It Costs $450 In Marketing To Make Someone Buy a $49 Nokia Lumia

benfrog writes "According to market-share estimations compared to marketing dollars, it costs nearly ten times as much to sell the Windows Phone-based Nokia Lumia as it does to buy one. Other analysts agree with the low sales numbers."

Comments

Subsidized price

[Google Fanboy]

Nokia Lumia does not cost $49 to customers. It costs (and makes profit of) $49 + whatever mobile operators make during the two year contract. God americans are stupid if they still go for this marketing trick. Even Slashdot runs bullshit story like this!!

On top of that Nokia is trying to capture US market, so they can spend more on it while they generate revenue from rest of the world.

Re:Subsidized price

[AgNO3]

Stop using logic, reasoning, and a basic understanding of marketing to confuse the issue. This is slashdot.

Re:Subsidized price

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, would it make you feel any better if the summary said it costs 450 dollars to make people pay the upfront cost of $49 for a Nokia Lumia? The point still stands. Windows Phone 7 is a failure. People have been calling it since the beginning yet the fanboys kept saying wait 'til NoDo, wait 'til mango, wait 'til Nokia, wait 'til Lumia 900, blah blah blah. It failed. Accept it. And it failed for quite a few reasons. Here, I'll list them. All of them.

OS LIMITATIONS

1. No true multitasking for 3rd party apps - they re frozen in the background.

2. No Divx/Xvid video codec support. Zune will convert with loss of quality.

3. No mass storage mode.

4. No micro-SD card support.

5. Only support up to 16GB storage .

6. No filemanager. Directory system is totally opaque.

7. Need Zune to transfer files. Zune will only transfer photos, videos & music. All other files need to email/upload to yourself.

8. Your contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service whether you like it or not.

9. Limited to 800x480 resolution.

10. Voice search is hardwired to Bing.

11. Cannot use any MP3 file as ringtone except those with strict constraints.

12. Cannot set static IP address so no connection to ad-hoc networks.

13. No VPN support for this âoecorporate enterpriseâ phone.

14. Cannot sync directly with Outlook without syncing to Cloud

15. Totally closed OS, cannot sideload apps outside MS Marketplace.

16. System font size cannot be changed.

17. Images and photos cannot be renamed in the phone.

18. Windows Live ID account cannot change country once set.

19. No centralized notification page.

20. Alarm clock cannot work when phone is turned off. All Nokia Symbian and Meego phones can do this.

21. The idle screen is completely blank and cannot display time or notifications.

22. Only photos allowed as email attachments, documents not allowed.

23. No way to stream audio to the majority of car audio systems as the most common Bluetooth rSAP profile is not implemented.

24. Cannot stream audio from video playback to Bluetooth devices as A2DP profile is not implemented.

25. No support for full on-device encryption required for secure applications like mobile banking and online payment.

26. Cannot use Bluetooth keyboard (no HID profile)

27. Cannot silence ringtone or alarm by flipping the phone.

28. Very limited customization option.

29. Cannot be upgraded to WP8 (Apollo)

USABILITY ISSUES

30. No always visible status bar for battery life, signal strength, carrier ID, 2G/3G wi-fi, Bluetooth on.

31. Taskmanager has no option to shut down apps you donâ(TM)t want running in the background.

32. Search and Back button cannot be de-activated in apps or games and easily touched by accident which interrupt your user experience.

33. Lockscreen need to be activated to show missed call/sms notification.

34. No way to close an app except pressing back button all the way to the first screen.

35. Tiny fonts in messages is very hard to read for those over 45.

36. Cannot create and save playlists on the phone.

37. Playlist can only be edited when you are playing it.

38. Cannot search your music collection on the phone, only in the Marketplace.

39. Cannot close music player, can only pause. Music player on lockscreen will stay until you reboot. Be careful not to touch it in a meeting.

40. No draggable progress bar for current track playing and no indication which track in an album is currently playing

41. Cannot lock screen orientation.

42. Online and phone contacts are mixed together with no ability to filter.

43. Search button in dialer does not search contacts for dialing, but search call history.

44. Cannot save draft sms messages.

45. Call history only show phone number type. If a contact has multiple phone nos. fo

Re:Subsidized price

[Thruen]

Addendum: T-Mobile will offer a lower price if you bring your own phone. The carriers that matter still don't though.

Re:Subsidized price

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they are all true. Furthermore, the GP was obviously specifically referring to Windows Phone 7 which is what the article is about. Please try to keep up.

Re:Subsidized price

[Anonymous Coward]

122. If S60+M[ae]e[mG]o strategy was a "burning platform" ... This platform is RADIOACTIVE, ON FIRE, and EXPLODING, bitchez!

Elop stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled.
The flame that lit Nokia's wreck shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet horrible and grim he stood, as born to rule the storm;
A creature of demonic blood, a proud, though troll-like form.

The flames rolled on – he would not go without his Ballmer's word;
That Ballmer, in Redmond below, his voice no longer heard.

He called aloud "Say, Ballmer, say if yet my task is done?"
He knew not that the stock-price lay yet twice the buyout one.

(Okay, that last line descended to junior-high love-poem level of suck; I'll quit before it gets worse.)
Seriously, just how much farther can MS possibly need to ruin Nokia before they buy them out and give Elop his bonus?

Re:Subsidized price

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine then, i'll just wait until I can upgrade my Lumia to Windows Phone 8 ...

Oh, wait ...

I've got a better idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they give me $400 directly and then I'll pay the $49 for the Lumia.

They've saved $50!

Re:I've got a better idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

We lose money on every sale, but we'll make up for it in volume!

Re:Unfortunately, Nokia has no Steve Jobs

[Google Fanboy]

Uh, Nokia haven't abandoned their other OSs. They're still selling Symbian, dumb and Linux phones.

Re:Unfortunately, Nokia has no Steve Jobs

[Luckyo]

They have been officially in process of abandoning symbian since 2011 or so, and it will officially end in total abandonment in 2016. In reality, symbian has been largely abandoned marketing wise back in 2011 along with the catastrophic "platform burning" memo which made sales go from "increasing by about 5% yearly" to "total collapse" overnight.

Linux smartphone is 100% abandoned. Meego has been abandoned before N9 was even properly out, with team developing it long disbanded. N9 is no longer manufactured and they're just selling the rest of the stock. There has been virtually no marketing push behind N9 either. Fun trivia: it still outsold all lumia phones to date.

Dumb phones are still going, but how long they will last is anyone's guess. Elop has finally gotten around to axing meltemi dev team (linux based dumbphone OS), which means that nokia essentially has no OS for dumbphones past 2016, when it's supposed to fully abandon symbian. WP is unsuitable for dumbphones due to both hardware requirements and software pricing, and Elop's clear main goal is to make nokia into a 100% WP OEM and nothing more. That makes dumbphone division future into a very big question mark.