There’s little question that Nokia is taking the low-end of the smartphone market very seriously these days. They just kicked off their race to the bottom with the colorful, budget-conscious Lumia 610 at this year’s Mobile World Congress, and while it’s far and away the least powerful of the Finnish company’s Windows Phone brood, it’s certainly priced to move at €189. According to Nokia EVP Niklas Savander though, that price tag isn’t quite cheap enough. In a brief interview with Pocket-lint, Savander revealed that in order to better compete with Android, Nokia is very concerned with getting their hardware to even lower price points.
“Android is in many markets at the €100 price already, so that would suggest that if we are at €189 with the Lumia 610 we still have work to do when it comes to creating a lower-end first-time user smartphone.”
Now, Nokia is no stranger to pushing out low-cost, no-frills hardware — their venerable Nokia 1100 once held the crown for the best-selling bit of consumer electronics in the world, but getting their Windows Phones to that level of ubiquity will take a bit of doing. While Nokia toils away on the hardware front in an attempt to cut costs without stymieing performance too much, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Tango update will make sure that the eventual end-users don’t lose too much functionality in the process.
Like This | 1 Comment
