Nokia 5230 price in india

New Delhi: Nokia has decided to revise its strategy for the rapidly growing smartphone market in order to gain back the market share it has been losing in the segment over the last year. Under the new plan, the company will add value to a host of newly launched high-end products, with services such as messaging, a music store and maps.

The company, which remains strong in the low-end volume market, has launched a number of smartphones in the last six months. These include the N97, N86, E75, 6700 and 6208. On Tuesday, it also announced two new touchphones, the 5230 and 5530, both at a very competitive price point of around Rs 10,000.

"We have a different approach. We want to be the leaders in all price segments," said Tuula Rytila-Uotila, Vice-President, Category Management, Live Category, while speaking to Business Line.

New services

Nokia has also said that it is launching many new services to go with its smartphones. This includes the Music Store, to be launched on Wednesday, besides a messaging service, Nokia Maps, and various applications under the Ovi platform.

"Our focus for the coming year will be to scale up with our services offering such as the Ovistore. Consumers in India want to do a lot with their phone and we want to bring them choice," said Ms Rytila-Uotila.

The Finnish company, a market leader in the Indian mobile phone industry, has been losing market share in the smartphone segment to newer players such as Apple and Research In Motion (RIM). While Apple's iPhone competes with Nokia's N-series and XpressMusic phones, RIM's BlackBerry, a business phone, is a direct competitor to Nokia's E-Series.

Market share

According to Gartner, the global market share in smartphone sales for Nokia had fallen 16.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2008 at 40.8 per cent from 50.9 per cent in the same period in calendar year 2007. In the same period, the market share for Apple rose 111.6 per cent to 10.7 per cent of the market, while RIM increased its share 84.9 per cent to 19.5 per cent of the total pie.

On a year-to-year basis, Nokia grew by only 0.8 per cent from 2007 to 2008, while Apple grew by 245.7 per cent and RIM rose by 96.7 per cent. However, Nokia remained the overall market leader with a 43.8 per cent share of the pie in 2008, down from 49.4 per cent in 2007.

In order to target the fast converging world of computers and smartphones, Nokia has also announced its foray into the netbook market.

Nokia aims for global mass market appeal with 3G-capable, Ovi-friendly Nokia 5230.

Nokia today launched their broadest effort yet at capturing some of the burgeoning tablet phone market. The Nokia 5230 looks remarkably like a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone, and it has many of the same advanced features. But the new Nokia 5230 will start at only 150 Euros, around $215. That's a great starting price that will make this phone free on most subsidized carriers, and within reach for unlockers. But the phone doesn't skimp on features. The Nokia 5230 still features fast, 3G networking via HSDPA networks, and enough extra features to confuse this device with a higher-end Nokia smartphone.

In fact, the Nokia 5230 runs Nokia's Symbian S60 5th Edition OS, so it is technically a smartphone, but Nokia might as well start calling these devices "Ovi" phones, since it relies so heavily on Nokia's Ovi cloud based services. The Nokia 5230 features A-GPS, and will use Ovi Maps for navigation as well as aerial views and other location services. For more location-based apps, users can browse the Ovi Store, an over-the-air application store that Nokia offers on their smartphone devices.

Even without the XpressMusic branding, the Nokia 5230 should be a capable media player. The device will have access to the Nokia music store, and in select markets this will even be a Nokia Comes With Music phone, for some all-you-can-eat music downloads. You don't get the external playback controls we like on XpressMusic devices, but the Nokia 5230 still features a standard 3.5mm headphone jack to listen to tunes on your own earbuds. The device will also accept microSD cards up to 16GB, though no internal memory will be included beyond a few measly megabytes. Nokia also includes a Media Bar interface to make jumping into music all the quicker.

Of course, beyond the lack of internal memory, there are other clues that this is a low-end device. The camera is a simpler 2-megapixel shooter, a seriously low-level tech for the likes of Nokia. The screen is a still-impressive 3.2-inch display, the same size as the Nokia 5800. Nokia is also bragging about impressive battery life, at least during music playback. If you used the Nokia 5230 as a music player only, you could listen for 33 hours.

The Nokia 5230 is expected to become available in the 4th quarter of this year. Besides the low price (in Euros), the fact that official releases came out of New Delhi, India, as well as Finland tells us that we won't be seeing this phone on the U.S. market for a little while. This looks to be an emerging market device, and for those markets it should offer a nice mix of high-end, 3G features at a reasonable price.