Till around six years back mobile phones in India were synonymous with brand Nokia. In every household, one would find at least one member of the family having a Nokia feature phone. After being sold to Microsoft and shutting down mobile production three years back, Nokia is set to make a comeback in 2017 with Android phones in India. The brand’s comeback, thanks to the amazing brand recall it still enjoys besides its almost legendary reputation on unique parameters like sturdiness, build quality and more, makes this one of the most awaited launches of 2017.
Rajeev Suri, chief executive officer, Nokia is to speak at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 in Barcelona. It is expected that he will share the company’s go-to-market strategy and unveil minimum three Android-based smartphones along with pricing and availability details at the event.
India Launch:
We expect Nokia will enter the Indian market somewhere in May or April. The exact launch date may be unveiled at MWC by Suri.
Also, it is expected that Nokia 6 will be the first device to be made available in the Indian market. It comes with a 5.5-inch full HD with a screen resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and 2.5d curved display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. Under the hood, the device is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 Processor along with Adreno 505 GPU. The phone is backed by 4GB of RAM and 64GB internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 128GB via microSD. It also houses a fingerprint scanner, which is embedded in its home button.
On the camera front, the smartphone flaunts a 16-megapixel camera with PDAF, 1.0um sensor, f/2.0 aperture, and dual-tone LED flash. While at the front, we have an 8-megapixel front-facing camera with a 1.12um sensor and f/2.0 Aperture for selfies and video calling. The Nokia 6 runs on the latest Android 7.0 Nougat and is powered by a 3000 mAh non-removable battery.
That should make it a shoo-in for being a very strong contender in the sub 16K price range, and a middling player in case it hits the market over 20K.
Where would it be sold?
In all probability, Nokia will take the online route to start with and going forward it will explore offline model as well. The reason being to keep the pricing of phones under check and reach wider customer base.
Will Nokia manufacture smartphones in India?
It will definitely happen but we are not sure about when. It also depends on when Foxconn, the one of the primarymanufacturer of Nokia smartphones, sorts of its plan. We have reached out to Foxconn for their comments but didn’t get a revert from them at the time of filing the story.
We will keep you updated about Nokia’sentry in the Indian market, as we get more information and do look forward to our reporting from ground zero at MWC where all theaction will commence from February 26.