Lumia 900 to launch March 18 for $99.99: leaked roadmap

We've said before that Nokia and Microsoft will struggle to get adoption of Windows Phone, what with the miniscule and declining market share of Microsoft smartphone platforms, and what with the huge lead that iPhone and Android have over WP. However, smart pricing and a compelling product might make an impact.

Microsoft's wallet for marketing and advertising certainly won't hurt.

But the information that was leaked on Wednesday about the AT&T Nokia Lumia 900, which will be an exclusive for the U.S No. 2 carrier, said that the Lumia 900 would launch on March 18. That's not a surprise, as it was expected to be released around that time. What is surprising, however, is the pricing.

The info, via a leaked roadmap, says that the Nokia Lumia 900 will sell for $99.99 on contract.

Given the specs, that is very aggressive pricing.

The Nokia Lumia 900 will come in cyan or black, have a curved, 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display with an 800 x 480 resolution, support LTE, carry an 8MP rear-facing camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and a 1.3MP front-facing camera. It will also have a 1.4GHz single-core (which is unusual these days of dual-core in everything) Qualcomm processor, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB of storage.

It's agressive pricing, but as we've said before, every app downloaded to a smartphone is one more reason to stay with that platform. The relative lack of apps vs. Android and iOS is a big negative.

It will be interesting to see if this low price point will attract any of the crowd of folks moving from feature phones to smartphones. It's still hard to see how it can attract people AWAY from Android or iOS.