AT&T to sell Lumia 900 for $100, starting April 8

The first real test for Nokia in North America will come April 8, the day AT&T announces it will start selling the Lumia 900. First announced in January, the Lumia 900 is the Windows Phone that Nokia said it designed specifically for North America. At the time, Nokia also said it would price the phone aggressively. It is. With a two-year contract, the Lumia 900 will cost $100. That beats the price of many other LTE smart phones, which have been launching at $150 or $200. While Nokia previously said the phone would come in blue and black, AT&T said it will also sell a white model, although interested buyers will have to wait for that one. It goes on sale April 22. The black or blue phones can be preordered starting Friday. Nokia smartphone sales in North America have plummeted over the past years and now account for just a few percentage points in market share. "Consider Lumia 900 as Nokia's triumphant return to the U.S. smartphone market," Jonathan Church, director of product marketing management for AT&T, wrote in a blog post Monday. Industry observers will be closely watching sales of the Lumia 900 as an indication of whether Nokia's decision to drop Symbian, the smartphone operating system it used previously, in favor of Windows Phone will pay off. While Nokia started selling its first Windows Phone smartphones in the U.S. last year, they offered models that had been repurposed from other regions or based on designs that ran different operating systems. AT&T also said Monday that the HTC Titan II, also a Windows Phone, will go on sale April 8. It will cost $200 with a contract, has a 4.7-inch screen and a 16-megapixel camera. The Titan II and the Lumia 900 are the first Windows Phones that can operate on LTE networks.