Nokia announced the new Lumia 610 with an attractive price and specifications. And many people are wondering if the phone can jump beyond Nokia’s pre-released smartphones based on Windows Phone.
Lumia 610 (photo from Nokia website)
According to the article of “Business Week(Nokia Offers Cheaper Windows Phone to Nip Android Expansion, February 29, 2012)”, this smart phone may be threatening the Android based smartphones as follows;
The price of the Lumia 610 “makes it very competitive with the low-end Android devices,” said Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. The handset will be attractive to operators as it will require very little subsidy, she said. “You build momentum, you build volume and then you build interest in the ecosystem.”
The price is a very good point to compete against other smart phone brands. One of the main reasons that Samsung is getting popular in the emerging market is the high price of iPhone. If Lumia series maintain its competitive price, it may be a good momentum to break through Nokia’s slump.
There was a time when Nokia had an overwhelming market share with a simple and affordable phone in China, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But because Nokia didn’t catch the mobile trend, their low-end phones have lagged behind its competitors’ smartphones. It shows that there is a long way to go. Though the price is an important factor for a consumer when choosing a phone, other factors should be considered. One of those factors is the application marketplace. While Android market and App Store for iPhone have their own eco-system in a quantitative way, the application marketplace for Windows Phone has a lot of work to do. So recently Microsoft hurried to close the gap between top two players and Microsoft. In the same article (Business Week, February 29), it delivers up to date what Microsoft plans to do.
Microsoft Corp. said it plans to bring its Windows Phone software to 23 new countries and put the operating system on less expensive smartphones. Microsoft will kick off the expansion by opening mobile-application stores in China, Thailand, Venezuela and the 20 other nations by the end of the month.
I think that the most influential conditions for consumers to be driven to the decision which smartphone they want is the price, the specification (hardware performance) and supporting environment (i. e. application marketplace, sync program, etc.). And it doesn’t need to do good in every three parts. To compete against rivals, Nokia needs to be focused on a strategic area that it can do better than others. Maybe it takes time to see the result whether Nokia makes a comeback.