The Lumia 435 is the cheapest Lumia yet and it's now available via the Microsoft Store in the U.S. for just $70 off-contract with T-Mobile.

Microsoft has decided to focus on affordable smartphones at least in the first half of this year, aiming to attract more customers to its platform and gain a bigger share of the highly-competitive smartphone market. The company has already added several budget-friendly handsets to its lineup, and the Lumia 435 is one of them.

Microsoft unveiled its Lumia 435 handset back in January and boasted that it's the cheapest Lumia it ever made. The Lumia 435 doesn't pack any impressive hardware specifications, but it should offer a decent performance and a neat software experience at a dirt-cheap price.

The handset officially went on sale in the UK last month, and now the Lumia 435 finally hit commercial availability in the U.S. as well. The smartphone is now on sale on the Microsoft Store, with a T-Mobile version available for only $70 without a contract.

For those unfamiliar with the device, the Microsoft Lumia 435 sports a 4-inch WVGA display with a modest resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage capacity, expandable up to 128GB via microSD. Other specs include a 2-megapixel rear camera, a 0.3-megapixel (VGA) front shooter, dual-SIM support, and a 1,560 mAh battery to keep things up and running.

In other words, the handset comes with low-end specs all around, but should be more than decent for its price and category.

Moreover, the Lumia 435 may come with modest specifications, but it also includes some neat software features. The smartphone ships with Windows Phone 8.1 and Lumia Denim out of the box, which will include Cortana, App Center, Live Folders, and other goodies. The handset also comes with the Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote), seamless Skype integration HERE location services, and up to 32GB of OneDrive cloud storage space for free.

Interested customers in the U.S. can now purchase the dirt-cheap Microsoft Lumia 435 on T-Mobile for just $70 without a contract, straight from the Microsoft Store at this link. For more information about the handset, check out the introductory video below.