Microsoft Lumia 550 Review

Back in October 2015, Microsoft announced the first budget Windows 10 Mobile device, the Lumia 550. The announcement was made along with the flagship phones, the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950XL. The Lumia 550 made its way to India in December and is priced Rs 9,200 and comes with 4.7 inch HD display, Snapdragon 201 Quad-core processor, 1GB RAM and 8GB storage.

There is also a 5MP shooter with LED flash. So this new Windows 10 Mobile budget phone worth buying, let’s find out in this detailed review.

Related Reading: Lumia 550 Unboxing

Here is the review of the Lumia 550.

Design and Build:

With respect to the design, Microsoft has gone in with the same old design as that of Lumia 630 released last year. The phone has flat matte finish back panel and tapering edge which gives a nice feel to the device in hand. The power and volume keys are on the right side, the 3.5mm audio jack on the top and micro USB charging slot at the bottom. The rear panel has the 5MP camera, LED flash and speaker unit at the bottom.

The front panel has 2MP camera, sensors, and 4.7-inch display. The build quality isn’t as good as older Nokia phones with rear and front panel attracting a lot of fingerprints and dirt. The back panel and the battery are removable on the phone and the phone comes with nano SIM card (single SIM) and a micro SD expansion slot.

Display:

The Lumia 550 comes with a 4.7 inch HD display with a resolution of 1280 X 720p. The display on the Lumia 550 looks decent and has good colors and also feels vibrant with 315PPI. The touch response is also good. But having said that, there is no protection offered on the display and also the display attracts a lot of dirt and fingerprint, so you might have to clean it frequently.

But overall, you would love the vibrant and crisp display on the Lumia 550.

Software:

Lumia 550 comes with Windows 10 Mobile out of the box and it is the first budget Windows Phone to run the latest Windows 10 Mobile build. Windows 10 Mobile comes with a lot of new features including improved notification center, start screen and also settings menu. The new settings menu has the option to search for any setting or option and also grouped into different categories making it easy to access the options.

Another useful feature of Windows 10 Mobile is that you can pin any settings to the start menu making it easier to access your most frequently used options. Other useful options include Kid’s Corner, sync settings across multiple devices and also Glance screen.

Windows 10 Mobile also comes with added options for customizations, now you can set any picture as the background image in the start screen and also set the transparency. The number of accent colors has also increased in the new version.

Overall, software wise, there is certainly a lot of improvement when compared to Windows Phone 8.1.

Performance:

The Lumia 550 is the first Windows Phone to come with the budget Snapdragon 210 Quad-core processor from Qualcomm which is clocked at 1.1 GHz with Adreno 304 GPU. It is coupled with 1GB of RAM similar to other budget Windows Phones. Now, talking about performance, this is where the Lumia 550 disappoints big time. There are two  aspects here, first is the performance of Windows 10 Mobile which we feel is pretty poor. We encountered lots of bugs and crashes, a lot of times the settings menu crashed and it took us back to the start menu.

The camera app was also not perfect, it too did crash occasionally. The second aspect is the performance of the OS on Snapdragon 210 chipset which is again laggy. If you are a moderate user, you might not see quite a lot of lag, but with multitasking and running heavy games and apps, the performance downgrades drastically.

Windows 10 Mobile has to go a long way before it can be used as a smartphone OS. We are expecting Microsoft to release updates for Windows 10 mobile pretty soon. Poor optimization of the software and also a low-end processor with just 1GB RAM makes this device unusable for heavy tasks. The multitasking was also not very quick.

The phone comes with 8GB internal storage and you can expand the storage to 128GB via micro SD card. You can also install apps directly on to the SD card. The phone comes with only single SIM card which is again a surprising strategy from Microsoft. The device has 4G LTE but supports only FDD LTE bands and there is no support for TDD LTE in India which is again disappointing.

The call quality on the device was decent and we didn’t notice any issues here. The speaker output is again average. The gaming performance of the device was just average considering that this runs a budget processor. The phone did get warm and the heat generated was on the higher side comparing with other budget Windows Phones.

Overall, the device was a disappointment in the performance and not recommended for heavy usage.

Camera:

When most of the Android phones in this price segment are competing with 13MP rear cameras, Microsoft has bundled a 5MP camera with flash and a 2MP front-facing camera. This is quite a disappointment for shutterbugs.

The camera UI is same as that found on the Lumia camera app with radial like controls. You can adjust ISO, exposure and other aspects. Coming to the camera quality, the 5MP shooter has decent colors and looked good overall, but the sharpness was way too low. When you compare with the competition, the camera samples are way behind and does not even come close. But if you compare this device with other 5MP camera, then Lumia 550 might emerge the winner.

The video recording is at 720p and again it is not a recommended device for videos. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Battery Life:

Lumia 550 ships with a 2100mAh capacity battery. The battery performance of the device is decent and with moderate usage with calls, social networking, a bit of gaming and browsing, you can get a day of usage with the battery. The battery saver settings allow you to get additional juice from the battery by limiting the background activity.

Verdict:

Should I buy Lumia 550? As of now, we would say a big no. Lumia 550 has low-end specs and priced higher than the competition from Android and comes with an OS which has a lot of bugs to be rectified and overall poor performance. To top it all, the camera is just a 5MP shooter when you can pick 13MP cameras in the price segment.

Overall, we were quite disappointed with Microsoft’s first attempt at budget Windows 10 mobile. We wouldn’t recommend this device for the pricing or unless Microsoft fixes the bugs in the OS.