STOCKHOLM—Nokia Corp. said Thursday it has started shipping its much-anticipated N8 smartphone, having warned only last week that it would hold shipments to do some final amendments.
Preorder customers were due to receive the phone by the end of September, but will now have to wait until October after the company warned last week that deliveries would be pushed back a few weeks, without explaining what had gone wrong.
However, the Espoo, Finland-based mobile-phone giant said Thursday that customers who have preordered the phone will be the first to receive it while market availability will vary by country and by operator, with broad availability in coming weeks.
"The Nokia N8 has received the highest amount of consumer preorders in Nokia history," Jo Harlow, senior vice president of smartphones, said in a statement, adding that 100 wireless operators have been signed up to offer the phone.
Nokia hopes the N8, with a new version of Symbian software, will compete with rival high-end smartphones from Apple Inc. and those based on Google Inc.'s Android software, but the launch has been dogged by delays to the development of the Symbian 3 software used in the phone as well as last week's unexplained problems.
The N8 comes with a 12-megapixel camera, high-definition video capabilities and will be priced at €370 ( about $504) in Europe, excluding taxes and subsidies.
Following the earlier delays, investors are relieved that the N8 will now be widely available to consumers ahead of the important Christmas season when sales tend to be particularly high, said analyst Greger Johansson at Redeye. The N8 will sell at a relatively high price so it should be able to give Nokia's profit margins a boost, he added. Nokia's new smartphone doesn't match Apple's iPhone in terms of services and application availability, but it could still sell well in the wider smartphone market as it offers very good hardware for its price, Mr. Johansson said.
No comments:
Post a Comment