Remember Viber? The mobile app offering free messaging and phone calls which was acquired by Japanese based e commerce company Rakuten two weeks back?
The company just announced that it has entered into an exclusive partnership with Nokia, providing Nokia X device users with instant Viber access.
“This strategic partnership will help us provide Nokia users with a great messaging and calling experience enhanced with photo sharing, stickers and other Viber functionality,” said Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber. “Working with Nokia is a natural step towards bringing Viber to all platforms including Windows Phone and S40, providing users with the complete Viber experience.”
“We believe that great innovation is enhanced through applications, therefore we made sure to offer many of the most popular applications on our new Nokia X family of devices,” said Bryan Biniak, Vice President, Developer Experiences at Nokia. “We worked closely with the Viber team and provided them with a clear path to get their app optimized for the Nokia X software platform. With Nokia X we are bringing Viber’s messaging and calling features to new markets and audiences.”
The partnership, together with Viber’s broad support for multiple platforms, is certain to help expand Viber’s presence in the Nokia market, bringing Viber functionality to Nokia users.
Viber currently has over 300 million users in 193 countries.
Nokia X on the other hand, is a newly released range of Android-powered smartphone, announced yesterday. Available from as cheap as $120 off-contract, Nokia X is a mid-range smartphone that’s oriented towards emerging markets in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It boasts a dual-SIM phone with a mediocre 4-inch 800×480 screen. There’s a 3-megapixel shooter on the back, an unspecified 1GHz Qualcomm SoC, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of internal storage (upgradable via Micro SD).
Nokia X series bears much resemblance to the newly launched Redmi in Singapore, which was sold out in 8 minutes when it was opened for pre-orders. Redmi, the first Singapore brand launched by China’s Xiaomi, is available at only S$169 without any contracts. The high powered budget Android smartphone sports a quad-core processor and a high definition 720p screen which has a pixel density close to that of Apple’s iPhone 5s. It runs on a quad-core MediaTek MT6589T 1.5GHz processor, a great bargain especially at only S$169.
It is unclear when Nokia X will be available in Singapore or any Asian country.
Increasingly, smartphones, especially Android powered, are getting cheaper and more accessible to the mass market.
Would be interesting to see how Apple will respond to these cheap but high powered Android devices.
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