Motorola knows that even in emerging markets people want style, what is Nokia doing about it?

This Motophone looks like something I would’ve personally used a few years back. Back in the day I used to be the anti smart phone guy, can you believe that?

I just needed a phone to make calls, last a long time (battery), and have only the basic features. For $40 this thin entry level mobile looks like something great to have around when I know I’m going to be away from the daily grind and just want a basic device to make calls. Emerging markets you say? This thing looks fashionable enough to be sold in the states!

So what exactly is Nokia doing? I’ve seen their emerging market line and they quite literally look like plain old Nokia phones from half a decade ago. What happens when your  local fisherman in India pulls out one of these babies and shows his friends? They all want the same thing! This is what USA Today had to say:

It feels perverse to meet amid the spectacle of 108-inch TV screens, automatic scalp massagers and cars with 20,000-watt stereos and talk about the digital divide. It’s like ordering a seven-course spread at Spago and then discussing world hunger.

But for at least two of the CEOs at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show — Ed Zander of Motorola and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo of Nokia — the billions of unconnected, undigitized, underserved people around the globe are often top of mind.

On the crass side, those billions are virgin potential customers, viewed by cellphone companies much the same as Starbucks sees the unfortunate souls who have never downed a half-caf mocha latte. As Zander noted during his CES speech, the number of new cellphone customers in India each month equals the population of Denmark.

But there’s another, more magnanimous side. Cellphones aren’t at all like mocha lattes. They are miniature self-improvement machines. They can make as much difference in individual lives as literacy, without the steep learning curve.

"In places like India, the impact of cellphones on the gross domestic product is huge," Kallasvuo tells me as we talk in a conference room at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Stories abound, for instance, of farmers or fishermen who start using cellphones to sell goods to the highest bidder instead of the lone buyer in the village, thereby vastly improving their lot. In one little way after another, cellphones act like extra pushes on the economic flywheels of developing nations — actually improving economies so people can, well, buy more cellphones.

Kallasvuo later sends me numbers from a London Business School study concluding that an increase of 10 cellphones per 100 people in a developing country translates into GDP growth of 0.6 percentage points.