Microsoft's selfie-obsessed Lumia 735 debuts on Verizon for under $200
Microsoft has designed the Lumia 735 explicitly with selfies in mind: there's a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and even the 6.7MP rear camera can be aligned on your face with the built-in Lumia Selfie app. It's also worth noting that the phone ships with the Lumia Denim firmware, which helps the phone fire off quick shots.
Verizon will charge $192 for the Lumia 735, or $8 per month (for 24 months) on Verizon Edge, when it ships next month; you can preorder it now. Verizon has also tossed in a year's subscription to Office 365 Personal, which adds another $70 worth of value to the whole affair. When Microsoft announced the Lumia 735 last fall, the company expected you'd pay about $288 for the Lumia 735; the price has dropped significantly since then.
Think of the Lumia 735 as the little brother of the Lumia 830, with the Lumia 830 carving out a niche as the "affordable flagship" of the Lumia line. The Lumia 735 is nothing fancy; in fact, besides the emphasis on selfies, little stands out.
In general, there's a good mix of low- to midrange components inside the Lumia 735. It ships with a 4.7-inch, 1280x720 OLED screen with sunlight readability enhancements and a high brightness mode; 1GB of memory; 8GB of internal storage; and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core chip running at 1.2GHz. A removable 2,200mAh battery is also included. The phone weighs 134.3 grams and measures 134.7 mm x 68.5 mm x 8.9 mm. Since the phone runs on Verizon, however, it also supports the carrier's XLTE network.
While the phone can be charged with a wired charger, Microsoft also has provided a line of wireless charging docks in orange, green, white, red, and cyan, that can be purchased for an additional $25.
Why this matters: For all of our myopic focus on flagships, readers keep telling us that price matters--a lot. With the Lumia 735, Microsoft has pared down the feature set to what most phone users tend to do: take selfies, browse the Web on a high-speed network, and run a few apps.