Nokia and Blackberry showed new phones this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The familiar, but faded brands pin their hopes on cheap novelty phones and Android.
Nokia played the retro card with a revamped 3310. It’s an expensive novelty for indulgent spendthrifts. There are also three ho-hum conventional Android models.
A Finnish start-up made the phones under license.
Low-cost
Nostalgia aside, the only remarkable feature is that they all cost well under €299. That implies they could land in New Zealand for less than NZ$500.
BlackBerry’s once prestigious brand and signature qwerty keyboard turned up on the Keyone phone.
Both phone makers are recent converts to Android. That is not going to save them. Gimmicks aside they are ordinary phones drowning in a sea of Android handsets.
At least half a dozen brands are now ahead of Nokia and Blackberry in the Android queue.
