Microsoft Lumia 735 will be the first smartphone to debut in the UK on Thursday, October 2 with the beta version of Windows Phone virtual assistant, Cortana, installed.
Cortana, a rival to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now, “tracks what you care about, helps you become more productive, and even gets better at her job the more she learns about you,” Microsoft claims.
The virtual assistant does the work of linking reminders to contacts, syncing diaries, making travel arrangements and notifying user of upcoming needs and occasions, such as birthdays, with accompanying gift suggestions as well as learning the user’s interest over time by keeping a record of searches and visited Web pages.
In addition to the highly touted Cortana, Microsoft’s selfie dedicated smartphone ‘Lumia 735,’ which was first unveiled at IFA last month in dual-SIM and non-LTE variant, will feature a 4.7-inch OLED display with a 720 x 1,280 pixel resolution, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor running at 1.2GHz, a 2,220mAh battery, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of onboard storage with a microSD card slot that supports external storage of up to 128GB, in addition to 15GB of OneDrive cloud storage.
There’s a 6.7-megapixel rear camera with Zeiss optics with an f19 aperture for great photos in low light and a full HD 5-megapixel front-facing camera with enhanced focal length and wider angles for best looking selfies. The handset will run Windows Phone 8.1 with the Lumia Denim update.
The Lumia smartphone will come loaded with a SensorCore low-power motion sensing technology that tracks user’s movements to improve the performance of the “next generation of fitness apps”.
The new Lumia 735 will be available with “all major retailers” across UK starting October 2 for around £20 a month on contract in bright orange, bright green, white and dark grey colour options.