Have you seen what budget phones can do now?
Published by krisse at 13:19 BST, July 11th 2008
Owners of smartphones have long looked down on budget phones with the assumption that cheap means nasty. However, budget phones have developed in leaps and bounds lately, and they may catch up with smartphones sooner than most people realise.
Have you seen what budget phones can do now?
Without much publicity, Nokia recently released a low-end budget phone called the Nokia 5000, which is aimed at emerging markets (i.e. poorer countries) and has a launch price of about 90 euros plus taxes, with the price probably dropping closer to 50 or 60 euros over time.
Also without much publicity, Nokia has started bundling Opera Mini with even their lowest-price models, including the 5000. But they haven't stopped there: Nokia have also recently announced that the WebKit open source browser core (as used by S60's browser and the iPhone's browser) will be included in the upcoming 6th Edition of the Series 40 platform.
Why does this matter? Well, it's easiest to express this with a picture:
The Nokia 5000 budget phone displaying the full PC version of the BBC News website
While the 5000's Opera Mini browser isn't quite as good as the S60 browser, in practical terms it's amazingly close, and the 5000's QVGA screen displays sites very much like an S60 device. When the WebKit browser makes its debut on S40 later this year the technological gap will be even narrower.
The overwhelming pulling power of budget phones
With all the talk of which phone is best for internet browsing, the question of price has been sadly neglected. Silly headlines like "New $199 iPhone" ignore the fact that the new iPhone actually costs about $600, with the $199 headline number just being the first installment of a long series of large monthly payments. Technology writers who dislike the iPhone and prefer alternative devices seem to just go for other expensive models like the N95, which also cost $600 or a long series of large monthly payments.
Absolutely no one talks about budget phones as web browsing devices. But, considering the photo above, perhaps they should?
Even if tech writers don't acknowledge it very often, most people buy ultra-cheap phones, often literally the cheapest phone in the shop. It's mainly because most people simply can't afford anything else, but even those who can afford it often still plump for the cheapest one anyway. It's good enough, so why pay more?
Price is not just a key feature, but arguably the most important feature a phone can have, and cost probably has more effect on purchasing decisions than anything else.
Just how quickly are budget phones catching up with smartphones?
Over the past few years many people have observed that ordinary phones and smartphones are growing closer together, but not many have noticed the incredible pace at which this is happening.
For example, this is how close Nokia's smartphones and normal phones are in many key areas of mobile technology:
| Technology |
S60 Smartphones |
Series 40 Normal Phones |
| Camera |
5 megapixels with Carl Zeiss optics on several models including the N95 |
3.2 megapixels with Carl Zeiss optics on the 6500 Slide |
| Camcorder |
VGA at 30fps on several models including the N96 |
VGA at 15fps on several models including the 3120 Classic |
| Web Browser |
WebKit in the S60 browser as standard |
Opera Mini as standard on new models, WebKit as standard soon |
| Flash Support |
Flash Lite 3 on latest models |
Flash Lite 3 on latest models |
| Screen Resolution |
QVGA standard on most new models |
QVGA standard on most new models |
| TV Out |
TV Out on several models including the N82 |
TV Out on several models including the 7310 Supernova |
| POP & IMAP E-Mail |
Standard on all models |
Standard on all models |
| Mass Storage |
microSDHC memory card slot on all new models (except those with built-in mass storage) |
microSDHC memory card slot on most new models |
| Music Player |
Standard on all models |
Standard on most models |
This isn't the whole story of course, S60 has the important ability to run more complex native applications, and multitasking lets S60 run many apps at once. There are also certain apps and services, such N-Gage, which are S60-exclusive, though Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and Ovi Share are starting to appear on S40 models too.
It's also worth pointing out that not all Series 40 models are budget phones, most of them are actually mid-range in terms of price. However, once a feature appears on a mid-range S40 device, it seems to migrate to the cheapest phone models fairly quickly because they too use S40.
What happens when the budget phones catch up?
Some people say that budget phones will never catch up with high end phones because there will always be some more advanced technology to be added, so for example when a budget phone gets a 1 megapixel camera the higher end phones will have 5 megapixel cameras.
This view is mistaken because progression like that can't go on forever, people don't generally need technology to develop beyond a certain point. How many people would have any use for a camera greater than 10 or 20 megapixels?
Eventually there won't be any room for high end phones because budget models will do everything that ordinary people require of them. That might sound depressing, but it will mean that high end features will be used by ordinary people instead of just rich technophiles, and that's when we'll see whether these features are actually capable of changing the world:
- If everyone has a phone with satellite navigation, how will people see the world around them? The writer Will Self observed that Londoners seem to live in the tube map (the underground railway map) because everyone uses the tube to get around. If everyone uses their phone to get around, will we start to see the world in terms of points of interest, and discover more about our neighbourhoods because of the diligence of the mapping companies? Or will those who control the maps start to exert undue influence over our view of the world?
- If every phone has a TV-quality video camera and a mobile internet connection for uploading video, how will that change the recording of history? What would have happened if President Kennedy had been assassinated while surrounded by people using such devices? As many have observed, video provides not just a metaphorical viewpoint but a literal viewpoint, you see exactly what the person saw at the time, and direct uploads from the phone to the internet would make censorship much more difficult too. It would become extremely easy to convey to the world what actually happened at an event.
- If every phone has a high resolution screen, a TV Out feature, and compatibility with a keyboard and pointing device, will anyone bother buying standalone computers? Cameras, calculators, dictaphones, pagers and many other devices have been pushed aside by the mobile phone, dedicated music players are on the way out too, and perhaps computers will be next. For perhaps most of the world, a mobile phone with TV Out may be the first and only computer they ever use.
It'll be very interesting to find out the answers to these and many other questions, but they will only be fully answered when these features become standard on budget phones.
Expensive phones are like an enormous test phase, but budget phones are the true launch pad for a mobile technology.
Krisse, All About Symbian, 11 July 2008
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Categories: Comment, Hardware
Platforms: Series 60, General, S60 3rd Edition
Feature Discussion
Unregistered
It should be pointed out that most newer Sony Ericsson phones allow you to multitask as many midlets as you can fit into memory. It's not hard to run Opera Mini, GMail, Gizmo and toggle back and forth between them without any lag or slowdown.
viipottaja
The most interesting points of your article are right at the end. It will be interesting to see also how all the information (mostly completely insignificant, at least as individual snippets of data, video, pics) will be stored over the centuries and how historians will be using it. "You want see it - you'll be dead?" you say? No way, I will live forever of course, when Nokia moves into the "Eternal life and happiness business" around 2015. :D
DevilsRejection
Blast! I've been wanting to do this very same article, except with a 1680 for a while now. Nice job Krisse.
ajck
Great article Krisse, spot on. I'm posting a link to it on Forum Oxford.
Agreed, the phone will eat the smartphone, and as I've been saying for ages, eventually the personal computer (I've given up saying "laptop" because people misunderstand and say "the screen's too small" not realising the significance of TV Out). These are both very good things!
Alex
phonething.com
shoobe01
Great article and a good point.
But I cannot get my head around how the s60 browser is better than Opera Mini. I use it only when needed (downloads), or because Google idle screen search fires it off.
Unregistered
You absolutely correct on this article. Many people do not get their phones because of may functions/features you can get on it, but for making calls. Nowadays people like getting online on their phones albeit just doing lilttle to moderate browsing. The new S40 ll bring many mid range phones close to what smartphones stand for right now. Smartphones ll always be far ahead of feature phones due to the recent developments in the smartphone worlds; Symbian and Andriod open source operating systems. To some extend hardware advancement is stagnating whereas software is getting more advance, which gives smartphones a big levarage on their robust architecture, scalability as the preferred platforms for most of these new services that ll be coming from vendors.
sjhong
What's a smartphone and what's a budget phone? Without a definition, I believe this whole discussion falls short in its impact.
svdwal
As long as there is enough money in smartphones (or whatever high-end phones will be called) there will be a smartphone device market.
Try argumenting the case using cars instead of phones and then explain why there are still expensive brands like Audi, BMW and Mercedes around. According to your argument, everybody should be driving some cheap Korean car. After all, both expensive and cheap cars have airbags, airco, power steering, ABS, a stereo and a rear seat that can be folded in parts.
Unregistered
The new opera mini 4.1 is excellent. It's my main browser nowadays, even for downloads. I use it to download The Smartphones Show(+-50mb). If normal feature phones come with it as standard, I think mobile web browsing will finally take off in a huge way.
krisse
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To some extend hardware advancement is stagnating whereas software is getting more advance
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That's a very interesting point to make. It could be the reason Nokia is putting advanced web browsers in even their cheapest phones: they want to get people using their online services as quickly as possible.
Nokia itself is trying to become a software and online services company, and it's probably for the reason you just gave: hardware is stagnating while software (especially online software) is taking off.
Personally I'm quite surprised Apple is entering the phone hardware market right now, when they could make far more money in the long term entering the phone online services world. Imagine if Apple allowed other phone makers to include iTunes compatibility on their phones, that would earn them lots of very easy money from selling licences, and it would be more sustainable in the long term.
Quote:
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What's a smartphone and what's a budget phone? Without a definition, I believe this whole discussion falls short in its impact.
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Well, I assumed readers of AAS would know, but here's the definition I've always gone by: a smartphone can use native applications (programs that use the hardware directly, which Java doesn't). A smartphone also lets you switch between applications because it's multitasking.
But this particular discussion could apply to high end phones in general as much as smartphones.
The point I'm trying to make in the article is that the cheapest budget phones are catching up with the most expensive models far more quickly than people realise. What will happen when they do catch up?
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As long as there is enough money in smartphones (or whatever high-end phones will be called) there will be a smartphone device market.
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Obviously if people carry on buying a product, the manufacturers will keep making it.
But at the moment the high end phone market mostly depends on high end phones doing things that budget phones can't. That would have to change if budget phones catch up with high end phones in functionality.
Quote:
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Try argumenting the case using cars instead of phones and then explain why there are still expensive brands like Audi, BMW and Mercedes around. According to your argument, everybody should be driving some cheap Korean car. After all, both expensive and cheap cars have airbags, airco, power steering, ABS, a stereo and a rear seat that can be folded in parts.
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I don't think cars are a good analogy for phones.
Korean cars are cheaper than German ones, that's true, but they're still not cheap by phone standards.
The very first mobiles cost thousands, but the latest budget models cost tens. In other words, modern mobile phones cost about 1% of the price of the first mobiles, and the prices are still going down.
That kind of drop has not happened with cars. In the car world, it would be the equivalent of a car dropping from 20,000 euros to 200 euros without any loss of quality or functionality.
If there WAS a car that cost 200 euros I suspect it would dominate the world market, but there isn't such a car yet.
A much better analogy is the pocket calculator, which used to be a high profile product that cost hundreds, but now is an everyday object that costs just a few euros.
Unregistered
...particularly your last:
Quote: - If every phone has a high resolution screen, a TV Out feature, and compatibility with a keyboard and pointing device, will anyone bother buying standalone computers?
It was literally years before I ever īneededī to buy a īproperī computer. I cut my teeth with a Psion Series 3 and later a Series 5mx, using a travel modem and later a 6210/6310i to connect. Nowadays itīs still a close run thing as to wether I use my E90 or home PC more, although since the advent of the eeepc in my life, the lines have become a little more blurred.
Keep up the good work lads.
Unregistered
Feature phones like my partner's 6500 classic still can't do the most important thing I want: code, install and run native applications. But I do agree that feature wise they are getting close to what smartphones can do.
krisse
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Nowadays itīs still a close run thing as to wether I use my E90 or home PC more, although since the advent of the eeepc in my life, the lines have become a little more blurred.
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One very interesting idea Nokia's Bochum labs were pursuing (just before they closed and moved) was of an N810 internet tablet connecting to a high definition television wirelessly.
If that feature ever appears in consumer products, you could just park yourself on the sofa and do computing stuff on your TV using a wireless keyboard and touchpad, with the phone or tablet doing all the actual computing while on a table or in a pocket. I think most people would prefer to do that than have a corner of their house dedicated to a PC.
You can see a video of the tablet-TV project (and others) here:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/20...ounds-project/Williamoni
Krisse
You make some good points as usual and thanks for highlighting how feature phones are catching smartphones up.
However, there are some flaws in your arguments. I agree with svdwal, who has given the argument using cars as the product. You don't accept this because cars are a lot more expensive than phones. That's true of course because the components necessary to make a car cost a lot more than the components necessary to make a phone. However, svdwal's point is still right -under your reasoning it doesn't make sense that everyone doesn't buy the cheapest car available to them, since they largely have similar functions. The fact is that people perceive differing performance levels, differing build qualities etc between the cars available and make choices accordingly.
There's no reason to believe that this will not happen with phones too.
You say that calculators are a better example. But the fact is that if I do buy the cheapest calculator available to me it does not have all the features that the most expensive calculator does. Yes it is true that the cost is much lower, but if I buy a one pound calculator in a Poundshop or whatever in the UK it will not be able to calculate sines and cosines for me. And this is after thirty years of these devices being available. Yet you seem to assume that even the cheapest phones will have the bells and whistles that the best smartphones have. In your example, calculators, this has not happened. And I don't think it will happen, fully, with phones either.
The other assumption you make is that if these tremendous extra functions are available to ordinary people, then these ordinary people will use them.
We can't assume that at all. Most of the people I know who aren't geeky will probably carry on in their own sweet ungeeky way and won't care that their phone can do a million things. They are happy to use it to make phone calls and not much else. They can't be bothered to even browse the web on a phone.
And by the way, I can't see the smartphone replacing the PC or laptop, even with TV out. If I'm on a train with some spreadsheet work to do how will TV out help me?
Unregistered
Quote:
Originally Posted by krisse
Well, I assumed readers of AAS would know, but here's the definition I've always gone by: a smartphone can use native applications (programs that use the hardware directly, which Java doesn't). A smartphone also lets you switch between applications because it's multitasking.
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You can do true multitasking on some featurephones, and some (Nokias and SEs) will let you touch the hardware directly from J2ME.
krisse
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However, svdwal's point is still right -under your reasoning it doesn't make sense that everyone doesn't buy the cheapest car available to them, since they largely have similar functions. The fact is that people perceive differing performance levels, differing build qualities etc between the cars available and make choices accordingly.
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I'm not just CLAIMING that most people buy the cheapest phones. They do!
A few facts:
- If you look at the global mobile phone market, the average sale price of a phone is now less than 100 euros and dropping all the time. That's the price of the actual hardware ignoring all subsidies and taxes.
- Phones that cost less than 100 euros are the cheapest models
- Simultaneously, total phone sales are going up all the time.
The most likely explanation for these things happening together is that the majority of people are buying the cheapest phone possible. As cheaper models appear, they form the majority of new sales so the average sale price goes down.
It's worth remembering that car sales are to a totally different market compared to phone sales. Most phone sales are in developing countries, and a lot of people who use phones may be living on as little as a euro a day.
A poor family might conceivably save enough for a 40 euro phone, but even that may be a lot for them to pay, and any drop in the price would be greatly appreciated. A family like that simply wouldn't have the option of buying a more expensive phone.
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And by the way, I can't see the smartphone replacing the PC or laptop, even with TV out. If I'm on a train with some spreadsheet work to do how will TV out help me?
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I'm not saying the phone will 100% totally replace anything, people still buy pocket calculators for example.
But I think phones may replace PCs as the main device used for doing computing tasks.
Most people don't have access to a computer at all, though they probably do own a mobile phone or have access to one.
As noted above, most phone owners are in developing countries where standalone computer ownership is very low. Mobile phones may well be the only computing devices they're ever likely to have access to.
If even a budget phone can double as a full size computer, that's going to be the most likely route to computer ownership in the developing world, and they are the majority of the earth's population.
Even if global PC ownership stayed exactly the same as it is now, the phone could still overtake the PC as the main form of computer because of its adoption in the developing world.
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We can't assume that at all. Most of the people I know who aren't geeky will probably carry on in their own sweet ungeeky way and won't care that their phone can do a million things. They are happy to use it to make phone calls and not much else. They can't be bothered to even browse the web on a phone.
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I didn't say all people would use all smartphone functions. What I was trying to say was that all smartphone functions would soon be present in all budget phones.
The last part of my article was deliberately a series of questions instead of statements. I asked what might happen if most people did use a particular feature, but I didn't say it was certain.
The point of the last part of the article is that we won't know whether a feature has true mass appeal or revolutionary qualities until it is available on the cheapest phones.
If text messaging had only been available on high end phones it might never have succeeded, but because it was available on even the cheapest phones it became a hugely successful mobile technology. We had to see SMS on the cheapest phones in order to find out how useful it really was, and the same is true of all mobile technologies.
If GPS is on all the cheapest phones I suspect most people will use it, but we won't know for sure until it IS available on the cheapest phones. That's why it's so interesting to see technologies migrate to the lowest end models, it's the true test of their worth.
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You can do true multitasking on some featurephones, and some (Nokias and SEs) will let you touch the hardware directly from J2ME.
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I'm not a programmer so I'm not completely sure what you mean by "touching the hardware" but if an app accesses the hardware directly then it's a native app. If it's a mixture of direct access and JavaVM then maybe you could call it a semi-native app? I don't know.
But the definition of a smartphone I use is that a smartphone can run 100% native applications, just like a computer can. That's the point of the word "smartphone", a combination of a computer and a phone.
If a device can do true multitasking for all installed applications, and these installed applications can be 100% native, then that device is a smartphone. Of course smartphones are often marketed as feature phones (for example the Nokia 6120 Classic) but technically they are still smartphones.
Unregistered
Quote:
Originally Posted by krisse
I'm not a programmer so I'm not completely sure what you mean by "touching the hardware" but if an app accesses the hardware directly then it's a native app. If it's a mixture of direct access and JavaVM then maybe you could call it a semi-native app? I don't know.
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Perhaps you should define "touching the hardware" before you go off and make it a requirement. :)
J2ME can do anything a native app can do anymore.. SE and Nokia provide classes that allow midlets to directly touch the hardware to do things like run a midlet as a wallpaper or screensaver, or to touch the camera (which is actually part of J2ME proper), etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by krisse
If a device can do true multitasking for all installed applications, and these installed applications can be 100% native, then that device is a smartphone. Of course smartphones are often marketed as feature phones (for example the Nokia 6120 Classic) but technically they are still smartphones.
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Sony Ericssons of recent vintage can multitask as many midlets as you have memory for. You can load a page in Opera Mini, switch to yahoo to go or gmail or upload photos to flickr or whatever, and switch back to OM to view your page when it's done.
tomsky
Quote:
The most likely explanation for these things happening together is that the majority of people are buying the cheapest phone possible. As cheaper models appear, they form the majority of new sales so the average sale price goes down.
It's worth remembering that car sales are to a totally different market compared to phone sales. Most phone sales are in developing countries, and a lot of people who use phones may be living on as little as a euro a day.
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Perhaps a better analogy is to another technology product: the graphics card. The majority of graphics processors are produced by Intel (just like the majority of cameras are produced by Nokia!). There are high-end, cutting edge ones, but they are really very fringe compared to mass market grey boxes.
Anyway, all of the innovations in mobile phones have been driven by lag in development of electronic devices as they race ahead of production capacity. Phone cameras are the same modules as used to go into top-end standalone cameras 2-3 years ago. Tooling up and down for production takes time, and phone companies saw the opportunity to buy them all up. The same goes for 3G, wifi and especially GPS. What is next? I think vast amounts of general processing power and fully software radio will be the next steps. Not exciting, not glamorous, but providing the chance for all the gadgets that mobile execs go weak at the knees for and the public don't know they want: payment by phone, near-field comms, mesh networking, adaptive navigation through information sharing.
Of course, all of this is bringing forward The Last Smartphone...
Unregistered
Having recently moved from a Nokia 6300 to a 6120c, I can say that the gulf between s40 and s60 is enormous, for power users at least. S60 gives me the freedom to run native apps, which start much faster than J2ME apps, and to do it all with multitasking. But more than that -- I can replace the builtin functions to make my phone far faster to use. Oggplay gives me a far superior media player than anything Nokia's made for S40 or S60; JBak Taskman gives me the chance to launch applications quickly; Papyrus is a much better calendar app than the native S40 equivalent; Nokia's Conversation applet lets me read SMS messages the way I've always wanted to -- threaded; Python lets me script out anything that someone else hasn't already coded ... I could go on and on. Having used S60 for six weeks, I could never, ever go back.
In short, if want to use your phone as a PDA, an OS with an SDK will always be better than a closed, dumbed down OS, simply because of the wide range of native apps available. If you don't want a PDA and just want a phone that will make calls and play java games, S40 is a very pleasant platform to use. I would even argue that S40 is more user-friendly out-of-the-box. It just depends what you want, really.
AVR4000
If we look at the price tags smartphones has been cheaper and cheaper for every year. Now we can get a very decent smartphone for the same price as a Nokia 6610i (Java) some years ago (around 2003). Iīm talking about Nokia E51 and 6120 Classic.
What we are seeing is the fact advanced devices is becoming cheap to produce and that means we get two classes of devices in the future:
1. Basic phones, for example with S40 with the ability to use Internet, e-mail and so on. Devices aimed at "ordinary people" who wants a cheap device with good functions. Those devices will be placed in the range up to around 150.
2. Smartphones. Devices in the class above 150 will be smartphones and are aimed to different categories. The differences lies in the hardware features. People who buys a more expensive phone instead of a basic phone gets the flexibility of a modern platform. Those who want a "talk and SMS" device buys a basic one.
The concept "feature phones" are outdated if we talk about devices over around 200. A phone with advanced hardware features must run a modern OS to be able to handle those features fully. Feature phones in the future is the same as basic phones. Today if we talk Nokia the most "feature phones" are in fact smartphones with S60. Sadly itīs a different story if we talk about Sony Ericsson which hasnīt any competitors to the most S60 phones from Nokia. They are pushing the old fashioned "feature phone" concept too far.
Unregistered
Joar
Concerning Opera Mini Nokia might be doing just like is "predicted" in the article. Opera software made this announcment a few weeks ago:
"Oslo, Norway - July 9, 2008 - Opera Software today announced that it has
extended and broadened its contract with a leading original equipment
manufacturer (OEM) to develop and deliver Opera Mini, the world's most
popular browser for mobile phones. Under the terms of the new agreement,
the OEM will pre-install a fully Opera-branded version of Opera Mini on
a wide range of mass market mobile phones. While the contract primarily
covers the OEM's high volume, proprietary platform, it also opens up for
distribution on other platforms. The Opera Mini browser will be tightly
integrated with other applications on the phones and the OEM has the
option to make Opera Mini the default browser on selected models. "
The financial analysts apparently assume the OEM is Nokia. If this is true we can expect to see Opera Mini integrateted in low (lower mid end...) end phones from Nokia in the not too distant future - thus further lowering the gap between low / high-end Nokia phones...
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