Nokia will be officially pulling back the curtains later on tonight, but the cat’s out of the bag: the company’s first U.S. Windows Phone is the Lumia 710, which will debut on T-Mobile with a $50 price tag on January 11.
Sure, it isn’t as svelte or as colorful as its brother the Lumia 800, but the Mango-powered 710 does share the same internals. The Lumia 710 sports a 1.4 GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage — nothing that sounds super-impressive, but we’ve seen before that Mango doesn’t need the latest and greatest hardware in order to run like butter.
The Lumia’s 3.7-inch ClearBack LCD display and the 5-megapixel rear-mounted camera aren’t too shabby either, and the customers can pick up the entire package in black or white. We’ve seen the 710 sport some funky-colored backplates in the past too, so I wouldn’t expect the chromatically choosy to suffer without some color for long.
With the 710, Nokia and T-Mobile have set their sights on first-time smartphone owners (a Nokia data sheet calls them “smartphone intenders”), and T-Mobile customers could do far worse for $50. Going after beginner smartphone users is a solid strategy for Nokia (and Microsoft by extension) — if they can get first-timers hooked on the simple, elegant functionality that Windows Phone is known for, they may be able to lock down those users for the long haul.
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