Nokia: Our Windows Phones Need To Get Even Cheaper

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.

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Intel announce two new Atom CPUs for phones and tablets

Intel is serious about getting a piece of the handheld action this time - they announced two new processors and chipsets to join what's already powering the likes of the Lenovo K800 and the Orange Santa Clara.

The first processor is called Atom Z2580 and features two cores (the same Medfield design like the fist one) with HyperThreading allowing the processor to run four threads simultaneously. It will be clocked at 1.3GHz, potentially going up to 1.8GHz with Turbo Boosts.

It's paired with a powerful GPU too - PowerVR SGX544MP2, which is supposed to double the performance of an SGX543MP2 found in the iPhone 4S.

Intel have their own LTE-capable modem that will work with the Atom Z2580 and all these components will be shown off in a brand new reference design.

With a little luck, it will go the way of the Santa Clara and be offered as a consumer phone too. However, that's unlikely to happen before the first half of 2013 at the earliest .

The second chipset includes the Atom Z2000, a low-end single-core processor running at 1GHz and without HyperThreading. There's a downclocked SGX540 GPU and an Intel-made HSPA+ modem.

The Atom Z2000 will get its own reference design and will target low-end phones. There's no word on availability, but probably won't be soon either.

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ZTE coming with 8 phones to MWC, quad-core flagship included

It's going to be a busy few days once the MWC starts - ZTE plans to introduce eight new devices at the Congress. The mix includes Android and Windows Phone smartphones, LTE and even a quad-core phone of their own.

The new mobiles will be unveiled Monday, February 27. They didn?t give out much detail about the upcoming announcements (like how many of the 8 phones will run Android), but they threw around phrases like "quad-core flagship handset" and "LTE-Advanced", which do pique our interest.

They've already announced the ZTE Mimosa X, which had the distinction of being the first smartphone to use chips by NVIDIA exclusively. Also out in the open are two ICS-running droids. We're not sure if thse three count towards the 8 phones to be shown at the MWC or not.

ZTE say they put back 10% of their revenue and hope to become the third biggest phone maker worldwide by 2015. They have quite a challenge ahead of them though, according to Gartner they were fifth in 2011.

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ViewSonic shows three Android ICS dual-SIM phones

ViewSonic announced three new phones all of which run Android Ice Cream Sandwich and have two SIM slots. That might make them the first dual-SIM Android ICS phones, for what that's worth.

The best-specced of the three phones has a 3.5" Super Clear IPS LCD with 640x960 pixels resolution and is called - wait for it - ViewSonic 4s. Yeah, like that iPhone Apple have. Anyway, it also has a 1GHz processor and a 5MP camera.

The other phone is the ViewSonic 3GS, uh, 4e which has a 3.5" HVGA screen, 3MP camera and 650MHz and is 10.3mm thick.

With these names Viewsonic is obviously staking on the remote similarity to Apple products. It's really a ridiculous move and we can't quite wrap our heads around their concept. Ok, perhaps, not ridiculous, but kinda sad.

The third one isn't just a phone - the ViewSonic 5e has 5" WVGA screen and is more of a phoneblet, but just like the other two it has two SIM slots and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

But whatever, Viewsonic should really stop playing with stuff they don't really understand. Every year the announce a bunch of weird looking phones at the MWC and then nobody hears anything about them. They should probably stick with their monitors.

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Nokia to unveil cheaper Windows Phones at MWC

We all know that Nokia is the king of entry level devices, and it seems they're keen on retaining that title as their upcoming press conference at MWC will supposedly reveal several new midrange WP-powered devices, alongside the new Lumia 610 and the worldwide version of the Lumia 900.

This also comes alongside news that Nokia has become the largest Windows Phone manufacturer, beating out HTC. This is truly an impressive achievement, considering Nokia has only been selling Windows Phone since the start of Q4 2011.

The Nokia/Microsoft partnership would to the casual observer sound like two behemoths dominating a significant piece of the global smartphone market, but in case you're one of the few that need to be reminded, WP and Symbian combined accounted for less than 14% of global smartphone sales in 2011.

The Nokia press conference at MWC is coming up fast, so we expect to find out exactly which devices Nokia plans to unveil very shortly.

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Windows Phone Tango to have restrictions on 256MB RAM phones

Windows Phone Tango will bring many cool improvements but also some tight restrictions for low-end phones. Russian site WP7forum tested Tango on a dev phone (the HTC Mazaa) and they've dug up some very interesting details on the matter.

Let's start with the bad news - Tango will enable phones with just 256MB RAM (all current Windows Phone models have 512MB). That's quite low for a smartphone (even Symbian uses more nowadays) and such won't support all apps, plus third-party Live tiles won't update automatically.

The list goes on - Tango phones with 256MB RAM won't be able to play videos with bitrate over 4Mbps (that applies for videos on the phone and streaming video), they won't let you manage podcasts on the phone (you'll need to use Zune on your PC) and photos can't be uploaded automatically to SkyDrive.

This sounds pretty harsh, but we're likely talking about very low-end devices - Microsoft will even let makers use 3MP cameras (the current minimum is 5MP). We're not sure what that means about the 720p video recording that is mandatory for WP phones right now.

Plus, Windows Phone Tango will bring some great usability improvements. It will let you import/export contacts from your SIM card, offer finer grained roaming options and download and update apps automatically through Zune. Tango will also more than double the number of pre-installed apps and support new countries.

MMS support will be greatly improved too - in its current form you can attach a single photo and that's it. With the Tango update, Windows Phone will let you attach multiple photos but also videos and audio files too.

So, Windows Phone Tango will bring some needed improvements to mid- and high-end phones and enable affordable, low-end phones that can pry some users away from the grasp of feature phones.

Source 1 ? Source 2 (in Russian)

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Windows Phone Tango to have restrictions on 256MB RAM phones

Windows Phone Tango will bring many cool improvements but also some tight restrictions for low-end phones. Russian site WP7forum tested Tango on a dev phone (the HTC Mazaa) and they've dug up some very interesting details on the matter.

Let's start with the bad news - Tango will enable phones with just 256MB RAM (all current Windows Phone models have 512MB). That's quite low for a smartphone (even Symbian uses more nowadays) and such won't support all apps, plus third-party Live tiles won't update automatically.

The list goes on - Tango phones with 256MB RAM won't be able to play videos with bitrate over 4Mbps (that applies for videos on the phone and streaming video), they won't let you manage podcasts on the phone (you'll need to use Zune on your PC) and photos can't be uploaded automatically to SkyDrive.

This sounds pretty harsh, but we're likely talking about very low-end devices - Microsoft will even let makers use 3MP cameras (the current minimum is 5MP). We're not sure what that means about the 720p video recording that is mandatory for WP phones right now.

Plus, Windows Phone Tango will bring some great usability improvements. It will let you import/export contacts from your SIM card, offer finer grained roaming options and download and update apps automatically through Zune. Tango will also more than double the number of pre-installed apps and support new countries.

MMS support will be greatly improved too - in its current form you can attach a single photo and that's it. With the Tango update, Windows Phone will let you attach multiple photos but also videos and audio files too.

So, Windows Phone Tango will bring some needed improvements to mid- and high-end phones and enable affordable, low-end phones that can pry some users away from the grasp of feature phones.

Source 1 ? Source 2 (in Russian)

View the original article here

Windows Phone Tango to have restrictions on 256MB RAM phones

Windows Phone Tango will bring many cool improvements but also some tight restrictions for low-end phones. Russian site WP7forum tested Tango on a dev phone (the HTC Mazaa) and they've dug up some very interesting details on the matter.

Let's start with the bad news - Tango will enable phones with just 256MB RAM (all current Windows Phone models have 512MB). That's quite low for a smartphone (even Symbian uses more nowadays) and such won't support all apps, plus third-party Live tiles won't update automatically.

The list goes on - Tango phones with 256MB RAM won't be able to play videos with bitrate over 4Mbps (that applies for videos on the phone and streaming video), they won't let you manage podcasts on the phone (you'll need to use Zune on your PC) and photos can't be uploaded automatically to SkyDrive.

This sounds pretty harsh, but we're likely talking about very low-end devices - Microsoft will even let makers use 3MP cameras (the current minimum is 5MP). We're not sure what that means about the 720p video recording that is mandatory for WP phones right now.

Plus, Windows Phone Tango will bring some great usability improvements. It will let you import/export contacts from your SIM card, offer finer grained roaming options and download and update apps automatically through Zune. Tango will also more than double the number of pre-installed apps and support new countries.

MMS support will be greatly improved too - in its current form you can attach a single photo and that's it. With the Tango update, Windows Phone will let you attach multiple photos but also videos and audio files too.

So, Windows Phone Tango will bring some needed improvements to mid- and high-end phones and enable affordable, low-end phones that can pry some users away from the grasp of feature phones.

Source 1 ? Source 2 (in Russian)

View the original article here