Nokia Unveils Low-Priced Phones

BARCELONA — Nokia on Monday introduced two new low-priced basic cellphones, plus two lower-priced versions of its flagship Lumia Windows smartphone — part of an effort by the former market leader to compete amid an intensifying price war in handsets.

The four new phones — the Lumia 720, Lumia 520, Nokia 301 and Nokia 105 — will help Nokia maintain and perhaps build on its position as the No. 2 maker of cellphones worldwide behind Samsung and fend off challenges by two Chinese manufacturers, Huawei and ZTE, analysts said.

The Lumia 520, selling for €139, or about $183, in Europe and $179 in the United States, is priced 25 percent less lower Nokia’s least-expensive smartphone, the Lumia 620.

“I think that with the Lumia 520, Nokia is really going to take the Windows 8 operating system to a much bigger, mass market,” said Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England. “I would expect their volumes of Lumia shipments to now start increasing slowly, but they still have a way to go.”

Samsung overtook Nokia last year as the leading global maker of cellphones, amassing a 23 percent market share. Nokia’s market share slipped to 17.9 percent from 24 percent during 2012, according to the market research firm IDC. Apple ended the year in third place at 9.9 percent, followed by ZTE, with 3.6 percent, and Huawei, with 3.3 percent.

The new handsets, which the company unveiled at the Mobile World Congress industry convention in Barcelona, reinforced Nokia’s strategy of targeting the least-expensive but fastest-growing parts of the market. The Nokia 105, the company’s new basic, entry-level phone, will sell for €15 — less than the price of a pizza in some countries.

T-Mobile U.S.A. has agreed to sell the Lumia 520, a 3G phone with a 4-inch touchscreen, in the United States starting in the second quarter, Nokia said.

In 2012, the global market for cellphones that cost $250 or less grew by 99 percent from its level in 2011, and accounted for more than half of all cellphones sold worldwide, according to IDC. The upper-end segment of smartphones costing more than $250 grew by only 23 percent during the same period.

“Nokia is targeting the right end of the market with new, inexpensive phones,” said Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst with IDC in London. “This is where the growth is.”

Nokia, the global market leader in smartphones as late as 2007 before Apple produced its first iPhone, trailed the likes of Blackberry, LG and Motorola with a roughly 4 percent market share in the fourth quarter, according to IDC. Huawei and ZTE, the No. 3 and No. 5, each sold more than twice as many smartphones as Nokia.

This year for the first time, more consumers around the world will buy a smartphone than a simple, basic cellphone, according to IDC.

Stephen Elop, the Nokia chief executive, said the new, lower-priced Lumia handsets would give the company a full array of smartphones it had been lacking.

“These are less-expensive devices, but they will move in much larger volumes,” Mr. Elop, a former Microsoft executive, said during an interview.

Mr. Elop said Nokia was committed to making some of Lumia’s unique features, such as digital lenses that allow users to enhance their own photos, available throughout the entire Lumia lineup, instead of reserving the most advanced features for the most expensive handsets.

The Nokia-Microsoft alliance that was announced two years ago in February 2011, Mr. Elop said, is gaining momentum. He dismissed the possibility that the company would eventually abandon its software partnership with Microsoft for another operating system, such as the Android system made by Google.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that that was the right decision” to choose Microsoft, Mr. Elop said. The alliance with the world’s largest software maker has set Nokia apart from handset makers relying on Android, Mr. Elop said, preserving an identify and edge for Nokia and its products.

With the Lumia line of smartphones expanding, Nokia can begin to sell Microsoft phones increasingly to businesses, which may already be reliant on Microsoft Windows and e-mail services in their operations, Mr. Elop said.

“Being able to bring those all together I think is a very powerful force,” he said. “And it’s something that’s just beginning.”

Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones in the fourth quarter, up from 2.9 million in the third quarter. Mr. Elop declined to say how sales of Lumia had develpoped in the first two months of the year. But he suggested that the three new handsets introduced over the last three months would help sustain sales momentum.

The Lumia 920, 820 and 620 are new devices that will translate into new sales, he said. “All of those things will contribute to what we hope to see in the future,” he said.

In the fourth quarter, Nokia generated an profit of €202 million, compared with a loss of €1.1 billion a year earlier.

The Nokia 301, a mid-range feature phone, will be introduced in the second quarter and sell for €65. The 3G handset can display streaming video and comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera and panoramic, wide-angle lens. The Nokia 105 will eventually replace the entry-level Nokia 1280, which sold more than 100 million units in the past two years.

The Nokia 720, which will be sold initially in Asia and Europe, is a 3G handset targeting social media users. The phone, which will sell for €249, comes with 8 gigabytes of internal memory and an SD-card slot for additional storage. China Mobile has agreed to sell the handset in China starting in the second quarter, Nokia said.

Bits Blog: 300,000 Android 'Phones' Roam a Virtual Town

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times A cluster of 500 PCs at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., is running a complex simulation of cellphones in the wild.

An air-conditioned data center at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., has the ambience of a Best Buy showroom, with 500 inexpensive desktop computers lined up on racks. But the PCs here are doing something special.

A small team of cybersecurity researchers have lashed the computers together to form a homebrew computing cluster. They are stacked five levels high, braced in impromptu fashion with metal girders in the event of earthquakes, and woven together with colorful Ethernet cables. They serve as a cyber-Potemkin village — a distributed software simulation that is intended to mimic the behavior of an entire city’s worth of Android smartphones.

So far, the researchers have emulated the behavior of a network of 300,000 Android phones, down to details like sending text messages and transmitting wireless data, and even the behavior of the phone’s radios or sensors.

In the future, they hope that their software, which will be freely available through an open-source license, will be used by groups designing social network applications like Foursquare, military battle planners, disaster relief workers and American hackers who are building mesh wireless networks intended to make the Internet available inside nations controlled by dictators, among others.

“We wanted to create something that would approximate the many, many phones in a real network,” said John Floren, a Sandia computer scientist who is part of the group of researchers that built the system, which is called MegaDroid.

The idea is that while such simulators have in the past been developed by the engineers of large data networks, they have not been generally accessible to small groups of designers who might be working on a some new type of distributed application.

To date, wireless smartphone networks have not suffered malicious software infections at the same rate as the standard wired network, which is now plagued by a vast array of malware. Many computer security specialists believe that this will soon change as personal computing goes mobile, much as Willie Sutton robbed banks because, as he put it, that’s where the money was.

A wireless network simulation like Megadroid would make it possible for security researchers to gain new insights into “attack vectors,” according to the Sandia engineers. Their computing cluster is in an unclassified area of Sandia, which historically has been one of the two engineering and design centers that has built and maintained the nation’s nuclear weapons.

On a large monitor outside the data center, it appears as if the researchers have turned loose a frenetic army of virtual Charlie Sheens on the city of Livermore, Calif. (The use of the Charlie Sheen icons is apparently an inside joke among the researchers.) The scene is actually a visualization tool used by the MegaDroid simulator, which includes fake GPS data and gives the appearance of a beehive of cellular activity as the Android phone owners drive and walk around a map of the city.

The researchers stressed that simulating a wireless network is a much more complex undertaking than simulating a standard desktop-based network.

“In a desktop PC network, the biggest problem you have is someone kicking a cord out,” said David Fritz, one of the MegaDroid designers.

In contrast, modern wireless networks are composed of shifting herds of tens of thousands of smartphone users. The simulation is made even more complex by the fact that each phone contains multiple radios and sensors.

The danger of not having a deep understanding of the behavior of a computer network was made clear several decades ago at the very beginning of the Internet era. In 1988 a Cornell graduate student brought much of the Internet to a standstill — it was composed of about 50,000 computers at the time — when he unleashed a program known as a worm that was intended to live in the network as a bit of digital graffiti — in effect, the cyber-equivalent of writing “Kilroy was here.” However, because of an error in coding that caused the software to rapidly replicate, a vast number of copies spread through the network, overwhelming it.

The researchers said they were concerned about such issues of network resilience, but they also saw the possibility that MegaDroid might be used to build new kinds of distributed applications. For example, disaster workers in an earthquake zone could harness the accelerometers in their phones together to provide a digital seismograph, tracking aftershocks. Or small and inexpensive chemical and biological sensors could be added to smartphones carried by government workers, creating an early warning system in the event of terrorist attacks.

The researchers said that they were sensitive to privacy issues and that they believed the simulator could be used to build systems that provided useful data in national security situations while protecting privacy.

Right now the system models only the open-source Android operating system designed by Google, but the Sandia researchers said they hoped to add other operating sytems like Apple’s IOS. This would give a more realistic model of the wireless data world.

Bits Blog: RIM Shows Off New BlackBerry Phones, but Gives No Release Date

Eric Risberg/Associated Press Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, did not offer a specific date for the coming line of BlackBerry 10 phones.

OTTAWA — Research in Motion said on Tuesday that its coming line of BlackBerry 10 phones would include the company’s popular BlackBerry Messenger service, a feature still absent on its tablet computers.

But during his presentation to software developers in San Jose, Calf., Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, still did not offer a specific date for what he called “our most important launch ever.” Mr. Heins said, however, that the new phones, which have been delayed twice, will be on sale at some point early next year.

At the meeting, the company displayed the second version of a prototype BlackBerry 10 phone. Outwardly, it appeared little different from a prototype given to developers in May. But the software on the phone demonstrated on Thursday looked much more refined and advanced. In addition to BlackBerry Messenger, it included apps for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare, which were integrated with the phone’s calendar, datebook and e-mail apps.

RIM also showed how corporations and governments would be able to segregate their data and app from users’ personal selections and information.

The software linking all the features, Mr. Heins said, will allow users to perform a variety of tasks from a single screen without switching applications.

Although creating new phones and a new operating system has clearly been a struggle for the company, Mr. Heins made no effort to temper expectations.

“We are convinced that the BlackBerry 10 platform will shape the next 10 years as profoundly and significantly as BlackBerry shaped the last 10 years,” he said. Recent demonstrations of the prototype to people at telephone companies and elsewhere, he said, have made “believers out of those who had previously written BlackBerry off.”

Still, the success of the new phones remains to be seen. On Thursday, Mr. Heins will have to face a much less cheery group, RIM’s investors, when he announces the company’s second-quarter results. A Bloomberg survey of 35 analysts found that they expected the company to report that earnings fell 41 percent from the same period last year.

Leading up to Tuesday, some analysts speculated that the total number of BlackBerry users had not grown or had even declined during the quarter, which would have been a first for the company. But Mr. Heins said RIM had counted 80 million BlackBerry users during the quarter, up from 78 million the last time the company reported.