Nokia Windows Phones ‘Competitive’ With iPhone [Analyst]

Photo: Sorosh (flickr.com/photos/sorosh)

Nokia may finally have found its answer to the iPhone, a pair of new Lumia Windows phones that one analyst tells investors is ‘competitive’ with the Apple smartphone.

Introduced recently as its flagship Windows phone device, the Lumia 800, with a $594 price tag “is even more competitively priced when compared to the iPhone and Galaxy SII,” according to Barclays Capital. Complete with an 8-megapixel camera, 3.7-inch touch screen and 1.4 GHz single-core chip the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 “will be one notch cheaper than the iPhone 4S across all launch markets,” writes analysts in New York and London.

The comments are a bit of pa back for Apple, which upon the 2007 release of the iPhone virtually destroyed the market for Symbian handsets.

The device first rolls out in November with 31 carriers in Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. The new Nokia devices will reach the U.S. and China during the first half of 2012. The Lumia handsets are GSM/UMTS/HSPA compatible, meaning when the devices reach America, they initially can work only with AT&T’s network. However, the Finnish cell phone maker says it plans to introduce CDMA or LTE versions of the units sometime in the future, opening the possibility the new Windows Phone products could be available at Verizon and Sprint, as well.

Although Barclays gives Nokia stock shares only a $10 price target, the analyst firm remarks the company’s disastrous second quarter “was the bottom” and now talk will move to operating margins.

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