Nokia makes a brave try

[Plane]

Check out the top end price.

Nokia Corp., battered by the popularity of smartphones, is abandoning the Japanese market, after a brief foray with luxury cell phones costing as much as 20 million yen ($250,000).

The Finnish handset maker is closing by the end of July its last store selling high-end Vertu cell phones in Ginza. Previously, it had four such stores in Japan, according to Tomoko Morinari of Sunny Side Up, a Tokyo public relations company that has Nokia as its client.

She declined to say when the decision to leave Japan was made or how many Vertu phones Nokia had sold in Japan.

Vertu said in a statement Wednesday that it was "withdrawing from the Japanese market" to better focus on priority businesses. It thanked business partners, said its Tokyo office will fold by the end of this year, but promised to continue to do work with Japanese craftsmen in its business elsewhere.

Nokia phones have never been that popular in Japan, where the iPhone from Apple Inc. is hugely popular in addition to offerings from Japanese electronics makers such as Sharp Corp.

http://www.ecnmag.com/News/2011/07/Nokia-abandons-Japan-market/?et_cid=1778700&et_rid=45566411&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ecnmag.com%2fNews%2f2011%2f07%2fNokia-abandons-Japan-market%2f

I wonder what the market strategy was for $250,000 a copy, where would you advertise that?What kinda app could it include?

Were they just hoping to sell a coupple?

[Xavier_Onassis]

A $250,000 phone is still a phone.  It would not be worth that unless it combined a transporter, phaser, replicator, communicator and medical tricorder for that price.