Nokia has made a comeback and Windows Phone has finally started getting some much needed attention, all thanks to the successful Lumia series. New affordable Nokia Lumia models like the 620, 520 and 720 have managed to generate significant customer interest even though Android and iOS dominate the market and Windows Phone holds only a small percentage of the market. To survive and compete with others, any phone should offer all the important features and apps that its competitors do, in its own style. For a company to attract more customers, entry level phones have to be popularised in the right markets. And Nokia is doing both.
The #2InstaWithLove app is spreading like wildfire. Created by Nokia, it is an appeal to the Facebook-owned Instagram to build an app for Windows Phone, it being one of the only major apps to not do so. The #2InstaWithLove app adds Instagram-like filters to the photos users share through it on social networks and adds the aforementioned hashtag to the posts. Nokia has gone a step ahead and taken the campaign to banner ads. The ads are designed to get more Windows Phone users to sign up for the #2InstaWithLove app. However, there are also rumours that this is just a publicity stunt by Nokia since a recent leaked screenshot of the Windows Phone Store showed that Instagram will be available on the platform starting May.
In other news, the Nokia Lumia 520 is expected to launch in India soon. Nokia is already very popular in India, especially for its basic phones. The country has a huge consumer base and lower end budget phones sell faster than the rest. The Lumia 520 is a phone with decent specifications for its price level. It features a 4 inch LCD WVGA display and 235ppi pixel density, along with 512 MB of RAM. Under the hood is a dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8227 processor with Adreno 305 GPU. Though the exact price is not revealed, the phone is expected to be sold at a price under 10,000 INR (~$195) and will offer a larger screen, higher resolution camera and more powerful processor compared to the other smartphones available in the same price range.
Nokia seems to be in full swing with innovative and calculated marketing tactics. Though it will be sometime before the success or failure of these campaigns can be analysed, the company has to be appreciated for its persistent efforts considering that it was completely written off a few quarters earlier.
