Nokia targets youth with N78 mobile

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Nokia has launched its ‘N78’ mobile phone, a multimedia device that fuses music, navigation, photography and mobility. The product is targeted at the youth and the ‘tech savvy,’ “who are always on the internet.”

With low personal computer penetration (31 million PCs) and low broadband level, the Rs 19,990 Nokia N78 phone acts as a convergence device. “We are looking at the next generation of internet that has evolved towards social networking or Web 2.0 where people can participate and share their experiences through communities such as Facebook and Flickr,” Vineet Taneja, Head of Go to Market, Nokia India Pvt Ltd.
Over a fifth of India’s 260 million-plus mobile subscribers use their mobile phones to log into their favourite websites to have access to mobility. This makes mobile phones the single largest consumer durable in the country, he told newspersons.
“We are moving towards ‘context aware internet,’ where people need to know what is available in a place they visit,” he said. For example, if a person with N78 is visiting the Spencer’s Plaza in Chennai, information on various stalls should automatically be fed into the device. This makes it easy for the user to go to the right shop, he said.
Nokia will use the internet as a key medium to market the N78 devices among the youth.

This will be in addition to the retail network, he said without disclosing any projection on the unit sales.


An interesting feature of the N78 is the ‘location tagger’ application, which automatically tags location data to the picture, allowing users to save picture by date and by geographical coordinates.
The slimmest of N-series devices with a 2.4 inch screen, the Nokia N78 comes with high speed connectivity with wireless local area network and a 3.5G High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, a 3G mobile telephony communication protocol. Enabled with global position system, the phone also has a 3.2 mega pixel camera pre-loaded with Nokia maps of eight cities with points of interest across 52 categories, including bars, cafes, restaurants and hotels. The Indian market for GPS-enabled device is now at $22 million, with potential to reach $448 million in three to four years, a Nokia press release says.