Monday, 9 January 2017

Nokia 6 Launch: HMD Global Will Need More Than Just Good Design and a Nokia Logo to Sell Its Smartphones


Nokia 6 Launch: HMD Global Will Need More Than Just Good Design and a Nokia Logo to Sell Its Smartphones

HIGHLIGHTS

  • The Nokia 6 sports premium design, but middling specifications
  • The China pricing of around Rs. 17,000 is simply not good value-for-money
  • HMD needs to get pricing right if it want to make any meaningful impact
After the CES 2017 fanfare ended this weekend, HMD Global - the company that now holds the right to make phones under the famous ‘Nokia’ brand - used the opportunity to revealthe Nokia 6, first of the many Android-based smartphones the company is said to be working on.

The Nokia 6, currently available for sale only in China, has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 chip paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage, 16 megapixel and 8 megapixel cameras back and front respectively, a fingerprint scanner, 3000mAh battery and runs Android 7.0 Nougat. If the specs sound familiar, that’s because they’re not all too different from offerings by many Chinese companies.

The Nokia 6’s internals can be very well compared to Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and Redmi 3s PrimeLenovo K6 Power. Bear in mind that that these phones cost many thousand rupees cheaper than Nokia 6’s selling price in China (which roughly translates to Rs. 17,000), though the Nokia 6 will never get an official India price tag since it’s meant to be China-only smartphone.
It’s not just us who’ve made these comparisons. If you were to look at comments about the Nokia 6 flowing online, many are making these comparisons too. At the time of writing this, our news story of the Nokia 6 launch had collected a fair share complaints of it being too expensive. The Snapdragon 430 chip is typically found in phones priced under Rs. 15,000 and below. And around that Rs. 17,000 mark, phones like the Lenovo Z2 Plus or LeEco Le Max 2 are available with top-of-the-line Snapdragons

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