Nokia is ending the year on a high note with the announcement of the availability of the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 in Singapore. They are respectively priced SGD$775 and SGD$505. The Lumia 800 will be on sale by 10 December and the Lumia 710 will be in stores in the following weeks. When it will be available in Malaysia is still not clear but the official estimate from Nokia would put it somewhere in the first quarter of 2012.
These are Windows Mango powered smartphones of course and combine familiar Nokia elements for the camera and imaging, navigation and music. Nokia claims that the Lumia 800 gives the nest Windows Phone experience in the market. While the Lumia 710 extends the Lumia experience to more people by being more affordable and offering personalisation with its colourful changeable covers.
“From a strategy perspective, we are delivering our first Nokia Windows Phone within eight months since we announced the collaboration with Microsoft earlier this year. And we have introduced Nokia's signature services which make these phones much more desirable and relevant to consumers . This significant step forward as we continue to drive innovation throughout our entire portfolio and the new range of Nokia Lumia smartphones is a testimony to our capabilities in balanceing technology innovation with optimal user experience,” says Niklas Savander, executive vice president, markets, Nokia.
According to Savander there is a strong engagement with its partners and operators around the Nokia Lumia smartphones – He says that together with Microsoft, Nokia has created a new ecosystem that opens up opportunities for developers as seen in these first two Nokia Lumia models.
From first looks at the launch event in Singapore yesterday, both models exude the expected Nokia hallmarks to quality – the core attributes such as craftsmanship, build quality and vibrant colours make them feel and look appealing. But what about the innards? The seem to be fairly decent enough and the Lumia 800 looks quite identical to the MeeGo powered N9; which in itself was somewhat of a breakthrough device.
At Nokia Connections held alongside CommunicAsia 2011 earlier this year, Nokia had said that it will use the learnings that it made to come up with the N9. It looks like some of that was transferred in terms of hardware, build and user experience into the Lumia range. NFC is however missing from the Lumia series for now until the OS plays catch up.
Neil Gordon, vice president of sales, Nokia South Asia Pacific says that the new Lumia series offers the best in social networking through the People Hub, offering one touch access to social networks. Singapore he also says is a strategic market for Nokia, with a population of socially connected, tech-savvy and design conscious smartphone users making it an easy choice launch market for the Nokia Lumia smartphones in Southeast Asia.
Nokia also shared some of its strategy and plans targeted to bumping up awareness and the developer efforts for its new smartphone platform of choice (more about this in coming post and January issue of Mobile World magazine).
If you haven't read about the specs and features for both yet (they've been announced in other regions earlier), here there are:
Nokia Lumia 800
- comes in cyan, magenta and black
- social networking and Internet performance - one touch social networking, easy regrouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9.
- 3.7 inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display
- 1.4GHz processor with hardware acceleration and graphics processor
- instant share camera experience with Carl Zeiss optics
- HD video playback
- 16GB internal user memory
- 25GB of free SkyDrive storage
Nokia Lumia 710
- purposely built, no nonsense with exchangeable back covers
- instant social and image sharing and browsing with Internet Explorer 9
- comes in black, white, cyan, fushia and yellow back covers
- 1.4GHz processor with hardware acceleration and graphics processor
- basically the same performance of the Lumia 800 at a more affordabel price
Of course besides that Nokia as usual has other Nokia staples built in such as Nokia Maps and Navigation which are free turn-by-turn navigation and dedicated in-car-user interface. Nokia Drive which is the name of the new equivalent, has the ability to preload maps for over 100 countries.
There is also Nokia Music, the service developed first for the Nokia N9 and now optimised for Windows Phone.
Also announced are accessories to go with the new range such as the on-ear Nokia Purity HD stereo headset by Monster and the in-ear Nokia Purity Stereo Headset by Monster, a new Bluetooth headset that comes in complemeting colours and some others.
The launch of the Nokia Lumia 710 and 800 in Kuala Lumpur brought splashes of colour to the launch of the Lumia series at Pavilion KL today. Free umbrellas of a variety of colours were handed out at the event to highlight the funky back covers available for the Lumia 710. Thanks to this and a couple of mobile trucks, the area resembled a rainbow.
It looks like it is true, as Nokia CEO Stephen Elop confirmed recent rumours that they were dropping the higher end Nokia Windows Phone in the US. According to Elop, the Lumia 900 would be on sale in the coming months. No other specifics were given, other than the CEO saying that they would "market it aggressively".
