Microsoft on Thursday launched another budget Lumia smartphone – the Lumia 430 Dual SIM – in India at Rs. 5,299, and it is company’s most affordable Lumia smartphone till date.
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The smartphone is mostly similar to Lumia 435, and since it is the popular $70 device from Microsoft, we were expecting that the company will price it more aggressively for the Indian market. To remind you, Microsoft had launched the Lumia 435 Dual SIM in February at Rs. 5,999.
The Lumia 430 Dual SIM runs Windows Phone 8.1 with the Lumia Denim update out-of-the-box. The company also promises that the phone will receive latest Windows 10, once it’s available.
Upfront, the Lumia 430 Dual SIM features a 4-inch WVGA (480×800 pixels) LCD display, and is powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor coupled with 1GB of RAM, just like the Lumia 435. About the display, it appeared quite reflective to us and the viewing angles also were not up to our liking, but we will get you more details on that in our full review soon.
The three capacitive touch buttons sits below the display. Right side of the smartphone houses the volume rocker and the power key. Other than than than there are no other physical buttons on the device. The 3.5mm headphones jack is located at the top, while the Micro-USB charging point is at the bottom.
In terms of design, the new Lumia 430 Dual SIM isn’t any different from Lumia 435, except little rounded edges. The smartphone sports a 2-megapixel fixed-focus rear camera without flash and a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera. Our expectations with the camera were very low, and going by what we could figure out in small time of testing, we can say both cameras are just about functional and there is not much to say on that department.
Coming to storage, Lumia 430 comes with 8GB of built-in storage which is further expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB). The device is backed by a 1500mAh removable battery. The removable back cover is matte finished plastic, and isn’t prone to excessive fingerprints.
The smartphone is not available via online flash sale, if you think that’s what Microsoft will also do, in fact we interviewed Chris Weber (CVP, Mobile Device Sales at Microsoft) on Tuesday and he told us that company has no immediate plans to adopt that model; you can read the full interview here.
The Lumia 430 Dual SIM can be purchased across all retail outlets (online/ offline) from April 30 and it comes in two colour options – Black and Orange.
Overall, the build of the smartphone seems good for the price, but will this be a value for money product for Microsoft in India, we will find out in our full review soon. So stay tuned.