So CES is happening in Vegas this week (it kicked off Tuesday and runs through Friday) and my Twitter feed is an absolute wall of 4K TV photos and dudes holding up curved screens like they just found a magic mirror. I'm not going to pretend I have anything smart to say about a 84-inch television that costs more than my car. What actually caught my eye, buried under all the "look how big and thin" noise, was Nokia quietly announcing the Lumia 620 on Monday.
It's a small phone. Not small physically, small as in cheap and unglamorous. Windows Phone 8, a 3.8-inch screen, dual-core processor, and a price that Nokia's pitching around 249 euros before subsidies and taxes, which is basically half what the flagship 920 costs. It comes in this whole rainbow of swappable shells too, yellow and cyan and magenta, clearly aimed at people who are not me, a 32-year-old who still has a black case on everything he owns.
I've been half-following Windows Phone since the original Lumia 800 came out and every single time the conversation is the same: the OS is genuinely nice to use, the tiles thing actually works better than people give it credit for, and then you go looking for an app you use every day and it either doesn't exist or it's some third-party knockoff with four stars and a review that says "ads are annoying but it works I guess." That hasn't changed with the 620. Making the hardware cheap doesn't fix the fact that Instagram still isn't there and probably won't be for a while.
But I get why they're doing it this way. Nobody's cracking the US market by out-marketing Apple and Samsung on flagship phones, Nokia tried that with the 920 and it didn't exactly set the world on fire. Going cheap and colorful and aiming at Brazil, India, wherever, that's a longer and less flashy game, but it's the only one Nokia's got a shot at winning right now. I just hope it works, mostly because a two-horse race between iOS and Android forever sounds exhausting and bad for prices.
Meanwhile back at the actual show floor, the thing everyone's fixating on is Ultra HD, sorry, "4K," which apparently is what we're calling it now because the CEA decided a few months back that regular people needed a friendlier name than "3840x2160." Sony's got one of these sets that I saw quoted at something like $25,000 last year when they first showed it off, and from what's trickling out of Vegas this week that ballpark hasn't moved much. There is functionally zero 4K content to watch on these things. It's a television that costs as much as a down payment on a house, to display content that doesn't exist yet, so you can sit slightly too close to appreciate pixels you can't actually see from your couch. I love this industry.
The other thing I keep seeing mentioned in passing, almost as a footnote in bigger CES roundups, is some guy named Palmer Luckey walking around with a VR headset prototype strapped to peoples' heads. I haven't seen it myself obviously, just secondhand accounts, but a couple of people I trust online were weirdly enthusiastic about it in a way that felt different from the usual CES gadget hype. Worth keeping an eye on I guess, though I've been burned by VR promises since I was a kid staring at magazine ads for the Virtual Boy, so I'm not holding my breath.
Anyway. My actual phone is a two-year-old Android thing with a cracked corner and a battery that dies by 4pm if I look at it wrong, so take all of this with the appropriate grain of salt from someone not exactly rocking cutting edge hardware. I did spend a good twenty minutes last night pricing out whether it's cheaper to just buy a battery replacement kit off some sketchy import site than to actually upgrade, which tells you everything about where my head's actually at versus where the tech press's head is at this week.
Back to regular posting soon, I've got a backlog of half-finished drafts sitting in the queue that CES coverage keeps shoving further down the list.