If anyone's been looking for a cheap Windows phone to play with, AT&T's "GoPhone" no contract version of the Lumia 640 with windows 8.1 is
on sale at Best Buy for $29.99. I noticed the Best Buy sale after buying one at Walgreens on clearance for the same price, so I assume that this phone is being replaced by something with Windows 10 and they're clearing out old stock. The documentation says that I should be able to upgrade to Windows 10 at some point, but no updates are available right now.
Here are my impressions after about a day of playing around with it:
The hardware is much nicer than any Android phones at that price point. Both the screen and camera are beautiful.
Using it without cell activation is easy. I don't think it asked me once to activate during setup and mine is currently just using WiFi.
Microsoft's included map software is wonderful. It allows downloading of maps for offline use and can even generate turn-by-turn directions while completely offline. It's worth $30 as a GPS alone.
The big downside to this phone is the lack of apps. I've started looking for ereader software that I like, but there doesn't seem to be a big selection to choose from. As far as store-specific apps go, Kindle and Kobo apps are available, but the NOOK app was apparently pulled during the big falling out between Microsoft and B&N.
I can manage ebooks in main memory using Calibre's MTP device driver, but it seems to have trouble with folders on the SD Card. On some other devices, I remove the SD Card and use Calibre's ability to "connect" to a folder, but removing the SD Card from this phone requires opening the back and removing the battery.
As a weird aside, you can't easily store offline maps on the SD Card. Since the phone only has about 3.5 GB free of its on-board 8 GB, maps can quickly eat that up (Michigan is about 200 MB and the whole US is ~4.5GB). This is apparently a design decision by Microsoft, because literally every other app can store its data on the SD Card. Not only that, but a tweak to the registry used to allow external storage of the maps, but Microsoft specifically disabled changing that registry entry in a subsequent software update. I managed to get the registry entry changed, but it involved installing Microsoft's development tools and registering as a developer in order to install a hacked registry editor.