Anton Nagy from Pocketnow has produced an incredibly informative 18 minute video where he pits Nokia’s new Lumia 610 against the year and a half old LG Optimus 7. The Lumia 610 is the first device on the market to run Windows Phone Tango, which is a version of Windows Phone that supports devices with “low end” hardware specifications. When the first generation Windows Phones that launched back in Q4 2010, they had a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512 MB of RAM. That got bumped up to 1.4 GHz a little over a year later, the RAM was kept the same, and support for 4G LTE was added. Tango meanwhile took things down to 800 MHz for the processor and more crucially it halved the ram to just 256 MB. You’ll notice in the video below that most applications take ages to load on the Lumia, whereas they fly on the LG.
Now before you start sending Anton hate mail because of the MacBook Pro and the iPad that you can clearly see at the start of his video, you should know that he was a former Microsoft Windows Phone MVP, so he’s actually a huge fan of the OS. If you’re a long time IntoMobile reader, then you’ll know that I’m not.
Looking at the prices for Windows Phone devices here in Finland, the Lumia 610 goes for 200 EUR, while the 710, which is a “fully equipped” Windows Phone that runs at 1.4 GHz and has 512 MB of RAM, is only 50 EUR more. It doesn’t make sense then to get the cheaper device, you’d have to be mad. But say you have a hard limit on your budget. Even in that situation, you can buy the same LG Optimus 7 in the video above for 200 EUR brand new!
Still, I can’t recommend Windows Phone in its current incarnation. Later this year we’re going to hear about Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo, and that’s supposed to fix many of the issues that plague the OS. We should know more around September.