Nokia Lumia 710 Now Cheaper Than Cheap

Nokia’s Lumia 710 hasn’t even been at market a week, and already retailers are dropping its price — and drastically, too.

The device — currently the only Nokia Windows Phone available in the U.S. — had been selling for $49.99 with a two-year contract. But now Costco has dropped that price to a penny, with a qualifying two-year contract from T-Mobile USA. And rival Wal-Mart, not to be outdone, has reduced it to free, with the same contract.

Steep discounts like these are not uncommon at either store, even for new devices. That said, entry-level smartphone pricing doesn’t get much better than that. As a Nokia spokesperson told Dow Jones, “It certainly looks like an excellent deal for consumers.”

The Lumia 710 is being targeted at the market’s lower end, and it will be interesting to see how it fares, now that it’s such an easy buy. If it does well, it could begin to build up the much-diminished Nokia brand in the States, ahead of the launch of the high-end Lumia 900, which is headed to AT&T’s 4G LTE network.