Two Windows Phones launched on AT&T yesterday, Nokia’s Lumia 900 and HTC’s Titan II. The former is being offered for $99 with a two year contract, the latter was supposed to cost $199 with a two year contract, but now it’s just $149. Why did this happen? We can only speculate, but we’re going to assume that sales of Titan II were so poor that something drastic needed to be done. To be perfectly honest, we think AT&T should have made the Lumia 900 free and the Titan II $99, because no one is going to commit to Windows Phone if they have to cough up anything upfront. We wouldn’t be surprised to see both of these devices discounted even further by the end of this month. Sources we’ve spoken to say that there is zero enthusiasm for either of these handsets, and we’re not too shocked to hear that. Windows Phone 7.5 simply isn’t a complete operating system yet. Windows Phone 8 will surely fix some of the glaring gaps, but it’s not expected to hit the market until the fourth quarter of this year.
The bigger question is why did Nokia even bother bringing the Lumia 900 to the United States? In half a year it’s going to be October, a month where we’re expecting Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 to be out on the market. The amount of advertising that both of those platforms will receive will be absolutely ridiculous. That’s the kind of environment that’ll encourage sales. Right now the market cares about the HTC One X, whatever the hell Samsung will announce next month, and then in June we’ll catch a glimpse at iOS 6 or even the next iPhone.
Timing is everything, and we simply don’t understand what AT&T, Nokia, and Microsoft were thinking when planning this April launch. If it’s simply a stunt to build “brand awareness”, then there are certainly much cheaper ways to do that.