Nokia Launches New Handsets and Expanded Product Line
posted Friday Feb 28, 2014 by Scott Ertz
On the heels of the launch of the new Lumia Icon and ahead of its merger with Microsoft, Nokia showed off a collection of new handsets at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The phones covered a wide range of capabilities and markets, but entirely skipped Microsoft's platform.
Nokia Series
The low-end of Nokia's handsets line, intended for pre-emerging markets, got a leap of capabilities with the announcement of the Nokia 220. Designed to be the upgrade to last year's Nokia 105, which Nokia announced sales of 1 million per week, this new handset adds 2G Internet access and some built-in applications, such as Facebook. The 220 launched immediately at the reasonable price of 30 euros.Nokia Asha
The Asha series, which was a transition from the Nokia N-series devices, is intended for emerging markets. With smartphone capabilities and incredibly low prices, the Asha handsets are a great place for new markets to get their hands on their first advanced devices. Certainly a fair upgrade from the standard Nokia Series.This year brought us another entry in the family, the Asha 230. Priced at only 45 euros and featuring some of the great new features of the family, this dual-SIM quad-band GSM phone is a great basic phone. Speaking of new features, the Asha family will be introducing Microsoft OneDrive, MixRadio and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), available to all Asha devices.
Fortunately Nokia has dropped the iPod retail packaging design style they introduced just 4 months ago. This phone looks much more like a standard Nokia, available in a collection of bright colors with matching accessories. Nokia certainly hopes that it will sell.
Nokia X
This is the handset everyone knew was coming and no one expected. In fact, the Nokia X is not a new handset, but a new platform from the company. Based on the Android Open Source Project (different from Android proper), this series of devices actually boasts 3 handsets: Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia XL.The bridge device from the low-end Asha smartphones to the high-end Lumia smartphones takes much of its design inspiration from its big brother, Windows Phone, while incorporating many of the best features from Asha. Sporting a home screen with huge, customizable live tiles with easy to find notifications, as well as at-a-glance information, this is the most usable Android derivative yet.
Coming over from Asha is Fastlane, the quick-access notification area where a Facebook-style feed of information from your social networks, news apps, photo sites, etc. all roll into one place. You can also add quick-access app links to the Fastlane, but you won't need that with the live tiles on the home screen.
The Nokia X lock screen will look familiar to our webOS friends, as the notifications and even the default wallpaper are straight out of Palm/HP/LG's ill-fated mobile operating system. To top it all off, the family can run Android apps, though not installed from Google Play. Instead, Nokia will be curating its own app catalog, similar to the Kindle Fire. App creators can convert their app from Android to Nokia X quickly, though.
While well thought out design-wise, the hardware is not going to make anyone's head spin. As one news outlet showed, an app load can take longer than a Vine video - yikes. But, the important question is: will this be enough for a market who is entering a high-capability smartphone for the first time?
