It may just be over-zealous marketing hype, but AT&T is saying the Lumia 900 Windows Phone will be “a notch above” anything in the carrier’s history.
The Lumia 900 is the follow-up to Nokia’s Lumia 710 phone, which launched to great fanfare in the US earlier this year, exclusively on T-Mobile.
The 710 instantly pushed Nokia to #1 status in the list of top-selling Windows Phone manufacturers, largely because of its highly accessible price of just $50 after service agreement and mail-in rebate.
The 900 is designed as a much more powerful phone. It packs in a 4.3-inch AMOLED display, a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdraggon processor, and compatibility with LTE high-speed 4G connectivity. But it will still carry a price tag well below almost all Android phones and iPhones.
AT&T said that the device’s launch will be a “notch above anything we’ve ever done,” according to a quotation from Cnet. That’s a bit hard to believe considering AT&T has iPhone exclusivity for a couple years, but we’ll play along with the marketing game.
An extraordinary TV ad campaign is expected to launch for the new Nokia device, and AT&T retail employees have reportedly already gone through a lot of training about what the phone brings to the market and how to peddle it to customers.
Of course, being the top Windows Phone manufacturer is kind of like being the best player in Little League – you’ll still have a tough time competing in the MLB. In other words, Android and iOS are still dominating the market, and Nokia has a long way to go if it wants to legitimately compete in that field.
So far, Nokia has made quite an impression, and there is the possibility that it could almost single-handedly help bring Windows Phone within striking distance of the two larger smartphone OS players. It will need to continue innovating if it wants that to happen.
