Finnish phone vendor Nokia on Monday introduced its first Android smartphone with a mission to grow its smartphone market share among masses. The price of Nokia X will be Rs 8,599 in India. Though Nokia X is on the Google Android OS platform, Nokia will continue Windows OS for Lumia smartphones.
P Balaji, managing director, Nokia India, admitted that the smartphone vendor is addressing market demand for multiple app ecosystems among developers and end users. “We are offering more choice to customers at low price points,” he added.
Nokia said Nokia X+ and XL, the other two smartphone under the X series, will be available in the next 60 days. Nokia X is available for purchase from today.
Nokia X has a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen. The budget smartphone features 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Dual Core processor, 512MB RAM, 3MP camera, dual SIM, up to 32GB expandable memory, 1500 mAH battery, Satellite GPS, Accelerometer, etc.
It’s available in colours including bright Green, bright Red, Cyan, Yellow, Black and White. Nokia is looking at the aspirations of young generation Indian who do not have enough funds to cough for a costly Lumia.
Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS.
1,500mAh removable battery offers a talk time of 10.5 hours on 3G and standby time of 28 days.
The phone runs a customized version of Android (based on Android 4.1.2) that has been stripped of Google services and apps including the Play Store. Nokia X comes with Nokia’s own app store, HERE Drive and Maps for location service, and Nokia MixRadio music service.
Nokia has also bundled Microsoft’s cloud storage service, One Drive with the phone and is offering 10GB of One Drive storage for free, along with one month of free unlimited Skype calls to landlines and mobiles.
The company will be announcing data bundled offers with Indian telecom operators shortly.
Analysts are speculating that Nokia – though it’s moving to the fold of Microsoft – is giving attention to Android to gain further market share.
ABI Research earlier reported that Android once again dominated the Q4 2013 shipment numbers for smartphone advanced operating systems with 77 percent market share of over 280 million smartphones shipped in Q4 2013.Nearly one billion smartphones were shipped in 2013, Android accounting for 78 percent across the year.
Android’s dominance is not quite as rosy as it seems though, with most of the growth coming from forked Android operating systems (137 percent year-on-year), mainly in China, India, and adjacent markets. Forked Android or AOSP accounted for 25 percent market share with 71 million unit shipments, as opposed to certified Android’s share of 52 percent, of a total of 77 percent market share.
Presence in low cost smartphones is important for the success of Nokia. During the Mobile World Congress 2014, Mozilla announced its partnership with the low-cost chipset vendor Spreadtrum, paving the way for smartphones running the web-based Firefox OS to be sold for $25.
Nick Dillon, senior analyst at Ovum, said: “With this deal the company is aiming to harness the momentum it has had since the launch of its first commercial devices in July 2013 to push down into even lower price points.”
Though Firefox is yet to announce any sales figures, it has revealed that there have been 425,000 unique visitors to the Firefox OS Marketplace since July 2013. This demonstrates at least a promising level of interest from consumers, and certainly more than the other alternative OSs can currently claim.
