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The Nokia X may have sold out in China in under 4 minutes with pre-orders totalling over 1 million in just 4 days, but that doesn’t mean Nokia’s first Android handset is an unqualified success. The Nokia X was also released in India on March 10 at a cost of 8.559 Indian Rupees (INR) which translates to around $141, and is now available from internet retailers for the reduced price of 7.027 INR ($116). This would seem to indicate that the Nokia X is experiencing slow sales.
While many people were excited about the seeing a handset featuring Nokia’s beautiful build quality and embodying the power of Android, Nokia’s offering of its Android-powered X range at MWC left many of us cold. The combination of low-end specifications such as a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, a measly 512MB RAM, the 3MP rear-facing camera and the low-res 4-inch WVGA display meant that the Nokia X was only ever destined for the bargain bucket. Despite this, it appears that Nokia still managed to over price their budget offering.
And it gets worse, Nokia’s custom fork of Android is based on AOSP (Android Open Source project) JellyBean 4.1, released back in July 2012. Quite why Nokia wouldn’t take advantage of the memory optimizations offered by Android version 4.4 KitKat for devices with low memory is unknown. And while the Nokia has received a firmware update to version 1.1 consisting mostly of bug fixes and performance tweaks, the base firmware has stayed the same. The combination of the low-end specifications, and the surprising choice of using an old version of AOSP on which to base their fork of Android on, does not make for a compelling product. Neither does stripping out all the Google goodness and replacing it with Bing and other Microsoft goodies.
This is Android though, which means we can rely on the talented devs of the XDA to provide us with ways of making the Nokia X a better device. One such developer is EthanFirst, who has compiled a Nokia X Toolkit enabling users to root, install a custom recovery as well as installing Google Play services. Thats right, you can get the goodness of Google on your Nokia X.
The Nokia X might not be to everyone’s tastes, but it looks like Nokia are attempting to make the Nokia X more appealing, by slashing the price by around $25. Are you more likely to take a chance on the Nokia X with the new lower price? Let us know on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter or in the comments below.