Nokia Lumia 900 Reportedly Shipping March 18, Aggressively Priced at $100

It's not unusual for a high-end smartphone to command $300 on a subsidized contract, and there are certainly a great number of powerful devices priced at $200. Word on the Web is that Nokia's upcoming Lumia 900 smartphone will run just $100 at AT&T with a two-year service agreement, and if that's true, kudos are in order for both Nokia and AT&T for such an aggressive launch.

Boy Genius Report first broke news of the release date and $100 price tag after supposedly receiving a portion of AT&T's 2012 roadmap from what it considers a "trusted source." Those seem to be a dime a dozen on the Web these days, but its information was corroborated by CNet, which is reporting the same information, which it obtained from "sources with knowledge of the launch."

This could be a big deal for Microsoft and the Windows Phone platform. Nokia's Lumia 900 is arguably the first WP device to really get excited about. It has a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED screen, 16GB of internal storage, 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM, 4G LTE, and a first-class 8MP camera with Carl-freaking-Zeiss optics, all of which will come wrapped in Windows Phone 7.5. At only $100, and perhaps even less on sites like WireFly, this could be the shot-in-the-arm Microsoft needs to push its mobile OS further into the mainstream.

Image Credit: Nokia via CNet