Microsoft does a first with “affordable 4G LTE smartphone” in Lumia 638

by | Dec 21, 2014

 Microsoft has made a new addition to its online listing of Lumia devices—the Lumia 638. If the model number doesn’t make the device special, the tagline does. It reads: “India’s affordable 4G LTE smartphone.” Yes, as per the specs, it does support the LTE frequencies in which Bharti Airtel has launched its LTE services in select cities and Reliance Jio Infocomm plans to do in phases in 2015.While the device still carries a “Coming Soon” status on Microsoft site, it is already available at Amazon.in, which lists an offer price of Rs 8,299. The smartphone comes with a 4.5-inch clear black IPS LCD screen, 5MP camera, 8GB memory and 1GB RAM, along with a microSD support for up to 128GB. As usual, users can access 15GB of One Drive cloud memory.

Additionally, Amazon is running a special offer from Bharti Airtel of free 5GB 4G data per month for 2 months, available only on special 4G post-paid SIMs in Bengaluru.

Microsoft could also expect the device to get some extra advantage from the special Office 365 offer it is running for new Lumia purchase before December 31, 2014.

The device runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, which is a quad-core 1.2GHz processor. Lumia 638 comes with a decent battery capacity of 1830 mAh.

Going by the specs, I was expecting it to be priced at a little under Rs 10,000. However, if Microsoft chose to be somewhat aggressive with the pricing, it could even tag it at just under Rs 9,000. That way, the Amazon pricing beats assumptions and as such may be expected of getting an extra advantage out of the Christmas and New Year shopping season.

Microsoft could also expect the device to get some extra advantage from the special Office 365 offer it is running for new Lumia purchase before December 31, 2014. Lumia customers stand to get access to 1 TB space on OneDrive at Rs. 799 for a year, and get 15 licenses for Office 365 Business Premium at Rs 2,499, which could be a whopping saving of around 72%.

Now an important question: which specific LTE bands will the smartphone support? Well, Microsoft lists out the following ones (along with the 3G/2G frequencies supported):

  • TD-LTE network: Band 38 (2570-2620 MHz), Band 39 (1880-1920 MHz), Band 40 (2300-2400 MHz), Band 41 (2500-2700 MHz)
  • LTE FDD network: Band 3 (1800 MHz), Band 7 (2600 MHz)
  • LTE max data speed DL: 150 Mbps (Cat 4)
  • LTE max data speed UL: 50 Mbps (Cat 4)
  • TD-SCDMA network: Band 34/A (2010-2025 MHz), Band 39/F (1880-1920 MHz)
  • TD-SCDMA max data speed DL: 2.8 Mbps
  • TD-SCDMA max data speed UL: 2.2 Mbps
  • GSM network: 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 1900 MHz
  • GSM max data speed DL: EGPRS 236.8 kbps
  • GSM max data speed UL: EGPRS 236.8 kbps
  • WCDMA network: Band 1 (2100 MHz), Band 2 (1900 MHz), Band 5 (850 MHz)
  • WCDMA max data speed DL: 42.2 Mbps (Cat 24)
  • WCDMA max data speed UL: 5.76 Mbps (Cat 6)