Nokia’s 4th W7 Mango phone – 610 – appears @ MWC12

Rating: Aimed at younger, more skint users (€189)

Well, a few more details have emerged on the latest W7 Mango phone from Nokia – the 610. It is priced at €189 and is expected to begin shipping in Q2 2012. At its news conference at MWC 2012 in Barcelona, Nokia confirmed that this handset will be perfectly capable of running all of the company’s ‘signature’ apps such as Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport and Nokia Music. So how has Nokia been able to come out with a more affordable Lumia smartphone?

The answer is to decrease the amount of available memory the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) OS needs to 256 MB.

In order to deliver this, a new software release should be available from April from Microsoft that will provide the necessary enhanced capabilities for the Windows Phone 7.5 platform.

To highlight the fact that Nokia is targeting the youth market with this particular Lumia phone, the company points out that it will provide “instant access to social networks – bringing all mobile, email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn contacts into one place.”

Nokia also emphasised that the fact that the Lumia 610 will have full access to W7 Mango apps – all 65,000 of them. That compares to around 400,000 Android apps and 500,000 iOS apps.

Incidentally, we still can’t see the Skype for Windows Phone beta in the official Windows Phone Marketplace here even though Microsoft said it would become available today.