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Microsoft has finally reached a point with Windows Phone where it's offering a reasonably rounded media experience, and the Nokia Lumia 635 benefits from that.
In Xbox Video, Windows Phone at last has a video content store to call its own. It contains a pretty comprehensive library of TV shows and movies to rent or own at competitive prices.
This stand-alone video app forms one half of the replacement for the old music and video app. The other half, you'll be unsurprised to hear, is called Music.
Again, this is fairly complete store for music tracks, though there's not much of a storefront. You kind of have to know what you're looking for here.
Of course, Nokia provides its own means of music discovery in the form of MixRadio. This app provides free curated playlists built around certain themes. These can be based on genre, moods, or events like festivals. Each playlist can be downloaded for offline listening, too.
You can also create personalised mixes by feeding up to three artists into the app, which will then spit out a bunch of related tracks. You can't specify particular artists to play, and you're limited to six skips per hour, but as a free music discovery tool (with no sign-up required), it's hard to complain.
So Microsoft's media ecosystem has finally matured. We're not sure the Lumia 635 is necessarily the best handset to exploit that fact, though.
Its 4.5-inch display is large enough for videos, but again, that 854 x 480 resolution isn't quite sharp enough to show it in all its HD glory. SD material fares better, of course.
The same goes for gaming, which I touched upon in the performance section. While the Lumia 635's quad-core Snapdragon 400 CPU can just about run everything the Xbox Live app has to offer, it won't look at its best on the display. Still, for the price, you have yourself an adequate gaming machine.
