Nokia's claim of 1 million pre-orders of Nokia X may not be true

Nokia is presently bragging on its Weibo account claiming that it has already reached over 1 million pre-orders for the Nokia X just fuor days after it allowed for advance ordering. Thing is, Nokia is also exaggerating without necessarily being dishonest.

Don’t misunderstand, the phone is an interesting build given its low price tag and hybrid nature described earlier. This, however, does not truly mean that it has received that amount of pre-orders.

There is marketing and then there is spinning the truth. While Nokia might want us to believe that there are 1 million people in China eagerly waiting for the Nokia X, the truth, as well as the numbers, might actually be a lot less than that.

On March 10, Nokia started a pre-order campaign on JD.com, one of China's leading online vendors. Within 4 days, over 1 million units were pre-ordered through the platform. Earlier today Nokia China made an announcement with updated numbers, pushing the total count to a whopping 3.8 million.

Well it seems that JD.com was serving the pre-order page and it didn’t require users to enter any payment information while hitting the button. Further, customers were allowed to hit the pre-order button once for each of the four colours on offer – meaning that there could be less than a million Chinese customers who hit the button.

Beyond that JD.com was running a contest wherein it is offering a free Nokia X to one lucky winner out of all those who pre-ordered the device, which may have played a role in the high number of pre-orders.

Nokia X will be available in China on March 24, exclusively to pre-ordered users first. As an entry-level device, it's officially priced at 699 RMB (113 USD), yet JD is now offering it at 599 RMB (97 USD).