Lumia 635 review: Could this be the low-priced future of Windows Phone?

Microsoft Lumia 635 $168.00 The Lumia 635 from Microsoft is a budget Windows Phone that sacrifices some features, but generally meets the basic requirements of a modern smartphone.

I initially wanted to dislike the Lumia 635, only because I feel Microsoft’s Lumia phones can aspire to something better. But the phone delivers the basics, with one inexplicable omission: a front-facing camera.

Microsoft’s new Lumia 635 may be marketed as one of the first Windows Phones to be sold to customers with the amazing features of Windows Phone 8.1, but that doesn’t mean much: the “Cyan” update will soon roll out Windows Phone 8.1 to all Nokia Windows Phone 8 handsets. No, it’s the price that matters: $168 at T-Mobile, or $7 per month over 24 months. (The Lumia 635 is also available via AT&T for $139.) 

Why is the price so important? Because Microsoft said this week that the midrange is the company’s new focus. In July 18 report, analyst firm Chitika revealed that the Lumia 520 and Lumia 521 delivered more than 54 percent of the ad impressions to the Windows Phone platform. The new chief of Microsoft’s device business, Stephen Elop sealed the deal.

 “In the near term, we plan to drive Windows Phone volume by targeting the more affordable smartphone segments, which are the fastest growing segments of the market, with Lumia,” Elop wrote in a memo this week.

The Lumia 635 (right) alongside the Lumia Icon.

That puts new pressure on the Lumia 635.

The Lumia 635 is an inherently basic phone; the 4.5-inch, 854x480 display even has something I’d forgotten about: visible pixels. The display is viewable in bright sunlight, but you’ll need to maximize the brightness, and there’s no adaptive brightness control to facilitate that. In general, it looks a little dull.

Viewed outdoors, the Lumia 635 screen is barely legible.

Inside is a 1.2-GHz Snapdragon 400 quad-core chip, which is no slouch. Still, don’t expect to run high-performance apps. Our SunSpider test averaged 1.47 seconds, about three times slower than the flagship Lumia Icon. (Our Peacekeeper test failed to run.) But the 512 MB of RAM the phone includes means that you’ll be seeing the “Resuming...” message quite a bit as you switch between apps that the Windows Phone OS has suspended. I also noted several instances where the phone would simply lock up briefly, such as after entering the PIN to unlock it.

Mark Hachman

The Bing Health & Fitness app can now pull information on how many steps you’ve taken, directly from the phone.

But this phone has one feature other Windows Phones don’t: motion-data collection. This enables it to act as a pedometer in addition to tracking your distance traveled via GPS. That feature ties into the Bing Health & Fitness app, as well as other apps you allow. Personally, knowing I walked a mile or so is good enough for me; but for those obsessed with accomplishing 10,000 steps or more, it might eliminate the need for a separate fitness tracker. 

The Lumia phones' other selling point has traditionally been the camera, so I was surprised to find the experience with those phone rather middling. Lumia fans will be disappointed to find out that the camera hardware button on the side of the phone has been removed; in fact, the home, back, and search buttons on the phone are also screen icons now. (Only the power and volume rocker switches remain.)

As I mentioned up top, the front-facing camera is gone as well. You can forget about taking selfies with this phone. For me, that's almost unforgiveable in this day and age. Sure, there's trimming the fat to save a few bucks. But this is trimming the fun.

The rear camera, meanwhile, is just 5 megapixels—that's a far cry from the 41MP the Lumia 1020 offers. The one unexpected plus is that the notorious shutter lag—the time from when you touch the camera shutter icon to when it takes a picture—has disappeared almost entirely. And I found nothing to complain about save for the fact the photos looked a bit washed out, as the Nokia Camera app (not the other stock “Camera” app) includes all the lovely manual controls.

Nokia has removed the hardware camera button from the Lumia 635.

I discovered numerous other oddities and bugs, too. Although the T-Mobile version of the device supports its LTE bands and Wi-Fi calling, it failed to connect to T-Mobile to register it, popping up a “REG90 Failed to Connect” warning over and over and over. Apps loaded slowly, and although the phone shipped with a Hulu+ live tile, the app wasn’t actually installed.

These latter glitches could have been just the vagaries of a test phone. I hope so. Fortunately, the Lumia 635 handles the basics pretty well. Calls were fairly clear, and they connected quickly. My only complaint while surfing the Web was that the low display resolution made pages like SFGate.com difficult to read when the desktop page was preferred. And the camera, while basic, did the job.

I wonder, though, how many Lumia 635s will be returned when consumers discover the lack of a front-facing camera. That’s a real blow to the platform, especially when you factor in the lack of first-party apps in the Windows Store. Phones like the Lumia 1020, Lumia Icon, and Lumia 1520 have given Lumia owners something to brag about. Phones like the Lumia 635 will straddle the narrow line between value and mediocrity.

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Review: Pingraphy lets you schedule your future Pinterest pins, get stats

Pingraphy Pingraphy is an essential service for Pinterest users who need to post at all hours of the day.

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Social media is popular, but needs to be taken in small doses. Nobody wants to be bombarded with lots and lots of status updates and photos all at the same time. When posting your items to a social media site, it is good practice to spread everything out over a 24-hour period. Services such as TweetDeck help us do this for Twitter, but Pinterest is a different matter. But unless you are the world's biggest insomniac, you are going to need a service such as Pingraphy to help you out.

Pingraphy is a Web service that enables you to log into your Pinterest account and schedule images to automatically be posted on a set schedule in the future. There is even a bookmarklet you can use which, when clicked, will pull all of the images from a webpage and then send them to Pingraphy for you.

Once your image has been uploaded, select the date and time you wish it to go out.

But first, you need to log into Pingraphy using your Pinterest credentials. Unfortunately this involves giving Pingraphy your password. As of this writing, there is no way to sign in with a permissions system which can be revoked later, similar to Google Accounts or Facebook. So you have to decide if you are comfortable giving out your Pinterest password.

This is where one of the drawbacks of Pingraphy becomes readily apparent. There is no function to revoke the website's access to your Pingraphy account, which means the only way to block Pingraphy is to change your Pinterest password.

The dashboard gives you an excellent overview of which pins are scheduled to go out and when, as well as which ones have recently been published.

Assuming you are OK with revealing your password and you have logged in, you will then be invited to drag the bookmarklet up to your browser toolbar. When clicked on a webpage, the bookmarklet will pull all of the images into a clickable list and you can choose which ones you want to be scheduled to get pinned in your Pinterest account.

Also, as part of the setup, you are provided with a calendar and sliders so you can specify the exact date and time the first pin should go out. You then specify your timezone and the interval (in minutes) between each pin going out. So theoretically you could schedule pins days, weeks, even months ahead if you want to. Perfect if you are going on holiday or if there will be an event which will necessitate you being away from the computer for extended periods.

Pingraphy provides you with statistics which will show you which of your pins were the most popular, the most shared and the most liked.

The dashboard gives you a nice overview of all the scheduled pins, so you can see at a glance what is due to go out, and what has gone out recently. From here, you can also click on "track", which allows you to see which of your pins were the most popular, how many times they were repinned and liked, and how many comments were received. These numbers are displayed in table format for easy viewing.

Using these numbers, you can see right away which kinds of images generally do well and which ones don't, enabling you to fine-tune your social media policy, which is important if you rely on social media to do your job more efficiently.

Apart from the inability to revoke the website's access to your Pinterest account and a bug in the bookmarklet which overrides the timezone settings (the latter of which is a very minor thing), Pingraphy is definitely a service you should consider if you are looking for this kind of thing, given that it seems to be the only service right now which schedules Pinterest updates in advance.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

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Future iPhones Could Share Data by Snapping Photos

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Intel Reveals The Future of Its Smartphone Processors

First Texas Instruments, now Intel. Shortly after TI announced the lastest version of its OMAP chip, Intel shot right back, announcing two new mobile processors and giving a speed boost to its codename Medfield chip. The first mobile processor built on the x86 architecture, Intel’s Medfield processor, now know by its official name, the Intel Atom Z246o, is expected to see a speed increase to a blazing 2-Ghz.

If that wasn’t enough to entice the speed-freak in you, Intel CEO Paul  Otellini, also announced its Atom Z2580 processor, a chip that will be twice as powerful as the aforementioned Z2460. But when pressed as to what kind of tangible specifications he could provide to support such a power boost, Otellini said he would rather keep that kind of information under wraps for now. In addition to raw power, Intel says the Z2580 will also sport a multi-mode LTG/3G/2G radio.

But Intel didn’t stop there. The company also announced its plans for the Intel Atom Z2000, a processor specifically designed to target the entry-level smartphone market. The 1-Ghz chip features support for the Intel XMM 6265 3G HSPA+ modem and dual-SIM capabilities for 3G and 2G modes. Otellini also revealed that Intel has already begun working on improved versions of these new chips, scaling them down from their 32nm architecture to a smaller 22nm. A 14nm chip is also reportedly in development.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why Intel has yet to touch on the prospect of a multi-core processor. Well, according to Otellini, the industry’s fascination with the number of cores a processor has is unimportant. Instead, Otellini explained, it’s the overall performance and power management capabilities of a chip that matter.

If Intel’s announcements mean anything, it’s that the days of chip maker sitting on the sidelines of the smartphone processor wars are indeed over. What remains to be seen, however, is how Intel-powered handsets will compare to their ARM and TI-powered competitors.

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