The technical specifications and pricing of the Nokia Lumia 510, along with its photo, have been leaked online. Over the last few weeks Nokia has gone all out with its brand-promotion for its forthcoming flagship Lumia smartphones - the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820.
These handsets are top tier models, and are expected to come at with a price tag that can compete with the Apple iPhone, a handset which is expected to be the Lumia 920's main rival. It appears that Nokia is about to release an entry level handset called the Lumia 510, which is expected to be slotted below the Lumia 610, in terms of price.
According to a report by GSMArena, the website that received a leaked photo of the Lumia 510, "We first heard about the Lumia 510 last month, in a leak that revealed that the low-end smartphone would sport a 4-inch display, have 4 GB of internal memory, and run on just 256 MB of RAM. Those specs have just been confirmed by our own source, who also sent us the picture above and hinted that the initial price will be $150. The Lumia 510 is aimed at targeting the entry-level smartphone market, and will likely start in China where smartphone ownership has nearly tripled since 2010." The website mentions that the handset could be launched across the globe by early 2013.
There is no word yet on the operating system the Lumia 510 handset will run on, but given its previous track record, Microsoft has managed to run Windows Phone 7.5 on handsets featuring 256MB of RAM. So this could be the OS used on this yet unannounced entry level smartphone.
When Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8, the brand also announced Windows Phone 7.8 which is a sort of 'value pack', for existing Windows Phone devices and not Windows Phone 8. All handsets running WP 7.5 or Mango will be upgradeable to WP 7.8, and one of the new features that the update brings with it is the new customisable home screen from WP 8.
In an interview with The Verge, Greg Sullivan explains this decision, “The nature of the investment [in Windows Phone 8] is primarily in areas that are not exploitable by existing hardware. To do the work to bring all of those elements to a platform that can't exploit them wasn't necessarily the most efficient use of resource.”
While we understand that WP 8 is a completely different beast, altogether, it's surprising that Microsoft couldn’t optimise it for single-core handsets. Perhaps it was the amount of RAM, and not an issue with the CPU; or that someone will manage to strip it down and port it over to older handsets.
Not everyone cares about dual-core on their phones, NFC and all that jazz, so for them, the WP 7.8 update is more than welcome. "When you pull that Lumia out of your pocket after you’ve received that 7.8 update, it will look and feel the same as a Windows Phone 8 device," said Sullivan. This should keep many WP 7 users happy for the time being, until they decide whether or not they need to take the WP 8 plunge.
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