Finally, I am off Verizon. My contract was up this week-end and I switched to Cricket Wireless. I got on the lowest tier plan from Cricket and now have more data and a lower bill. 2.5 GB for $35 per month.
I chose the Lumia 640 as my new phone. It was $129 plus sales tax and a $25 connection fee. My old phone was HTC 8X with 16 GB of on board memory. While the Lumia only has 8 GB, it has an SD Memory slot. I had already bought a 64 GB memory card from Amazon for $26. The SD Card was put in the phone as it was being set-up at Cricket.
I took the phone home and set it up. After I entered the credentials for my Microsoft Account, I was asked if I wanted to restore from the backup of the HTC phone or start with a clean install. I chose to restore from the backup. This took a while to run—again do this at home. As the backup began installing, my phone automatically switched to my home’s Wi-Fi. All my custom settings except Bluetooth seemed to be installed when finished. Also, all phone apps were downloaded; most without any user intervention needed. Only 4 MB of the data plan was used to setup the phone and close to 6 GB on the Wi-Fi.
Also during the process of setting up the phone, my new SD card was detected. When prompted, I said “Yes” to use the SD card. All music, photos, documents, etc. were automatically set to go to this card instead of using the remaining memory on the phone.
Only maps that were downloaded were stored on the phone memory. I could find no setting to move these to the SD card.
The phone screen is slightly larger than my HTC, but is seems much bigger. I set my HTC phone on top of the 640 just to compare the size. To me it seemed about 1/8” bigger around all four sides.
The phone has fewer physical buttons than the HTC, only Power and Volume. The traditional Widows Phone buttons of Back, Windows, and Search are now virtual buttons on the touch screen. So far, the Lumia is faster than the HCT in booting up and running apps. I have not put the camera thru its paces yet but hope to do that soon.
It’s a great experience. Oh, and the color is Cyan which is bright, happy blue.