Then came ´small is beautiful´ age where companies fought with each other to advertise where in your cloth their small phones could disappear. The ´slim´ and ´razor-thin´ were the buzzwords in the cell phone market.
Now is the age of touching, feeling and having your phones, having the facilities of a computer, in your pockets. Phones, these days, are not so small that they fit in the small change pocket of jeans or thin enough to make anorexic models jealous. In fact, they are nearly as tall as the old NT phones. This revolution can be attributed to Apple iPhone which changed the market scenario. Though it wasn´t the first touchscreen phone in the market - some companies had introduced touchscreen phones more than three years before the iPhone - it combined elegance, ease of use and a whole lot of other features that created a new era in mobile phones.
At first others were left playing catch-up, but now the pretenders have put on a serious challenge to iPhone´s throne. Two such phones are the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and N97. Nokia 5800 was launched in Nepal in January this year and is now selling at an average of 300 units a month, even when the ´gray market´ is not taken into account, according to Paramount Electronics Pvt Ltd, an authorized distributor for Nokia.
Rohit Rauniyar, general manager, Paramount Electronics, projects August sales of the model to be between 350 and 400. Rauniyar said the local sales figures for N97, unveiled globally in June, was 50 units a week.
So what are Nokia touchscreens´ USPs?
"They are very user-friendly and they are Nokia, which means they carry on the robustness from previous Nokia products. Also its interface is similar to all Nokia phones. So users will find it very easy to switch from their previous phones," Rauniyar said. Other features, he highlighted, are their music playing capabilities, range of games (including motion sensor games) and applications available, and wireless internet to name a few. Nokia users are also supported by the Nokia users´ social networking website www.ov.com. Paramount has also slashed rates from Friday keeping in mind the upcoming festival season.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
Old Maximum Retail Price: Rs 30,470
New Maximum Retail Price: Rs 28,870
Screen: 3.2 inch
Weight: 109 grams
Networks: GSM, HSDPA (3G), GPRS
Connectivity: WiFi internet, Bluetooth, USB, EDGE
Camera: 3.15 MP, video, LED Flash
Storage: 81 MB internal, 128 MB SDRAM
External Memory: 8 GB card free (expandable to 16 GB)
Stereo FM Radio
Talk time: up to 8 hours 45 minutes
Music Play: Around 30 hours
Colors: Black, Red, Blue
Warranty: 1 year (six months on battery and charger)
Nokia N97
Old Maximum Retail Price: Rs 56,040
New Maximum Retail Price: Rs 55,400
QWERTY keyboard and Touchscreen
Screen: 3.5 inch, sliding tilt TFT LCD display
Weight: 150 grams
Networks: GSM, HSDPA (3G/3.5G), GPRS
Connectivity: WiFi internet, Bluetooth, USB, EDGE
Camera: 5 MP, video, LED flash, secondary camera
Storage: 32 GB internal, 128 MB SDRAM
External Memory: Expandable to 16 GB
Stereo FM Radio
FM transmitter with 10m range
Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF)
Talk-time: Up to 9 hours 30 minutes
Music Play: Up to 40 hours
Colors: Black, White
Warranty: 1 year (six months on battery and charger)
Nokia 5530 XpressMusic
A new Nokia touchscreen mobile is scheduled to be launched in Nepal in a couple of weeks. The Nokia 5530 XpressMusic has a 2.9-inch wide touchscreen. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash. Its storage includes a 70MB of internal memory and external memory of up to 16GB. It can also run the internet through WiFi and GPRS, and connect to other devices through Bluetooth. The new model also has video recording capabilities. Being from the XpressMusic series, playing music to produce high quality sounds will be one of its features. The price has not been announced.
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