ZTE’s upcoming Tania Windows Phone is a smartphone we’ve known about since September of last year. For those of you who may not remember the device, it sports a 4.3 inch screen that pushes 800 x 480 pixels and has the specs of just about every other Windows Phone on the market: 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, 512 MB of RAM, 5 megapixel camera. Now where ZTE’s specialty lies in is making ultra low cost handsets. The Tania was supposed to launch in the UK this week for £250, but in an effort to undercut the competition (read: Nokia) the price has now been lowered to just £199. That’s a hell of a lot of smartphone for that kind of money. To put that price into some perspective, Three UK is selling the Lumia 710, the cheaper Lumia that has a lesser quality camera and uses an LCD instead of AMOLED, for the same £199 price tag, except that it’s locked to their network. Which should you buy? That’s a question of persona preference. Would you rather have a smaller 3.7 inch device or a larger 4.3 inch device?
We’ve got to wonder, if Nokia and ZTE can make Windows Phones that cost just $315, when exactly are they going to reach the elusive $200 (150 EUR) price point? We know that there’s an upcoming Windows Phone release called Tango that’s supposed to be all about the low end of the market. Will devices running Tango be made available to people living in rich Western countries as well or will they be limited to places like India and China? More importantly, and we can’t wait to find this one out, what’s the development story behind Tango? Which apps will and which apps will not run on that platform?
If you’re not a budget Windows Phone buyer, then we recommend you keep your wallet shut until later this year when Windows Phone 8 comes out. It’s supposedly going to be the release that finally brings Windows Phone to parity with the other smartphone operating systems, at least in terms of hardware specifications (dual core, HD screen, etc.).