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Nokia Spinning Featurephones as Smartphones

Posted by Unknown on from the the-thin-line dept.

zacharye writes with an excerpt from BGR: "One reason for Nokia's surprisingly strong share price rebound over the past two weeks is the success of its new Asha feature phones in Asia. According to our sources in Delhi, the Asha 305 sold out in several stores soon after its debut even before the marketing campaign kicked in. Is it a coincidence that major Asian newspapers like The Philippine Star and Singapore's The Sun Daily describe Nokia's new Asha models as 'smartphones'? No. Nokia has done its very best to dress up its cheap new feature phones as something far more aspirational — to the extent that devices like Asha 305 are now widely depicted as smartphones across Asia and Africa. This is a critically important maneuver.." Of course, maybe they are smartphones; the Asha appears to be speced better than the HTC Dream (1Ghz processor, albeit with only 128M of RAM), and they've added a lot of new features to Series40. But then it's still Series40 with JavaME.

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is the difference to the end user? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I would say the defining feature of a smartphone would be the ability to install apps to expand its capabilities.

    You can do that on Series 40, installing Java ME apps has been possible for a long time now.

  2. Re:What is the difference to the end user? by Clarious · · Score: 4, Informative

    Opera mini does the same, that is why it is so lightweight and can render (albeit sometimes incorrectly) fairly complex webpages on very weak phones, it even re-encode images to webp format to reduce file size. Amazon Silk also does that too, so it is nothing new.
    Back to the topic, for the same price for a Asha 303, you could get something like a Samsung Galaxy Pocket, which has GPS and double amount of RAM. In my country (Vietnam, a 3rd world one) Android is gaining market, even at the lower end segment while Nokia is losing out rapidly. I was surprised that if someone I know has proper web-browsing capability now, then it is most likely to be an Android phone or, sigh, iPhone.

  3. Re:Smartphone vs Feature phone by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Informative

    One thing I can't understand though is why Nokia are even bothering with Series 40 at all when they could simply have used S60 (which is a proper smartphone OS) on these cheaper models. S60 is looking good at the moment.. just at the point it is being discontinued.

    They're skimping on the RAM (128MB) by running S40. That and the small screen size shared with a hardware keyboard, whereas their S60 machines evolved to a larger touchscreen and slider keyboard.