Not quite two years ago I blogged that I was getting a Lumia 520 phone, which was thrown in free with the Smart 45 plan I was on. The Lumia 520 held up quite well; it got dropped more times than I would have liked, but spending most of its time in a pouch meant it was relatively well looked after. In the end it was a faulty power button that has seen it put in storage as a standby spare (the phone can still be turned on with the hardware camera button).
The replacement, which I paid for, is a Lumia 635. This model has a slightly larger screen with Gorilla Glass instead of the generic glass on the 520. About three months ago MS started shipping the 635 to NZ with 1 GB of RAM instead of the original 512 MB. This makes it more suitable for Windows 10 when it arrives. The screen is slightly larger with a few more pixels, the battery is a little larger, the CPU is quad core instead of dual, and it supports 4G. And that’s about all – and you pay $149 for the handset compared to $99 now for the 520. I think the screen is probably brighter and therefore better in sunlight. I felt that the 635 being a bit dearer would be a better phone, and with 1 GB of RAM I think it is.
The big difference is in body styling. The 520 has a curved back, and the edges are all curved as well at the rear of the phone. The corners seen from the front are relatively square, with very tight curvature. The 635 has a mostly flat back with straight (although slightly tapered) sides, and the corners are quite wide. Overall I like this appearance much more.
Side by side the 635, 520 and the old HTC Trophy 7 which was my first smartphone.
Seen from the rear view.
The 635 also has changeable covers like the 520. In this case the colours are green, orange, black and white. The phone comes from the shop as black. Ascent supplied a green cover for just over $20. The green is very bright and glossy – it is grass green and I love it. It really adds to the character of the phone and makes it fun to use. I think the cyan blue for the 520 was a bit bland and red would have been a better colour to have had, although I can see the attraction of the blue.
The 635 was easy to switch to in the shop and the SD card fits into a slot in the battery bay just as in the 520. It was easy to back the old phone up onto OneDrive and then restore it onto the new phone. So it was pretty much all go within a couple of hours.