Back in February, Microsoft"s Lumia 435 became available in the UK priced at just under £90 off-contract. By August, its price had dropped considerably to just £39.99. But now the company"s most affordable smartphone is available there for even less.
Carphone Warehouse is selling the Lumia 435 for just £19.99 when you buy it with a new pay-as-you-go (PAYG) SIM. To qualify for that price, you"ll have to buy some PAYG credit too - a minimum of £10 which, on EE, includes 150 minutes of talktime, unlimited texts and 500MB of data, valid for 30 days.
On Virgin Media, for the same handset price and top-up amount, you"ll get either 30 days of unlimited landline calls and 120 minutes of cross-network mobile calls; or 3000 texts and 1GB of data.
You can also buy the Lumia 435 with PAYG SIMs from Vodafone or O2 - but if you do so, you"ll either have to pay more for the handset or for the minimum PAYG top-up. Given that almost every phone sold by Carphone Warehouse is network-unlocked - including almost all of those sold on PAYG - you may as well go for the cheapest option.
Even with those caveats, the all-in price of £29.99 is still remarkably low; indeed, the only other smartphone that you can buy for so little money at the same retailer is the Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 3, an Android 4.4 KitKat handset, with a 3.5-inch 320x480px display.
The Lumia 435"s key specs include:
- 4-inch LCD with WVGA (800x480px) resolution
- Dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor
- 1GB RAM
- 8GB onboard storage (plus microSD support up to 128GB)
- 2MP rear camera with fixed focus
- 0.3MP front-facing camera
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- 1560mAh battery
- Dual-SIM variant available
- 118.1 x 64.7 x 11.7mm; 134g
- Windows Phone 8.1
The Lumia 435 is available in black, white and orange, along with a green option unique to Carphone Warehouse.
And by the way, Microsoft has confirmed that the 435 will be among the very first devices to be upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile.
Source: Carphone Warehouse