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You can get colourful with Windows 8.1 at a wallet-friendly price on or around 3 July with the arrival of the new 4G Nokia Lumia 635 , set to cost £145. And you might not have to wait too long to be chatting up Microsoft’s Siri rival Cortana either.
Microsoft is making Cortana available in the UK and China “very soon,” says Marcus Ash, Group Program Manager for Cortana on Windows Phone. He promises “Weeks not months.”
In the meantime £145 is the UK price for the 635 according to online shop Unlocked-mobiles, where you can now pre-order the new phone. The 635 will come in black, green or orange, with a 4.5-inch screen and 4G LTE for extra-fast data.
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It also features Windows Phone 8.1, the latest update to Microsoft’s software for smartphones. Whether that includes Cortana from day one remains to be seen; a spokesperson for Nokia told me that while the company won’t name an exact date for Cortana’s UK debut, ” it is coming.”
The Lumia 635 is, along with the Lumia 630 and Lumia 930 , one of the first Windows Phone 8.1 phones. The trio was announced in April at Microsoft Build developer conference in San Francisco. The 630 is already on sale in the UK for around £120, but it doesn’t include 4G.
While exact release dates haven’t been confirmed, the 635 is also expected to go on sale in the US this summer. AT&T, T-Mobile, and MetroPCS are the first US carriers to confirm they will sell the phone. Nokia says it will cost $179 off-contract in the USA.
As well as being one of the first devices to show off Windows 8.1, the 635 is one of the first to arrive since Microsoft bought Nokia’s devices and services business for more than $7.2 billion in April. Now the deal is done, the days of phones with a Nokia logo on the back are numbered according to Nokia’s phone boss, Stephen Elop who returns to his former employer Microsoft with the deal.
