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BARCELONA, Spain–Microsoft wants to be known as the people’s smartphone company.
The software giant said today that it had lowered the minimum requirements to build a Windows Phone, a move that allows vendors to construct less-expensive devices that can appeal to more budget-conscious customers and first-time smartphone buyers.
The shift represents an attempt to expand Microsoft’s addressable market, vital to the company’s bid to regain a measure of relevancy in the smartphone business. The company had previously maintained a strict list of specifications that vendors had to follow, which at the time made the devices fairly high-end. The move comes as Android’s momentum in a variety of markets, high and low, continues to gain ground.
“Our strategy over time was to expand the range of price points,” said Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Microsoft, in an interview with CNET.
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Microsoft’s move follows a similar tack Google took with Android. The Internet search giant initially worked with some key vendors to create some high-end devices, including the initial G1 with HTC and the Motorola Droid. But over time, more vendors started to take Android and put it into more affordable devices, something Google encouraged with its open philosophy. Rather than hit one stratum, Android had become an operating system for everyone. The results are clear: Google is activating 850,000 Android devices each day.
Microsoft badly wants Android’s reach. The first result of its move was the Nokia 610, which was announced earlier today at a press conference at the Mobile World Congress trade show. The phone will retail for 189 euros ($254) without any subsidy.
Nokia intends to take this to a broad number of countries, said Kevin Shields, senior vice president of the Windows Phone program for Nokia. He said he believes the Nokia 610’s affordable price makes it ideal for prepaid carriers, as well as traditional postpaid carriers.
Hands on with the Nokia Lumia 610 (photos)
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“Early on in our discussions, it was clear we needed to bring this thing to a broad range of customers,” Shields said in an interview with CNET. “What we’re trying to do with Microsoft is foster the growth of the ecosystem.”
Microsoft initially set a bar of a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 384MB of RAM (most vendors used 512MB). When the phones came out in the fall of 2010, those were fairly ambitious specs, and the phones were all considered premium devices.
Of course, the initial run of smartphones didn’t fare so well, and were ultimately discounted by the carriers anyway.
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With today’s announcement, the company is allowing a slower Qualcomm processor, and a minimal threshold of 256MB of RAM, which the Lumia 610 uses. Microsoft worked with Nokia and a number of partners on the lower end portfolio. ZTE also announced a low-end Windows Phone during the show.
The move to more mass-market phone falls in line with a recent marketing campaign launched by Microsoft that pushes the experience and speed of the devices–even if it lacks the dual-core or quad-core chips of smartphones. The company is attempting to market Windows Phone as the ideal upgrade path for people buying a smartphone for the first time.
Microsoft’s messaging flies in the face of those from other vendors, including LG and Huawei, which are quick to tout the specifications of their mobile devices. Others, such as HTC, have also moved away from the spec talk and focused more on the experience.
“Consumers are being told to care about something they don’t understand,” Sullivan said of the spec talk. He said that despite the lack of multiple processing cores, Windows Phones are faster at the tasks that people care about.
Sullivan was mum on when Microsoft would support multiple cores, but said the company would plan to jump on that technology once it finds a way to minimize the battery drain issue and show significant performance improvement.
“Philosophically, we’re not opposed to multi-cores,” he said.
