A screenshot of the Nokia website displaying Lumia, the firm's first Windows phone.
Nokia Corp. on Wednesday launched its long-awaited first Windows cell
phones, hoping to claw back market share it has lost in the tough,
top-end smartphone race to chief rivals, Apple Inc.’s iPhone, Samsung
and Google’s Android software.
But some analysts say it may be too little, too late, for the world’s top mobile phone maker.
With price tags of 420 ($580) and 270, the Lumia 800 and 710 are based
on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 7 software and come eight months after
Nokia and the computing giant said they were hitching up.
“Lumia is reasonably good ... but it’s not an iPhone killer or a Samsung
killer,” Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics said. “But where Nokia
does stand out is on their price it looks like they are going to be very
competitive.”
Lumia 800, with Carl Zeiss optics and 16GB of internal memory, will be
available in selected European countries in November, including France,
Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Britain. It will be sold in Hong
Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan before the year-end.
Lumia 710, with a 1.4 GHz processor, navigational applications and Nokia
Music, mobile music-streaming app will first be available in Hong Kong,
India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan toward the end of the year.
The company’s share price jumped almost 3 per cent to 4.96 ($6.90) in otherwise depressed market in Helsinki.
Nokia also unveiled four cheaper smartphones aimed at emerging markets,
the Asha handsets priced 60 to 115 with cameras, navigation applications
and fast downloads, in a bid to help “the next billion” users connect
to the Internet, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said at the Nokia presentation
in London.
Equipped with QWERTY keyboards and some with the popular dual SIM cards,
the Asha handsets will be shipped globally in the fourth quarter or
early 2012.
Nokia, which claims 1.3 billion daily users, has steadily been losing
ground in smartphones, squeezed in the low end by Asian manufacturers
like ZTE and in the high end by the iPhone, Research in Motion’s
Blackberry, Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Taiwan—based HTC Corp.
The iPhone has set the standard for smartphones among many
design-conscious consumers. The Blackberry has been the favourite of the
corporate set and increasingly Google Inc.’s Android software has
emerged as the choice for phone makers that want to challenge the
iPhone.
Samsung and HTC snapping at Nokia’s heels for third place in top-end
smartphones behind the iPhone and Samsung are the biggest users of the
Android platform.
Nokia is still operating Symbian software, older than Apple’s software
and considered clumsy by many, although it has been upgraded. Nokia also
introduced the MeeGo platform in its flagship N9 model launched last
month.
Mr. Elop has said Windows software will become the cell phone maker’s
main platform but that Nokia won’t stop developing Symbian or MeeGo.