Nokia has just announced plans to launch the first C-Series Smartphone, the Nokia C5, sometime during Q2 of this year. You may ask yourself, what is so special about this device? Well at just €135 ($183), before taxes and subsidies, it has an impressive price point.
Even though it does not have a large touchscreen, like you get with Google’s Nexus One or Apple’s iPhone, it does have a 3.2MP camera and a 2GB Memory. Then when you add in social networking capabilities and Nokia’s free Ovi Maps app, the C5 will surely tempt many users from their feature phone when it’s time to upgrade.
With the news from ST Ericsson that they have developed a platform for Android devices, which it says enables manufacturers to produce smartphones with a wholesale price of less than €100 ($136), this year we can expect a number of low cost smartphones to be launched. HTC have already announced the HTC Smart getting its launch in Q2.
So how will the introduction of low cost smartphones affect the mobile handset market? These low cost smartphones will inevitably cause a dent to high end feature phone sales, as the extra features available will draw consumers away from the feature phone market, the only drawback being that a data plan would be needed for the smartphone handset. There is still plenty of growth left in the smartphone market and I believe that as low cost smartphones begin to flood the market the growth rate will only speed up.
Tags: HTC, Nokia, smartphone, st ericsson
