With budget-friendly Asha 210, Nokia takes aim at emerging markets

The Asha 210 is a smart-looking, social-networking-centric smart phone. What it's not is high-powered. 

|
Nokia
The Nokia Asha 210.

Nokia today took the wraps off the Asha 210, a colorful smart phone (see photo above for proof) with a QWERTY keyboard, and a dedicated WhatsApp button, which allows users to easily send and receive messages across an array of platforms. The Asha 210 is relatively low-powered – witness the 2-megapixel camera and 2.4-inch QVGA display – but Nokia is betting the social networking capability more than makes up for the lack of clout. 

The Asha 210, Nokia exec Timo Toikkanenhas said in a statement, has "been designed to allow people to easily update their social networks, stay in touch with friends and share user created content." Left unsaid, of course, is the target audience for the Asha 210. Because with an estimated retail price of 72 bucks, the Asha 210 will not be going up against the much more expensive Apple iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S4

Instead, the target here is consumers in emerging markets such as India or Brazil, who may be looking for a capable and smart-looking smart phone, but are unwilling to fork over the equivalent of $200 (plus a two-year contract) for the privilege. As David Meyer of GigaOM notes today, this is an area in which Nokia, with its Series 40 phones, has historically acquitted itself very nicely.  

Moreover, he writes, the Asha 210 "will be going up against very low-end Android phones, which offer a much wider range of apps but not necessarily better performance (and seriously, battery life is a major issue in many of these markets), and the soon-to-be-released Firefox OS phones, which are HTML5-only and as such an unknown quantity at this point. Given its social chops, the 210 will be a fairly impressive contender for many users." 

The Asha 210, which is available in yellow, cyan, black, magenta, and white, is expected to hit shelves sometime in the second quarter of 2013.  

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to With budget-friendly Asha 210, Nokia takes aim at emerging markets
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0424/With-budget-friendly-Asha-210-Nokia-takes-aim-at-emerging-markets
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe