Earlier today we got some pretty solid information as to what the long rumored Nokia Lumia Ace will have under the hood. Supposedly it’ll be called the Lumia 900 and have a 4.3 inch screen, 8 megapixel camera, 1.4 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and run a version of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango that supports LTE connectivity. What we don’t know is who exactly will be launching the device in America, when, and for how much? Thanks to a rumor from BetaNews however, we now have a slightly better idea. They say that the Lumia Ace will first come out on AT&T somewhere around the end of March, though a Verizon release is still unknown. AT&T will position the Lumia Ace as a “hero” device and there are plans to blow upwards of $100 million on marketing the thing. It’s not yet known how much of that will be spent by Nokia themselves, or AT&T, or even Microsoft.
The bigger question here is will $100 million be enough? To put that number into some perspective, Apple spent $691 million during 2010 on marketing. We’ll find out soon enough how much they spent on marketing during 2011, but it’s pretty much a given it’ll be more than they spent during 2010. Now yes, Apple’s $691 million was spent on marketing worldwide, and AT&T/Microsoft/Nokia’s $100 million will be spent purely on North America, but they’ve got a lot more to prove. They need to convince Americans that Windows Phone is worth paying attention to, that Nokia isn’t a long forgotten company, and that AT&T’s LTE network is worth using versus Verizon’s. That’s a tall order.
To be perfectly frank, we admire Windows Phone at IntoMobile Headquarters, but we still think it doesn’t have enough to compete with the current state of both Android and iOS. Maybe by the time Windows Phone Apollo launches in late 2012 we’ll change our minds, but that’s quite a ways off.