Nokia’s Lumia 800, the “first real Windows Phone” according to Stephen Elop, the company’s CEO, landed in India on the 16th of December. We’re barely three months out and the price has been slashed from 29,990 INR ($595) to 23,590 INR ($465). That’s a price drop of over 20% INR. Some sites like WMPoweruser are framing the price drop as a good thing, that it’s a sign Nokia will soon launch the global variant of the Lumia 900 and thus wants to push the price of the Lumia 800 a bit lower. We think that’s total bullshit. Such a massive price reduction is likely the result of one thing and one thing only: lackluster sales. When you have a device priced at $595 in India, it’s competing against other devices in a similar price range. Devices like Samsung’s Galaxy S II, Apple’s iPhone 4, probably even the Galaxy Note. When you pit the Lumia 800 against hardware like that, the only reason you’d actually get the Lumia is because you have some perverted sense of brand loyalty.
There’s also another possibility. Earlier this week we reported that Microsoft may have hinted that today’s Windows Phones aren’t going to get upgraded to the next version of the OS, codenamed Apollo. We know Apollo is going to land at roughly the same time that the desktop version of Windows 8 is going to hit the market, so that’s late Q3 or early Q4. Assuming it’s October, that’s just 7 months away, so why would you buy the Lumia 800 or Lumia 900 when you know it’s going to be obsolete in half a year?
And finally there’s the Nokia PureView 808. Symbian has a strong fanbase in India, and they’ve definitely heard of Nokia’s 41 megapixel beast. Maybe they’re saving up their pennies for that device, which as far as we know is coming out in the first half of this year, likely in May.