Phablet for the biz fleet with easy typing: Microsoft Lumia 640 XL

Company classic?

The camera has been upgraded to a fine quality 13MP shooter with Carl Zeiss optics, and f/2.0 aperture, that protrudes gracefully from the back. You’ll be able to find a model with dual LTE SIMs. And the phone will work on 800MHz spectrum. Somewhat surprisingly, it takes a micro SIM, rather than a nano SIM.

Get snappy with its 13MP shooter

The small reduction in the size of the display from the Lumia 1320 means the 720x1280 resolution display now a little sharper. RAM has been upped to 1GB. The chip is the Snapdragon 400 quad-core unit that powers many cheaper mid-range and budget phones, including Microsoft's 830, 730 and 630 Lumias. It runs the latest Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2 – more details in my Lumia 640 review.

I found easier typing to be the main advantage of the 640 XL, as you would expect from larger, well spaced keys. Apple’s iPhone doesn’t seem to scale in the same way, and Microsoft’s word prediction is far superior to Apple’s. It’s a pity the apps don’t scale up too, but Office and the platform are due for a “big bang” overhaul with Windows 10 later this year.

Rich capture mode takes several pics to make one good one – click for a full-resolution image

Call quality was excellent but I didn’t have the chance to test LTE speeds, as our review sample was a European (it boots into Italian by default) 3G model. But generally it was nice to have a Lumia with bit of character, as there are so many models it is difficult to tell them apart. For instance, the 535 and 640 look identical from the front.

The phones runs Windows 8.1 Update 2 which brings one work-friendly feature with it: the ability to use an external Bluetooth keyboard. At last.

Nice niche – Microsoft's Lumia 640 XL shows that big phones don't have to have a big price

The Reg Verdict

There isn’t a lot of competition in this “economy large-screen” class today, with Huawei’s Mate costing £100 more. Samsung once threw its Galaxy Grand into this category, but sidelined it in favour of the Note, and today Samsung’s Note 4 is twice the price of the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL. Even the two-year-old Note 2 costs more.

So you could understand if Microsoft simply slung out another model to meet the price point. But it’s done an excellent job – and Microsoft looks a lot more credible as a mobile company as a result. ®