Nokia’s new Windows Phone handsets are priced to sell, and some analysts are impressed with what they’ve seen so far. A team from Barclays Capital on Thursday said Nokia’s first round of Windows Phones aren’t quite as differentiated as they would have liked, but they are priced competitively. “We believe [Nokia’s] devices will be competitive in the marketplace from both hardware and pricing standpoints,” the Barclays team wrote in a note to investors. “Nokia in fact highlighted that pricing tariffs for the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 will be one notch cheaper than the iPhone 4S across all launch markets.” Read on for more.
The analysts were also impressed by the number of carriers supporting the devices across launch markets, Barron’s reports. “We have been positively surprised by the large number of operators involved (an average of 5 per country where the device will be launched in Western Europe this quarter),” they wrote.
Nokia unveiled its Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 smartphones earlier this week, and preliminary reactions were positive. The high-end Nokia Lumia 800 offers a sleek unibody case and a sharp AMOLED display atop a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 16GB of storage and an 8-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The mid-level Nokia Lumia 710 features the same display and chipset along with a 5-megapixel camera, 8GB of storage and swappable brightly-colored battery covers.
Barclays analysts conclude in their note that future Windows Phones from Nokia should offer more differentiation, and future software updates could be key. Nokia’s Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 launch next month across several markets, though they will not hit U.S. shores until some time next year.
