Xbox Video movies and TV shows, but no HBO GO or Amazon streaming video.
Conclusions
Low-cost Windows Phones are excellent choices for first-time smartphone users who aren't obsessed with the latest apps and social networks. In exchange for a few missing apps, you get a much better-looking phone than same-price Android devices, with access to T-Mobile's super-speedy LTE network. So far, so good.
But there are a few major caveats. That lack of a front-facing camera will be a deal breaker for many. To get a decent front-facing camera and LTE in a current phone on T-Mobile, you need to make a big price jump up to the excellent Moto G for $219. You'll lose the expandable memory, but you'll gain the more mainstream world of Android apps.
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