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Cricket Wireless is now offering the Microsoft Lumia 640 smartphone to its no-contract wireless customers, packing plenty of quality features and a low $129.99 price tag. The Lumia 640 is available immediately in Cricket stores and from the company’s Website.
Included in the Lumia 640 is a 5-inch Clearblack HD display for improved visibility in sunlight; a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 cover for extra durability; a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor; 1GB of RAM; 8GB of on-board storage, which is expandable to 128GB with a microSD card; a 2,500mAh battery; and an 8MP rear camera with flash and HD video recording capabilities.
The 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) smartphone runs on the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system and includes the Lumia Denim update, which offers useful features such as Live Folders, a one-swipe Action Center and fast texting with Word Flow. The handset also comes with up to 30GB of free OneDrive storage and a wide-angle 1MP front camera.
As a special limited-time offer, buyers who purchase their Lumia 640 smartphones by June 30 will get one year’s free access to the Microsoft Office 365 Personal bundle, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, so that users can access and edit their files on the go. Also included in the bundle, which normally sells for $69.99 per year, are up to 60 free minutes of Skype calling per month in the first year, as well as an expanded 1TB of online cloud storage on OneDrive.
Cricket, a subsidiary of AT&T, is only offering the Lumia 640 in cyan blue.
The Lumia 640 and its larger sibling, the Lumia 640 XL, debuted in March at Mobile World Congress, according to an earlier eWEEK report. The Lumia 640 XL has a 5.7-inch HD display and starts at $242 with LTE capabilities.
Both new Lumia 640 smartphones will be upgradable to Windows 10 after its release later in 2015.
Cricket offers a Basic mobile plan at $40 (including 2.5GB of data), a Smart plan for $50 (including 5GB of data) and a Pro plan for $60 (including 10GB of data). Each of those plans is $5 less per month if customers use Cricket’s automatic Auto Pay payment service. The plans also include unlimited talk and text. Data use over the monthly limits will result in reduced access speeds of a maximum 128K bps for the rest of your monthly plan cycle.
In April, Cricket Wireless began to offer $9.99 Bring Your Own Device Universal SIM Card Activation kits through Amazon.com so that customers can easily move their existing no-contract mobile phones over to Cricket from competing carriers. Cricket previously offered such kits through its own Website since May 2014 when the company was relaunched after being acquired by AT&T, but the new distribution deal with Amazon is meant to promote the idea to an even wider audience.
In March, Cricket rolled out the Motorola Moto E 4G LTE smartphone to its customers for $129.99. The Moto E, which runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop, includes many upgrades from the original first-generation Moto E that debuted in May 2014. It has a 4.5-inch thin-film-transistor (TFT) display with 960-by-540 resolution and a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 surface; a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor; 1GB of RAM; 8GB of built-in on-board storage, which is expandable up to 32GB via a microSD slot; a 5MP rear camera; and a VGA front camera. The device also includes a 2,390mAh battery that provides up to about 14 hours of talk time and up to about 400 hours of standby time.