Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President at Nokia, recently gave an interview to the folks at Pocket-lint where he told them that the Finnish handset maker needs to make some seriously low end smartphones if they have any chance of competing with Google’s Android ecosystem. His exact words:
“We have a lot riding on the fact that we need to get a lower price point. We are competing with Android. Android is in many markets at the 100 EUR price already, so that would suggest that if we are at 189 EUR with the Lumia 610 we still have work to do when it comes to creating a lower-end first-time user smartphone. Symbian is doing a very good job in capturing that first-time smartphone user, but the platform is, of course, aging. And the functionality isn’t evolving as rapidly as it should, so we need to continue to push the price of handsets down when it comes to the low-end. You have to be very much into multiple applications and have everything open at the same time before you can see the engineering cuts that Microsoft has made to run it [Windows Phone] in lower memory.”
That pretty much sums everything up perfectly. Nokia needs to make cheap Windows Phones, and while Tango let them scratch the surface of that mission, they seriously need to hit even lower price point. Curiously, back when Tango was nothing more than a rumor, we heard that it would support screen resolutions lower than 800 x 480 pixels. Displays being the most expensive component of a device, that’s the first area you’d think Microsoft would try to reduce cost. How much would a Lumia 610 cost if it ran on a 320 x 480 pixel display? Should it also scale down to 320 x 240 like the recently announced Galaxy Pocket?
Hopefully we’ll hear more about this by the time Apollo comes out in Q4.