Microsoft's new Lumia 430

Lumia 430 is its cheapest Windows phone yet at just $70

Microsoft's new Lumia 430

Microsoft is continuing its push into the low-end smartphone market today with the launch of the Lumia 430. At just $70 before taxes, Microsoft labels it the "most affordable Lumia to-date," and its basic specifications clearly help achieve that impressive price point. For the money you’ll get a 4-inch WVGA display, 8GB of storage (with a microSD slot), and 1GB of RAM. This is all powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, and a relatively small 1500 mAh battery. To put this all into perspective, you could buy nine of these Lumia 430 phones for the price of a single iPhone 6. You obviously won't get the same experience, but it shows just how cheap modern smartphones are getting.

"Available in April in limited regions"

The Lumia 430 joins the Lumia 435 and 532 handsets in Microsoft’s lowest-priced Windows Phones, and its camera capabilities are very similar. There’s only a 2-megapixel camera at the rear of the Lumia 430, with a VGA 0.3-megapixel camera at the front. That won’t give you stunning smartphone photography, but for the price it’s understandable. Microsoft says it’s planning to make the Lumia 430 available in April in APAC, IMEA, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

If you’re still waiting on the company to release a high-end flagship Windows phone then that wait will continue until the summer at the earliest. Microsoft previously revealed that it won’t be launching a new flagship handset until Windows 10 is available. The software maker promised to launch Windows 10 in the summer earlier this week, but with the Windows 10 for phones preview lagging behind its desktop counterpart it’s not clear whether phones will actually launch with the software in the summer period. Either way, no successor to the Lumia 930 or Lumia 1020 will arrive until later this year.

via Tom Warren