Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

<keyword id="3368145" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="hmd-global" source="Orion">HMD Global</keyword>, the home of <keyword id="6354716" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="nokia" source="Orion">Nokia</keyword> phones, on Monday launched a new rugged smartphone Nokia XR20 in the Indian market. The Nokia XR20 will be available at ₹46,999 in ultra-blue and granite colour options across leading offline retail stores, e-commerce platforms and Nokia.com. The smartphone will be available for pre-booking from October 20-29 and the sales will start from October 30. Customers who pre-book the smartphone can avail free gifts such as a Nokia Power Earbuds Lite worth ₹3,599, and one year of screen protection plan. "The consumer expectation from a premium smartphone is not only for advanced features but also the longevity of the device. The Nokia XR20 is a life-proof smartphone that has been designed and built to survive through the frequent drops, splashes and tumbles of daily usage. It's a device which consumers can love, trust and keep for a long time without worrying about its maintenance," Sanmeet Singh Kochhar, Vice President, HMD Global, said in a statement. According to the company, the brand new life-proof Nokia XR20 smartphone has been built to last with military grade resilience paired with four years of monthly security updates, the latest software upgrades for up to three years and future-proofed 5G. In terms of specifications, the smartphone features a 6.67-inch 1080p LCD display 60Hz refresh rate with a hole punch cut-out. Under the hood, the smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 system-on-chip paired with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage. It has two cameras on the back with a 48MP main and another 13MP ultra-wide angle. On the front, it has an 8MP selfie shooter. The smartphone houses a 4,630mAh battery with 18W wired and 15W wireless charging and runs Android 11 software.

Nokia launches 'rugged' XR20 smartphone in India, starting at ₹46,999

<div class="image-container float_right"><div class="image">REUTERS/Adnan AbidiA model poses with the new <keyword id="6354716" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Nokia">Nokia</keyword> "E90 Communicator" phone during its launch in New Delhi June 28, 2007. </div></div>SINGAPORE/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - <keyword id="10387" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Microsoft">Microsoft</keyword> Corp's acquisition of Nokia's handset business gives the software behemoth control of its main Windows smartphone partner, but leaves a question mark over the bigger business it has bought: Nokia's cheap and basic phones that still dominate emerging markets like India.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has said he sees such phones - of which Nokia shipped more than 50 million last quarter - as an entree to more expensive fare.
"We look at that as an excellent feeder system into the smartphone world and a way to touch people with our services even on much lower-end devices in many parts of the world," he said in a conference call to analysts on Tuesday.
But analysts warn that's easier said than done.
The problem, said Jayanth Kolla, partner at Convergence Catalyst, an India-based telecom research and advisory firm, is that Microsoft simply lacks Nokia's retail and supply chain experience in the Finnish company's most important markets.
"The devices business, especially the non-smartphones business in emerging markets, is a completely different dynamic," he said.
Kolla pointed to the need to manage tight supply chains, distribution, and building brands through word-of-mouth. "Microsoft doesn't have it in its DNA to run operations at this level," he said.
India is a case in point. Nokia has been there since the mid 1990s and the country accounted for 7 percent of its 2012 revenue while the United States generated just 6 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Its India roots run deep: it has a presence in 200,000 outlets, 70,000 of which sell only its devices. One of its biggest plants in the world is in the southern city of Chennai.
For sure, Nokia has slipped in India as elsewhere: After nearly two decades as the market leader it was unseated by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in overall sales last quarter.
But it still sold more of its more basic feature phones.
As recently as last October, market research company Nielsen ranked it the top handset brand. The Economic Times ranked it the country's third most trusted brand.
<h3>LOYALTY RUNS DEEP</h3>
In a land of frequent power cuts and rugged roads, the sturdiness and longer battery life of Nokia's phones have won it a loyal fan base - some of whom have stayed loyal when trading up.
Take Sunil Sachdeva, a Delhi-based executive, who has stuck with Nokia since his first phone. He has just bought his fifth: an upgrade to the Nokia Lumia smartphone running Microsoft's mobile operating system.
"Technology-wise they are still the best," he said of Nokia.
But Microsoft can't take such loyalty for granted. Challenging it and Samsung are local players such as Karbonn and Micromax, which are churning out smartphones running Google Inc's Android operating system for as little as $50.
Such players are also denting Nokia's efforts to build its Asha brand, touchscreen devices perched somewhere between a feature phone and a smartphone.
Nokia shipped 4.3 million Asha phones globally in the second quarter of this year, down from 5.0 million the previous quarter.
"The sales performance of the Asha line has been quite poor," said Sameer Singh, Hyderabad-based analyst at BitChemy Ventures, an investor in local startups. "With increasing competition from the low-end smartphone vendors, I'm unsure how long that business will last."
That leaves the cheap seats. Singh estimates that the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa accounted for two-thirds of Nokia's feature phone volumes in the last quarter, at an average selling price of between 25 to 30 euros ($32.99 to $39.59).
"I don't see how Microsoft can really leverage this volume," he said. "The market is extremely price sensitive and margins are racing into negative territory."
<h3>TOO BIG TO IGNORE</h3>
The quandary for Microsoft is that while the basic phone market may be declining, it may simply be too big to ignore.
"If you look at markets like India and Indonesia, more than 70 percent of the volume comes from the feature phone business," Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner said. "It's still a significant part of the overall market."
That means that if Microsoft wants to herd this market up the value chain to its Windows phones, it needs to keep the Nokia and Asha brands afloat - while also narrowing the price gap between its smartphones and the feature phones and cheap smartphones.
Microsoft has hinted that lowering prices of smartphones would be a priority. The Windows Phone series includes the top-end Lumia 1020, which comes with a 41-megapixel camera, while it also sells simpler models such as the Lumia 610 and 620 aimed at first-time smartphone buyers.
"The lower price phone is a strategic initiative for the next Windows Phone release," Terry Myerson, vice president of operating systems said on the same conference call, while declining to provide details.
An option for Microsoft, analysts said, would be to shoe-horn services like Bing search, Outlook webmail and Skype, the Internet telephony and messaging application, into the lower-end phones as a way to drive traffic to those services and make the devices more appealing.
"So you can bundle services with these low-end products and that way you can reach a wider audience," said Finland-based Nordea Markets analyst Sami Sarkamies.
But in the meantime Microsoft needs to brace for assault on all fronts as emerging market rivals see an opportunity to eat further into Nokia's market share. In India, said Convergent Catalyst's Kolla, cheap local Android brands have been held back by Nokia's strong promotion of its mid-tier Asha brand.
"Now, I expect them to pounce," he said. ($1 = 0.7577 euros)
(Reporting By Jeremy Wagstaff in Singapore, Devidutta Tripathy in New Delhi, Bill Rigby in Seattle, Ritsuko Ando in Helsinki; Editing by Emily Kaiser)

You Searched For "nokia rugged smartphone" and got 2 results

Nokia launches 'rugged' XR20 smartphone in India, starting at ₹46,999

IANS

Microsoft's Cannot Ignore Nokia Phones That Dominate In Emerging Markets

Jeremy Wagstaff and Devidutta…

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides