Nokia's Low-End Asha Is Outselling Lumia Two to One | Hacker News Reader

Nokia's Low-End Asha Is Outselling Lumia Two to One

allthingsd.com

44 pointsPr010 comments

Good. Nokia's S40 based devices are awesome. They are the last bastion of sense in the mobile communications market.

I've just replaced by Lumia 710 with a Nokia C2-01 on pre-pay. It cost bugger all, last literally days to the point I don't have to carry a fucking charger on me 24/7 any more, bounces when you drop it, actually has decent call quality and I can actually type on it without smashing my face on a lamp post every few minutes because I have to spend all my time staring at it to correct mistakes. Plus the sound quality is better when playing mp3s and the alarm clock is actually audible (the Lumia one is like an ant farting). And if I break it or lose it, I will just shrug and buy another one for less than the monthly contract bill of a Lumia 920.

I have willingly traded convenient browsing, email [1], apps and all that shit for a phone that actually works properly when I need it to. In fact it's improved my life because I'm not constantly bugged and distracted by the damn thing.

I've had an iPhone 4, Galaxy Ace, Galaxy S3, HTC Desire recently and they are all just as horrible so this is not specific to the Lumia but the whole "SmartPhone" concept.

[1] It actually has a good IMAP4 client in it but I haven't bothered to use it past an initial test as email is annoying me.

I have willingly traded convenient browsing, email [1], apps and all that shit for a phone that actually works properly when I need it to.

Wait, are you one of those fabled people who use phones as phones? :)

Jokes aside, maybe I'll have to upgrade to one of those. I've got a $20 dumbphone right now, and it is almost good enough. Some good 'ol Nokia durability might be just what I need.

Can you sync a calender to it over USB? Calender sync is the only "feature" I miss about fancy-phones.

I am the fabled :)

I haven't tried it but you can sync the calendar with nokias data suite which is actually pretty damn good. I think it supports ical as well but again I haven't tried it as I don't use a calendar (other than the one in my head)

So a cheaper device is selling more units than a more expensive one? This hardly seems newsworthy. If the Asha was making more profit then perhaps something interesting might be happening but there's no indication that this is the case. Perhaps a better headline would be "Nokia Asha sold 9.3m units in Q4".

Not very surprising that there is still a market for inexpensive phones. I imagine Samsung sells far more cheap Android phones like the Galaxy Y than they do high end phones.

That interface looks a lot like MeeGo, which is great. Is it just me who sees that?

Such a shame we never really got to a phone mass-marketed with it.

That's just Nokia's icon grid. Later versions of Symbian also look like that. Meebo (and the Nokia N9) was great, but it wasn't amazing. Honestly I doubt they would have sold enough units to create a reasonable ecosystem anyway, so it would have still been a dying platform, just one where hundreds of millions of marketing dollars had been spent.

At the time when the N9 came out, people just weren't interested in the N9 at all (and this is in Australia, where Nokias used to be best-regarded manufacturer). They had a few disasters with Symbian (the n97/n97 mini/C3/N8), and even Nokia die-hards weren't prepared to recontract with another Nokia handset (I was working in telco at the time).

Only two to one? The only phones which have sold over 100 million handsets are low end devices manufactured by Nokia, and Nokia has made EIGHT such phones [1].

Sure, the Asha series are basic smart phones, rather than the feature phones of the above models, but it wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption to think that the people in 'emerging markets' who bought basic feature phones in 2005 are now moving to basic smart phones.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_pho...

Those little cheap Nokias are great for what they are. I had a Nokia 1800 for a long time and it did its job perfectly: good reception, battery lasted forever, screen was always easy to read, alarm was nice and loud, software was easy enough to use.

I use a Nexus S now and it's probably altered too many of my habits for me to go back, but I still miss how my little cheap Nokia just did its job and did it well.

I am considering switching my Nexus S for a Nexus 7 + cheap Nokia combo though. It seems like it would give me the best of both worlds. We'll see.

Good for them, but unless this thing has a reasonable profit margin Nokia still might not live to see 2014.

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