It’s here finally. The much awaited low cost Windows Phone device Nokia Lumia 610 was announced today at a press conference in New Delhi extending it’s Lumia lineup to a total of three devices. Lumia 610 comes with Group Shot, Nokia Traffic and Nokia Music – Mix Radio – with offline support (finally!) DRM free with 45lakhs + songs. That is impressive. Lumia 610 comes in four colors and will be available starting tomorrow at Nokia stores.
lumia 610 now available in India
You’ll find the usual Nokia exclusive applications too – but with 256 MB RAM – you’d be missing out on few applications (an insignicant number..if you ask me – excluding Skype of course) in the Windows Phone marketplace.
Our friends over at FoneArena liveblogged the event, so watch their coverage here.
Here’s a review of Lumia 610 that I highly recommend you check out : UnleashThePhones
Fellow desi tech bloggers on Twitter aren’t happy about the price. I wholeheartedly agree with them. This is typical Nokia India stuff though. Release phone at high price point. Wait for some fanboys to pick it up. Suffer sales due to lack of fanboys. Then undergo heavy cut and make those rare fanboys rage. So i’d suggest you wait a month or two if you are really interested in getting Lumia 610 at 10-11k.
This was Nokia’s only chance to get back in the low – mid end market by pricing it under 10k and they completely blow it away. I don’t see why anyone would be crazy enough to pick up Lumia 610 for 13k when Lumia 710 is available at < 15k in the market. This is absolutely crazy. Nokia is planning to launch a Windows Phone 8 device at the end of the year, according to our report. Now we are at the middle of the year and there is no way Nokia will release a device as cheap as Lumia 610 running Windows Phone 8 this year. Windows Phone 8 demands powerful hardware. Dual cores are the standard now. The price of hardware is getting cheaper but not cheap enough to build another Lumia 610 running WP8 without compromises. So this is Nokia’s only chance to battle it out at low – mid end segment which is dominated completely by Samsung. Galaxy Y is still a best seller at Flipkart and it’s been the same since launch. Nokia Lumias have never made it to the list. Ask your local retailers and they will tell you the same. It seems to me that Nokia doesn’t have a strategy in mind for low t0 mid end phones. Too bad because that’s what Nokia used to dominate. Why wouldn’t anyone spend 1-2k Rupees more and get Lumia 710 (no compromise Windows Phone device) instead? Let us know your thoughts in comments below.
Nokia also unveiled special edition TDKR Lumia 800 at the press conference today. Interested users can purchase the device from Nokia online store.
TDKR special edition Lumia 800 in India
