Nokia smartphone bug hits US ambitions
Nokia said it will offer anyone who has bought Lumia 900, or will buy by 21 April, a $100 credit to their AT&T bill
Nokia has found a software bug in its Lumia 900 smartphone, its answer to Apple’s iPhone, and is effectively giving the model away until it is fixed, blunting its bid to turn around its fortunes in the United States.
Nokia’s first 4G phone, which it markets with the strapline “an amazingly fast way to connect”, can occasionally lose its data connection as a result of the bug, Nokia said.
Though still the world’s biggest volume maker of cellphones, Nokia lost the top spot in the lucrative smartphone market last year to Apple and Google, in part due to its weak performance in the United States, where its smartphones have slipped to less than a 1% market share.
The Lumia 900, which uses Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, is currently only available in the United States and is key to its comeback there.
“It’s like they stalled their engine when everybody is looking at them at the start of their race,” said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.
It is the third Nokia phone to run the Windows operating system since it ditched its own Symbian system last year, and only went on sale in the United States through AT&T on 8 April. It is due for a wider global launch this quarter. The model won several awards at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when it was launched in January.
Nokia said a software update to fix the problem, which was “a memory management issue” related to phone software, not to hardware, the network or the Windows operating system, would be available around 16 April.
It is offering anyone who has bought a Lumia 900 phone, or who buys one by 21 April, a $100 credit to their AT&T bill. The operator sells the phone for $99.99 with a two-year contract.
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