Last month at Mobile World Congress we saw ZTE announce a bevy of smartphones, one of them being the Mimosa X. It’s an important handset because it’s the first to use NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 combined with an Icrea cellular modem. What does that mean? Qualcomm powers 4 out of every 10 mobile devices that aren’t made by Apple. That ridiculous amount of success is due to the fact that Qualcomm sells handset vendors a platform called Snapdragon that has everything they need to make a phone: the application processor, the graphics processor, the cellular radios, and the wireless (WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS) radios. NVIDIA wants a piece of that pie, so they bought a company called Icera last year so they can come out with their own version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. The first fruits of their labor will be in the Mimosa X. All that aside for a second, there’s rumors that ZTE will also release a device called the Mimosa (without the X).
Said handset will not be running Android, instead it’ll run Windows Phone. And unlike the Mimosa X, which has a dual core Tegra 2, this Mimosa will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon that’s meant for low end devices. It’s expected that this thing will cost as much as Nokia’s Lumia 610, which comes in at around 180 EUR. We should be hearing more about the Mimosa in May, which coincidentally is the same month that CTIA kicks off in the US. If we had to take a guess, we’d say that one of America’s budget operators is going to offer the Mimosa unsubsidized.
Should you buy a roughly 200 EUR Windows Phone? That’s hard to say since everyone will have different needs. Microsoft’s OS is certainly easier to use than Android, but it’s also more limiting. This writer would rather spend that amount of money on HTC’s upcoming One V, which is rumored to be coming out this spring for $200 (unsubsidized) on Virgin Mobile.