Nokia Starts Pre-Orders in China for N9, Virtual Elbowing Begins

Nokia's pre-orders page for China, which went live this morning.

Form an orderly virtual queue… No pushing… Nokia has just announced on its two official Weibo accounts that it is starting to take pre-orders in China for the sleek, Meego-powered N9 smartphone.

Pretty much the same message went out to its Sina and Tencent Weibo followers this morning – which total about 850,000 fans – saying, in my rough translation:

From September 16 to October 14, Nokia fans can log into Nokia’s official website, or go to an authorized Nokia vendor, and pre-order an N9. You can choose three colours: black, magenta, or blue. At the same time, Nokia will draw 100 names from the reservation list to win one of 100 N9s as a prize.

The pre-order page is here. It’s a bit odd to be cannibalizing 100 very willing customers by gifting some of them free phones – but I guess Nokia has actually thought all this through.

Nokia will have a hard time in beating the Android-powered Xiaomi phone in a battle of the hyped pre-order rush. Just last week 300,000 Chinese netizens surged to book-up the entire first batch of 1.5GHz dual-core phones in just 34 hours. It’d be uncharitable of me to point out that the Xiaomi phone is not only cheaper and more powerful than the N9, but also has a much larger catalog of Android games at its disposal. Oh, wait, I just said it already. The N9 is 4,888 RMB, versus the Xiaomi M1’s 1,999 price tag.

However, the N9 does have some winning features, such as NFC support, which is burgeoning as a means of payment, as well as social check-ins. Nokia is pushing NFC in Asia with its recent 600, 700, and 701 model phones, for which it has teamed-up with Chinese LBS, Jiepang.

If you want to eyeball the N9’s Meego OS running in Chinese, check out this Engadget China hands-on from earlier this summer for plenty of photos.