Windows Phone, and Nokia in general, are doing pretty bad in the U.S. right now. Both companies are hoping that’ll change when the Lumia 900 comes out. Said smartphone was announced at the Consumer Electronic Show in January, but we’ve yet to hear a concrete launch date or price point. Anyway, that’s just one device. Nokia being who they are, they’re all about building a portfolio that reaches multiple price points. Sources that have spoken to Tom Warren at The Verge say AT&T is going to launch two additional Nokia Windows Phones during the latter half of this year. One of them, codenamed Prodigy, is supposedly a “Windows 8 superphone”, whatever the hell that means. The other device, codenamed “AC/DC”, will be a midrange device. And that’s all Tom knows. No spec sheets, no price points, no concrete dates, just two names and a vague description of each.
What we want to know is what exactly is going to make the next version Windows Phone special? Rumors we heard last month painted a pretty picture of devices with dual core processors, high resolution screens, NFC, and so on and so forth, but without actually seeing how Microsoft plans to take advantage of that additional horsepower … we don’t know how to feel. Not for nothing, today’s version of Windows Phone runs fantastic on single core devices with 512 MB of RAM. It’s the software that feels lacking, the Marketplace that’s littered with useless applications, and other things that we just can’t quite put our finger on. The OS just feels incomplete.
At the end of the day we feel kind of bad for Nokia. There are so many Windows Phone 8 rumors floating around the internets right now that we simply can’t recommend their current lineup of Windows Phones. They’re going to be obsolete in half a year.