Nokia's Lumia 710 Makes Windows Phone a Midmarket Competitor

Nokia is starting off its run to capture a chunk of the U.S. smartphone market with the Lumia 710, which it will market with T-Mobile at a low price ($49 with a two-year contract). For that cash outlay, users will receive a device with a handsome exterior and smooth user interface, 4G support, and respectable battery life (seven hours) and processor (1.4GHz Snapdragon single-core). It also boasts a 3.7-inch screen with 800-by-480 resolution. Nokia and T-Mobile, its carrier partner on the venture, recognize that they're marketing a midlevel smartphone. In that spirit, their campaign for an audience focuses on price and Windows Phone's supposed ease of use. This is a device meant for customers who've never owned a smartphone before, they argue, or find some higher-end rivals' devices too intimidating. The Lumia 710 runs Windows Phone Mango, Microsofts latest update to its smartphone platform. That update, with its hundreds of tweaks and features, potentially makes Windows Phone a viable option for a broad audience. While Mango has attracted largely positive reviews, Microsoft's smartphones continue to struggle for adoption in the face of significant competition from Google Android and Apple's iOS. Considering how all of Nokia's new phones will employ Windows Phone, the Finnish phone maker's survival is inevitably tethered to how well Microsoft and its partners can reverse that trend.    - ...

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