Microsoft Lumia 550

It's impossible to deny Microsoft's influential position in the entry-level smartphone market   over the last few years. The company has always managed to deliver compelling budget packages at hard-to-beat prices.

While success has never been a given for any low-end smartphone, Microsoft seems to have perfected the formula. A light and resource-efficient OS such as Windows Phone has certainly helped. Microsoft's devices are typically capable of matching and beating the speed and performance of their Android peers with less processing power and RAM.

The Microsoft Lumia 550 however is the first budget smartphone to run Windows 10 - which marks a new stage in mobile software for the Redmond company and a step towards platform convergence. It's too big a step though for the Microsoft Lumia 550 but even without the Continuum support, the phone isn't without its merits.


Key features
Windows 10 Mobile
4.7" 720p LCD display of 315ppi, Glance Screen
Snapdragon 210 chipset with quad-core 1.1GHz Cortex-A7 CPU and Adreno 304 GPU, 1GB of RAM
5MP auto-focus camera with f/2.4 aperture, LED flash, 720p video recording @ 30fps
2MP front-facing camera with 480p@30fps video recording
8GB of built-in storage; expandable via a microSD slot
Cat. 4 LTE (150/50Mbps); Wi-Fi a/b/g/n; Bluetooth 4.1; GPS/GLONASS/Beidou; FM radio;
Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
2,100mAh battery


Low performance chipset
No Windows Continuum support
The black polycarbonate is quite smudge-prone
The design might be growing old on some long-time Windows Phone users

There's more to the Lumia 550 though than its looks. We're excited to see what Windows 10 has in store for the entry-level smartphone space. Before that, let's explore the hardware and what Microsoft changed about it. Or didn't.