Some insightful Cringely speculation. AT&T is already selling the iPhone 3GS (8 gigabyte) for $49.
Here is the transition we are likely to see. Cheaper smart phones are coming. There was a story just this week about Apple announcing a cheaper smart phone this summer. I can see it now: at the WWDC in June Apple will announce the expected multi-core, 4G, international-ready, whiter-then-white, 1.2-GHz iPhone 5, but the “one more thing” will be a repackaged, smaller form-factor, $29 iPhone 3GS. Nokia has to not only have a response to this move by Apple, they must preempt it with an earlier announcement of their own.
Nokia (and Microsoft’s) survival in the phone market is dependent on staking out the lower end of the market where people buy on price as much as features and brand loyalty is less of an issue. Apple is heading there and Android is there already. Only by rushing the net — by following the time-honored Microsoft technique of throwing bodies and staggering amounts of money at a problem in a market-changing way — can these companies remain relevant in the mobile space.
But they have only one chance to make it work and they’ll have to take that chance before June.
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