The new billion dollar smartphone battleground
Perhaps some of the most interesting announcements so far at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona have come from Nokia and Mozilla.
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Peter Dolukhanov
Nokia, the Finnish company whose phone business Microsoft announced it was buying last year, debuted the Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia XL, its latest line of smartphones which now run on Android, sort of. Technically, they run ‘Nokia X’, an Android-based operating system which has stripped out most of the experience Android users will be used to, forgoing services including Google Play in favour of Nokia’s own app store, a similar approach as taken by Amazon with the Kindle Fire device.
Nokia hopes this move will introduce a new wave of users through apps, utilising the Android Developer network to bring existing Android apps over to these new Nokia handsets instantly, with several monetisation incentives for developers. To retain a sense of a Microsoft user experience, Skype and Outlook will be preloaded onto the Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia XL and will be priced at €89, €99 and €109, respectively. That's £75, for a smartphone.
Shouting about Android is the bait Nokia will be using to pull the punters in, but in reality Nokia’s own platform and probably Microsoft’s cloud services will be pushed heavily through the handsets. It’s part Android, part Windows phone.
A slightly strange proposition then when compared to the experiences iOS and pure Android handsets offer in the USA, Japan, Korea and here in the UK. But these handsets aren’t being aimed at the western market, or the budget Android market for that matter. Nokia is squarely targeting first time smartphone owners in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China) countries as well as other emerging markets including Thailand, Poland and Mexico for Nokia to grab a slice of the budget smartphone pie. They won’t be available in countries such as Japan or the US where top-end smartphones reign supreme.
If €89 seems budget, how about $25? Mozilla is also focusing its efforts on these emerging markets to target its hardware and services at the billion+ people around the globe without internet access in their pocket or the income to buy the latest Apple or Samsung device. A hardware partnership with Chinese company Spreadtrum will "lead to a flood of $25 smartphones” according to Mozilla COO Jay Sullivan.
Countries such as India, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Hungary will be targeted with the Firefox OS, to bring a smartphone which runs Mozilla’s famously open operating system to a whole new market and open up the smartphone ecosystem to users who don’t have the higher standards of an iOS or Android experience to compare Firefox OS to. The handsets will be cheap enough to forego long-term carrier contracts and provide a new opportunity for brands to connect with these users through branded content on mobile, whether that be services, cross-promoted content or apps.
A low price point for handsets might not make Mozilla or Nokia huge returns per device, but with a over a billion people ready to buy hardware and services, it’s a market that can surely reap great returns in the long-term, both from a brand and revenue perspective.
Peter Dolukhanov is joint managing director at Nice Agency. You can follow him on Twitter @dolukhanov