Nokia's Windows Phones: The Games Begin
|
Last week Nokia unveiled a pair of Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 710 and 800. They'll arrive in the United States sometime in early 2012, according to the Finnish manufacturer. "Lumia is the first real Windows Phone," Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told the audience during a London keynote Oct. 26. "We are signaling our intent right now to be today's leaders in smartphone design and craftsmanship, no question about it." Let the games begin. The Lumia 800 represents the high end of Nokia's smartphone plans, and features a 1.4GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor, and an 8-megapixel camera that uses Carl Zeiss optics. Design-wise, there's a 3.7-inch active-matrix organic LED (AMOLED) ClearBlack curved display integrated into a body rendered from a single piece of polycarbonate. I played with it during a Nokia presentation last week in New York City; it's pretty. In a play toward the midmarket, Nokia is also offering the cheaper Lumia 710, also with a 1.4GHz processor, and a 5-megapixel camera. It's pretty, too. To say that Nokia needs both these devices to succeed is something of an understatement, considering how it's abandoned its other operating systems in favor of Windows Phone. In order to sweeten the deal for consumers, Nokia has installed some exclusive apps with its phones, including Nokia Drive (with turn-by-turn navigation and voice-activated control) and Nokia Maps, which offers up points of interest around the user's location. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Microsoft wants to push Windows Phone more toward the midmarket, and the Lumia 710 seems a big step in that direction. "We are dramatically broadening the set of price points in Mango-related phones that we can reach," Andy Lees, president of Microsoft's Windows Phone division, told the audience during the Asia D conference Oct. 19. "That's particularly important because going lower down in price point opens up more addressable market." But it'll still be some months until we know whether Nokia's succeeding in its all-or-nothing effort. |
Comments (4)
Interesting that the Lumia 800, despite being an obvious derivative of the Linux-based N9, still manages to be a step backwards from it in terms of specs: no front-facing camera, and no NFC.
I think this shows how much harder it is to do development for Windows than Linux. Nokia should have stuck with Meego, or at least gone for Android, while it still had the chance. Now it is just handicapping itself in a race for its own survival.
Posted by Lawrence D’Oliveiro | November 1, 2011 2:10 AM
WP7 is going nowhere. It has an aura of disease and death about it. Things such as the dead WM6, the born-dead Kin, the allways dying Nokia, patent trolling and protection racketeering spring to mind when one thinks of WP7.
Posted by K. H. | November 4, 2011 10:28 AM
Or maybe not.
If they manage to get the thing all tied together with Windows 8, they might just manage to migrate all of the their billions of windows users and developers onto the new pony.
Time will tell.
Posted by bt | November 8, 2011 11:22 PM
Ah, the billions of users. Those that ditched windows mobile for Apple or Android maybe ? Or the millions of destop users still running XP ? They'll surely come in droves to get those phones after skipping Vista and 7.
Or maybe those that jumped of Nokia's platform before and after Elop sounded the fire alarm. They surely will like another refreshing dive and come swimming back.
Well, maybe the publicity generated by the DOJ investigating Microsoft's golden Android protection racket will help.
Posted by K.H. | November 11, 2011 1:14 PM