• Reuters, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 11:16 AM

Stalling Nokia’s (and Microsoft’s) assault on Apple’s mobile rule, the company has found a software bug in its highly touted Lumia 900 smartphone. The bug causes the phone -- which Nokia is marketing as "an amazingly fast way to connect" -- to occasionally lose its data connection, Reuters reports. Nokia said a software update to fix the problem, which was "a memory management issue" related to the phone’s software -- not to hardware, the network or the Windows operating system -- would be available by mid-month.

In the interim, the phone-maker is offering any consumer who already bought the Lumia 900 phone -- or who buys one by April 21 -- a $100 credit to their AT&T bill. As Reuters notes, the operator sells the phone for $99.99 with a two-year contract, which means the defective devices are essentially being given away. Bigger picture, the issue is “blunting [Nokia’s] bid to turn around its fortunes in the United States,” Reuters writes.

Indeed, “the Lumia 900 … is key to [Nokia’s U.S.] comeback.” In the words of Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi: "It's like they stalled their engine when everybody is looking at them at the start of their race.” The Lumia 900 is the third Nokia phone to run the Windows operating system since scrapping its own Symbian system last year.

Read the whole story at Reuters »