Nokia has a mission: Win over as many Windows Phone fans as it can — in any country, and at any price point. To that end, the company has debuted a pair of basic cellphones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona intended to lay the groundwork to create future Lumia owners.
The idea is that even if a phone doesn't run proper "apps" or belong to a major platform, it can still provide basic connectivity to the web. And that web should have Nokia and Microsoft software front and center.
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"When people experience the web for the first time, they will do Bing search, they will get Outlook mail, they will use OneDrive," says Jussi Nevanlinna, Nokia's vice president of product marketing for phones. "It's a service footprint and cloud footprint play. And if you can offer cloud at those price points, it's a huge competitive advantage."
What kind of price points? How about $40 (29 euros) without a contract. That's the price of the Nokia 220, which looks like a phone you might have owned in 2005, except for one thing: It has a web browser as well as pre-installed icons for Facebook and Twitter.
The browser is highly efficient, compressing data by 80%, according to Nokia, and it of course appoints Microsoft Bing as the default search engine. There are also a few games from Gameloft.
Stepping up a bit — and just a bit — is the Asha 230. Asha is Nokia's line of souped-up feature phones or low-end smartphones (depending who you ask), and this model takes the barrier to entry even lower, all the way down to $60 (45 euros) unsubsidized.
"What we are doing with Asha is to make it more affordable," says Nevanlinna. "It runs all the same apps as the Asha 500 series. It does the essential smartphone things quite well."
Expectedly, the Asha 230 has lots of hooks into Microsoft and Nokia services: Bing search, Outlook mail, Here Maps and OneDrive. The homescreen also has the Asha "Fastlane," a record of all your most recent activities on the device.
The devices are due to go on sale in various global markets early March. And if all goes well for Nokia, satisfied customers are due to upgrade to Lumia smartphones sometime in 2015.
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