Remembering the Affordable Flagship (Premium)

I’ll be evaluating the recently-announced Google Pixel 3a XL this week. But let’s see. A mid-range smartphone with a high-end camera that’s marketed as an affordable alternative to expensive smartphone flagships. Where have I heard that one before? Ah yes. The Nokia Lumia 830. Which you’ll recall was marketed the “affordable flagship.”

Well, it wasn’t that affordable, not when compared to the actual flagships of the day. And it was no flagship, not with its middling, mid-range specifications. And, honestly, even the camera wasn’t that great, a major downer for this Lumia fan.

But when I see how Google is marketing its new mid-range Pixels, the 3a and 3a XL, I immediately think back to the Lumia 830 and its sibling, the Lumia 735. Each was born of the same market share desperation. Each sought to find a cheap way out of a problem that, frankly, was better solved by not cutting corners. And the Lumias, at least, underestimated the market need for truly affordable flagships that could rival the best the competition had to offer; the jury is still out on the Pixel 3a/3a XL.

I’ve written about the new Pixels separately. Here, let’s look back at the Lumia 830 and examine a few parallels with Google’s latest non-flagship handsets as we go.

As someone who has always been attracted to what I think of as “good enough” technology, I was immediately interested in the Lumia 830 when I first saw it in August 2014. Nokia’s high-end Lumias of the previous year---the Lumia 1020, 1520, and 930/Icon---were all excellent, but they had done nothing to slow down iPhone or Android, despite numerous technological advantages, especially in photography. And the only truly-successful Lumia of that era, the lowly Lumia 520, was popular mostly because of its low-ball pricing.

So, Nokia, hemorrhaging cash, and busy secretly selling the remains of its carcass to Microsoft, tried to a new strategy aimed at gaining market share volume: It would pretty much only release inexpensive phones. Devices like the Lumia 525, 530, 630, 635, ranged from terrible to decent but all were cheap to acquire and were aimed at expanding on the 520’s success. To tackle the high-end of the market, however, Nokia couldn’t afford high-end parts. So, it released a set of mid-market smartphones, the Lumia 830 and 735, which it claimed could compete with high-end iPhones and Android handsets.

And while they were decent handsets, they in no way lived up to the reputation of Nokia’s true flagships, let alone the best that Apple and Android had to offer.

There were familial resemblances to past flagships; the 830’s circular rear camera surround looked like the amazing Lumia 1020 camera, and Nokia called it PureView, but it was a fake.

“[The 830’s camera is] less powerful than the camera in the Lumia 1020, of course—what isn't?—but it's also not quite up to spec with the cameras found in the Lumia 1520/Icon/930 handsets,” I note...