Nokia last week confirmed that the Lumia 610 would be launching in the United Kingdom this week. The low-cost Lumia is a cheap and cheerful alternative to the pricey flagship Lumia 900 that Nokia launched earlier this year. Aimed at young people looking to buy their first phone, it doesn't pack the same high-end specs as the Lumia 900, but it also comes without the hefty price tag.
Announced earlier this year, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Lumia 610 boasts a slightly more curved design than we've seen with the other Lumia devices and packs an 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A5 CPU, Adreno 200 graphics, 256 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM, a 3.7-inch 480x800 capacitive touchscreen LCD, 8 GB of internal memory, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, Bluetooth 2.1, and Windows Phone 7.5 (Tango).
Available in the Lumia's trademark white, cyan, magenta and black hues, the phone is available through a variety of retailers and carriers, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4u, and starts at just £15 per month on-contract. If you're looking to get the device contract-free, last we heard the price was set at £150, but this has not yet been confirmed.
Of course, the trade-off for choosing a budget phone such as this is that it can't do all the things its more high-end brothers and sisters are capable of. And we're not just talking about the lack of front-facing camera. According to Crave UK, the Lumia 610's 256 MB of RAM means it can't run a ton of popular apps, chief among them are Angry Birds and Microsoft's own VoIP app, Skype. Also named are PES 2012, Plants vs Zombies and Assassin's Creed. Bummer. At the very least, you can console yourself with the fact that there's apparently a special version of Angry Birds in the works for budget devices such as the 610. No word on Skype, though.
