Lumia 640 XL LTE

Lumia 640 XL LTE

Microsoft Devices' Lumia 640 XL LTE is the souped-up version of the company's 5-inch Lumia 640. The XL ups the screen size to 5.7-inches and adds 4G connectivity, while popping a significantly bigger 13-megapixel camera on the rear, a 5-megapixel one on the front and a 3,000mAh battery inside. Even better, it does all this while maintaining a respectably low price: just $240, £219 in the UK and AU$399 in Australia.

My colleague Andrew Hoyle was quite effusive about the smaller Lumia 640, calling it "everything you'd hope for from a budget phone." But, bearing in mind the XL has the exact same processor, storage and RAM as the smaller model, are these additions worth the extra cost?

A quick note: there are a couple of different variants of the Lumia 640 XL available, including a dual-SIM model and one without the LTE offering. The model reviewed here is a version with a single SIM slot and an LTE 4G modem.

In an ocean of black handsets, the Lumia 640 XL stands out like some sort of exotic fish. Yes, you can still get it in black or white, but the blue -- wait, make that "cyan" -- review unit that I had in the office was actually quite refreshing.

Even better, the casing on the 640 XL is a matte finish, unlike the gloss on its smaller sibling. I've never been a fan of a piano-finish as they seem designed purely to collect fingerprints, so the XL gets extra points just for that.

The 5.7-inch IPS screen on the XL might be bigger than the base 640, but it has the exact same resolution of 1,280x720 pixels. This means the XL actually has a lower pixel density than its smaller cousin -- 259ppi versus 294ppi. (For some more context, the 1,440x2,560-pixel Galaxy S6 has around 577 ppi.)

The 640 XL is running the same version of Windows Phone 8.1 as the 5-inch 640, with all the same benefits and disadvantages. It's also packing the exact same processor and memory, a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 and 1GB of RAM. 

The XL improves on the 640 in both rear and front cameras. The front jumps from an underwhelming 0.9-megapixel to 5, which is going to keep you happy for both selfies and Skype calls.

But it's the 13-megapixel snapper on the rear -- complete with German-made Zeiss optics -- that's the most marked improvement. That's letting you take 4,128x3,096 resolution photos (far, far better than the screen can display) and 1080p Full-HD video -- also at a higher res than the screen can display.