Microsoft Lumia 550 review: Low-Five

Photos

One of the first noteworthy new apps in Windows 10 Mobile is Photos. Its default view is an overview of your entire collection of pictures (sans the screenshots). It is also capable of aggregating all of your OneDrive photos and listing them along with your camera snaps. Microsoft gives you 30GB for free plus 3GB for the each device on which you turn on the automatic OneDrive camera upload.

The photos app

Live images are available as well. If the option is enabled from within the camera interface, your image will open as an animated picture similar to Apple Live Photos, sans the 3D Touch gimmick. The live picture is stored in a standard jpg container, but only the Photos app of Windows 10 (Mobile, Desktop, Xbox One) can actually display the image animated. For all others image viewers/editors - it's a static image with double the size though.

Groove Music

The Music app in Windows 10 Mobile has gone through some major changes. It is now called Groove Music, named after Microsoft's music streaming service. Groove Music service is integrated within the app and offers streaming and downloading music the same way Google Music and Apple Music does.

Groove Music

Groove Music sorts your local music by albums, artist, songs and playlists. It covers all the usual requirements for a music player, supports editing playlists and comes with a nice and clean interface.

Groove Music app supports playing back the music you've uploaded onto your OneDrive storage, which is potentially quite useful.

FM radio

The Lumia 550 comes FM Radio-enabled, but in most regions there is no FM radio app pre-installed. You can grab a proper app from the Windows Store and listen to FM stations using a headset connected as an antenna.

Note that this functionality may be locked entirely for some countries and also you'd need to get a headset separately as there is none in the retail package - at least ours came without one.

Audio output is better than the price suggests

The Microsoft Lumia 550 did very well when plugged in an active external amplifier. While its volume levels were only average, it posted great clarity scores top to bottom.

Plugging in a pair of headphones harmed the stereo crosstalk moderately and it also introduced some intermodulation distortion and frequency response fluctuations, but none of those is too major a deficiency. Volume levels remained flat for a solid performance overall.

Anyway, here go the results so you can do your comparisons.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Microsoft Lumia 550	+0.01, -0.03	-91.1	90.9	0.011	0.013	-91.2
Microsoft Lumia 550 (headphones attached)	+0.46, -0.13	-89.7	91.1	0.019	0.306	-62.1
Nokia Lumia 950	+0.01, -0.03	-91.3	91.2	0.0036	0.012	-91.6
Nokia Lumia 950 (headphones attached)	+0.59, -0.03	-92.0	91.9	0.011	0.316	-63.9
Meizu m1 metal	+0.02, -0.12	-93.6	93.5	0.0016	0.0068	-93.9
Meizu m1 metal (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.16	-93.2	93.2	0.0042	0.056	-58.9
Microsoft Lumia 640	+0.05, -0.05	-93.1	92.9	0.0090	0.013	-93.2
Microsoft Lumia 640 (headphones attached)	+0.46, -0.10	-92.5	91.9	0.015	0.115	-56.7
Meizu m2 note	+0.08, -0.05	-93.1	92.7	0.0079	0.013	-92.4
Meizu m2 note (headphones attached)	+0.40, -0.62	-86.9	88.0	0.145	0.529	-50.8

Microsoft Lumia 550 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.