Nokia Lumia 610 review

I will get right to the point. The Lumia 610 is Nokia's biggest mistake when it comes to their Windows Phone 7 portfolio. Their strategy of racing to the bottom has backfired badly. Core Windows Phone 7 features like Live Tiles has been disabled no thanks to the compromise made with the RAM. While built-in apps has not suffered much, third party apps suffers from incompatibility issues, as well as inability to update its content in the background and update their Live Tiles.

It is difficult to comprehend why Nokia and/or Microsoft chose this route for Windows Phone when the OS philosophy has always been about standardisation, none-compromises and fending of potential fragmentation. I admire Nokia's strategy of getting the price of Windows Phone devices lower, but not when it alters the usability of Windows Phone.

At the end of the day, all I can say is the Lumia 610 and Windows Phone Tango should be treated as none-canon to the Windows Phone family and should thus be ignored and forgotten forever.

Read on my review on FoneArena to see why exactly I found the Lumia 610 to be a failure.

Nokia Lumia 610's Tango limitations

Nokia announced the Lumia 610 back at MWC. The handset was supposed usher in a new lower price point for Windows Phone, and to do that, some corners had to be made. Microsoft created a new version of Windows Phone 7 dubbed 'Tango'.

In this update, the OS is optimised to run on an older generation Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC with a 800MHz Scorpion CPU and Adreno 200 GPU (the same one that powered the first generation Windows Phone), and 256MB of RAM - which are the components found inside the Lumia 610. The cut down in specs, particularly the RAM bit, has brought some dramatic compromises to functionality. Background tasks is not enabled with Tango, and fast-app switching has also been excised completely.

Not good. I have already identified a couple of my favourite apps that were unable to run on the Lumia 610, including DoDonPachi Maximum, Sid Meier's Pirates, Angry Birds, Skype and WeatherMaster. Other apps like WeatherFlow would install and run, but you wouldn't be able to use the Live Tile functionality (background tasks is required to update Live Tiles).