Microsoft's Lumia 650 now available from £129.99 in the UK

Microsoft opened pre-orders for the Lumia 650 in the US and Canada a few days ago, and it will soon be available in Mexico too. Over in the UK, the new Windows 10 Mobile handset went on sale three and a half weeks ago, priced at £159.99 SIM-free and unlocked, but its price has already begun to fall.

Various retailers have recently reduced their SIM-free pricing to around the £150 level, but you can now get the Lumia 650 for considerably less.

Leading independent device retailer Carphone Warehouse had been selling the Lumia 650 on contract-free pay-as-you-go (PAYG) plans with several networks, priced at £149.99 for the handset, plus a minimum £10 purchase of PAYG credit, bringing the total cost to the same as that of buying the device SIM-free.

Now, though, Carphone Warehouse is offering the 650 on PAYG from £119.99 + £10 top-up, bringing the total cost down to as little as £129.99. To qualify for that price, you’ll have to buy the device with £10 of PAYG credit on Vodafone – which includes 150 cross-network minutes, unlimited texts and 500MB of data – but given that almost every handset that Carphone Warehouse sells is not locked to a specific network, you should be able to use it with SIMs from other operators without any problems.

The Lumia 650’s key specs include:

5-inch AMOLED with HD (1280x720px) resolution and Gorilla Glass 3
Quad-core 1.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 processor
1GB RAM
16GB onboard storage (plus microSD card support up to 200GB)
8MP rear camera with autofocus, LED flash and 720p video recording at 30fps
5MP front-facing camera with continous autofocus, 'video light' and 720p video at 30fps
Bluetooth 4.1
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with support for Wi-Fi calling
4G LTE connectivity (bands 1, 3, 7, 8 and 20)
NFC support
microUSB 2.0 with Type B connector
Removable 2000mAh battery
142 x 71 x 6.9mm; 122g