Nokia Spinning Featurephones as Smartphones

[wraggster]

One reason for Nokia's surprisingly strong share price rebound over the past two weeks is the success of its new Asha feature phones in Asia. According to our sources in Delhi, the Asha 305 sold out in several stores soon after its debut even before the marketing campaign kicked in. Is it a coincidence that major Asian newspapers like The Philippine Star and Singapore's The Sun Daily describe Nokia's new Asha models as 'smartphones'? No. Nokia has done its very best to dress up its cheap new feature phones as something far more aspirational (http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/13/nokia-feature-phone-business-analysis/) — to the extent that devices like Asha 305 are now widely depicted as smartphones across Asia and Africa. This is a critically important maneuver.."Of course, maybe they are smartphones; the Asha appears to be speced better than the HTC Dream (http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_asha_303-4278.php) (1Ghz processor, albeit with only 128M of RAM), and they've added a lot of new features to Series40. But then it's still Series40 with JavaME.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/08/14/018207/nokia-spinning-featurephones-as-smartphones