Related Articles
September has seen a flurry of new smartphone news, with Apple, Motorola and Samsung all announcing new models, and LG expected to add to the list on 19 September. But perhaps no announcement was more critical to the success of a company than Nokia’s new Lumia launch was in New York on 5 September. Many see this as the company’s “make or break” phone, and we’d love to know what you thought about what was unveiled.
As a bit of a recap, the Lumia 920 is the handset in question, and is designed to run on Windows Phone 8. On the surface, it looks quite similar to its forerunner, but there are plenty of upgrades below the surface. Nokia packs in a 4.5-inch IPS display, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and its new PureView camera technology (which you can read more about here).
Our interest was really piqued after watching the CNET live blog of the Apple iPhone launch last week. Because our team shares the same live-blogging tools, we had a behind-the-scenes look at the blog as it was being published, including all of the comments made by users that weren’t published in the final stream. Of these, there were a lot of questions about the Lumia 920 — asking how the CNET team thought the new iPhone compared to it — and comments about how the new iPhone’s features compare to the Lumia, especially in regards to photography.
That same day, we monitored search terms on CNET Australia, and found that Australians were not searching for information about Nokia or the new Lumias nearly as much as the commentary earlier had suggested. Considering that the commentary on the live blog was primarily American, we’re wondering whether interest in the Lumia 920 is regionally specific.
Recent OS market share figures show Australia as being one of the countries with the highest uptake of Windows Phone 7 devices, with 4.8 per cent share in Oz, compared with 3 per cent in the US and other parts of the world. So, if Australians aren’t interested in the new Lumias, does this spell trouble for Nokia?
