I have to say I'm becoming more and more intrigued by WP7. I like their development package (now merged with XNA) and have been toying with doing some app development for personal use.
But, when do we see the first Nokia WP7 hardware? Do we have any tentative dates yet?
I read early 2012 but there are lots of different time lines going around. There are plenty of great wp7 phones out right now though. I have the Focus and it has the highest customer satisfaction rate of any phone on the market right now. It's an awesome phone.
Actually you got one of the few decent ones. Most have a small screen or small battery or are bulky.
I'll be happy when I can get something with a big screen, large capacity battery (e.g. 1600 mah or larger) in a SLIM design. Frankly I'd love something with the screen, battery, and depth specs of a high end Android phone - wouldn't mind the ability to turn on 4G for when I tether either. They didn't need to release WP7 on crap hardware the first time around. They could have just said you can turn on 4G when mango is released.
Nokia has a nice Power Point presentation, but it's missing one slide. The one that explains why me, or anyone else, is going to buy phones running their software vs Android or iOS.
Who cares? They're trying to sell advanced *connected* *mobile devices*.
You want to edit a Word or a Powerpoint document on that? That didn't roll too well back in the Palm days but now it's even more irrelevant.
With their cloud services Microsoft will have to be very careful to provide other OS support because otherwise they will take a huge hit themselves; they're simply not in a position to demand OSes in this particular case and sensitive markets will not pay for expensive upgrades if they have to take the risk and pay the price to switch many other systems at the same time. At the moment Outlook for example works just fine with iOS. If they wanted to loose a lot of their well paid for Skype customer base as quickly as possible they'd better drop other OS support right away. ;)
WP7 just has no real relevance in this world yet and they'll have to work very hard to achieve some -- if it will be possible at all...
Nice Office apps and integration with Sharepoint is a bad thing?? Not sure why people take these things so personally. Light editing of Office documents on your phone is a handy feature. You can't be at a computer 24/7. Windows Phone is a good platform. Don't understand the hostility here. Read the user reviews on Amazon, Sprint or Verizon.
I deepliy dislike Elop and if M$ does end up buing Nokia we know what his job was as CEO. The guy decided to go for the riskiest option,new OS without market share that lacks many things made by a very slow giant (that's also afraid to innovate) and then commited suicide by actually announcing it before having devices ready.Now Nokia is falling a lot faster than it would have if the deal was not made public and if WP fails they got no back up plan since they will lack the resources to restart developing Symbuian and MeeGo. It would be very hard to do things worse than he did.
@prev comments :the first WP device(s) should show up in Q4 check Nokia's latest press releases (the one about cutting outlook published a few days ago).
@ Brian Klug "which possibly puts to rest the rumor that Nokia will be using ST-E SoCs in its WP7 devices " I'm not gona go looking for links to provide proof but they should be using ST-E in a second wave of devices in Q1-Q2 next year,while the first devices should be on Qualcomm.
"I'm not gona go looking for links to provide proof but they should be using ST-E in a second wave of devices in Q1-Q2 next year,while the first devices should be on Qualcomm."
That's actually an interesting idea, and perhaps after Mango the WP7 team will afford Nokia some liberty to move onto a different SoC vendor, I'd definitely buy a rumor that they'll start with Snapdragon and move to ST-E later over them launching with ST-E. Very interesting.
So all 1.1-1.2 billion users of Windows have zero credibility?! You must not walk out your front door for fear that you will be screwed over by all the unscrupulous folks that surround you.
What OS do you think people use exactly? OS X? There's only about 50-54 million people using OS X. So what OS exactly would you consider credible?
So it looks like he could not even be there in person to talk up his platform? Impressive Nokia.....
I also enjoyed him giving criticism to Android as if it will soon be all locked up......how much hardware diversity is there on WP7 right now? Oh ya, NONE
To clarify something, they will most likely use more than one vendor going forward,it makes little sense to use just one so most likely they'll use the 2 already mentioned+ maybe others. I remember Nvidia saying at some point that as Nokia goes Windows there is a natural intersection point,but they can't say when that will be. Anyway ST-E announced some exciting 32nm SoC so i'm looking forward to see how those perform.
Actually Nokia did just use one. ST, moving to ST-E (for Maemo and Symbian devices). ST-E already was in the process providing BSP and support for MeeGo. Basically they screwed their hardware partners too. And now it does indeed look like they will be Qualcomm exclusive, otherwise their first device would have been ST-Es platform which will also get WP support. ST-E was indeed their exclusive future supplier before. Basically Elop doesn't seem to care for the company or industry at all. Certainly the move weren't popular at Nokia and with all the thousands and soon tens of thousands that will have to go from the company that did run a profit until he stepped in.
So Microsoft decides to go in late into this game with an inferior system which was already adopted by other vendors (with little success) aims at one of the smaller ecosystems (because the others are either "closed" or "too crowded") while abandoning their previous small ecosystem but open strategy (MeeGo) and plan to expand the system to actually catch up with the huge advantage iOS, Android and heck even WebOS already have?
Sorry Finland too, but Elop and Microsoft just destroyed Nokia and every single engineering and manufacturing job along with it. It's clearly not a technical reason to drop Symbian/Qt/MeeGo. But they manage to destroy themselves and all their credibility by doing so.
WP7 can never sell the 110 million or so devices that Symbian sold last year, it can never replace Nokia's dumphone lineup. It can never do anything except not earn them any money at all. It's a falls choice that is portrayed here. You could say it's simply to rob Nokia of it's billions of investment in Navteq and it's efforts creating Ovi Maps, because that's the only thing Microsoft really gets from it.
Elop has even managed to destroy Nokia on the hardware side ruining all their partnerships for next gen platforms. Downsizing a company to make it take losses rather then the other way around is just plain stupid.
Nokia could take some qualcomm chips and ship some Mango-phones but they will never sell more then 20 million of them so what is really the point at all. Common it's a great platform ones they finish Mango and gets everything rolling but it's not a mass platform. It's simply wrong for a company like Nokia. Sorry but Elop isn't ready for anything. The vision for three platforms with Microsoft being the largest on smart phones is just delusion. Nokia needed the developers to continue, their UI to be finished so they can get along with a new (updated) branding of themselves and the new platforms on ST-E to be released, not kill themselves. What will happened with the excess capacity of 100 - 200 million devices that will build up now? Will you just destroy those billions in investment? Looks like it. Nokia needed Symbian and MeeGo jointly running their Qt environment, that was an platform that could reach several hundred millions devices and stuff like Ovi maps did distinguish themselves from the competition. It's not a matter of old and new, the legacy software framework from the S60 days was already legacy on Symbian with new apps being built in new tools and new framework. The kernel it self is certainly more flexible then Microsoft have shown WP to be any how, and it's a fairly slim nanokernel realtime OS. Certainly not a lot of legacy to be dealt with and the OS that was driving the Qt/QtMobility development. Certainly an interesting platform that together with MeeGo could have run on devices from 60 Euro to 600 Euro. Nokia certainly did not look anything like the failed companies of Motorola or Sony-Ericsson with UIQ and Motomagx. It was moving along and was profitable. The mobile wing held their network business afloat actually. But they rapidly replaced S40 devices with Symbian and now they have no platform to fill the void, their only option is to massively downsize the company to something like 1/3 of what it was. Tablets and other stuff that won't sell won't help them.
It is fascinating to see any thread on the subject of Nokia and MS here at Anandtech or indeed any of the other popular tech-sites. There is always, without exception, a group of "contributors" who log on to tell all the rest of us, at length, how this partnership is certain to be an unmitigated disaster. The degree of malevolence we often see in such postings is so obvious that it is a wonder that these people think they are going to convince anyone when it is very clear that they are talking about want they *want* to happen, not what they genuinely believe *will* happen. Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with anyone who says that Nokia have taken a big gamble, anyone who claims that they "know" what the likely result will be is just serving up a load of bs. Whilst it could certainly go horribly wrong for the Finns it *could* go right for them. There is a genuine business logic to the alliance - though it of course remains to be seen whether it actually will work. I wish them well, (I run a Desire Z and am very pleased with it and have no immediate ambitions to rush out and buy a "Nokiasoft" when they become available) - it is in all our interests regardless of which phone we choose to buy that there is as much diversity and competition in the marketplace as possible.
Well it's still a choice not a gamble a choice to dismantle most of the business.
WP simply can't sell 100 million Nokia devices next year and everything below it means big changes for Nokia. Not just for the software developers but for the engineers and technicians and all who work on the hardware and manufacturing and related parts of the company. It's simply set up not to be a success. Not in that regard at least. For Microsoft a success is 20-30 million devices under next year though. So you do have to separate those things. And the products will still be great in of it self even if nobody can really live on them from the handset makers perspective. Microsoft gains Nokia's map and navigation technology but that is certainly not paid for in full by Microsoft to begin with so how would that help the other part of the partnership. Nokia still could be alive as a brand, but not much more then that after a few years of this. It's a massive change to the industry. Microsoft's other competitors will be the ones contributing most from it too. Microsoft doesn't take over the market by just removing some of the competition. Which they of course know.
Change in the business is however good, but this time it's clear it's about downsizing a company to save it from seizing to exist thanks to the change in strategy before they failed with their own tech. It also means any mobile OS development outside of North America is dead. So you can't be all positive about them going exclusive and revamping their previous profitable business, which wasn't stagnant, it's simply a lie if you insinuate that it will be more successful from the companies perspective with selling a few million WP devices. The company will have a much smaller turnover, have to fire the majority of it's employees and have to give up and write off billions of investments in manufacturing facilities and so on. It could give some to the shareholders eventually (it's undervalued today so the stock price might suit the new company). But it's hardly the shareholders choice, and that would be years off and with years of losses before. Those investments simply wont go up in smoke with no consequences. It's simply not a magic move that will make the shareholders a lot of money.
It will be a though job to make the New Nokia profitable and it will be a totally different company doing totally different things. And it means Nokia will shrink and soon be surpassed by Samsung as worlds largest terminal manufacturer. You might be fine with all that, and Nokia simply won't go under and disappear but it will be something different. Might need even bigger restructure then even I could imagine. And it's challenges will be more then the success of Windows Phone. Nokia will never be making 40 Billion EUR on Windows Phone they will not even be ever making 10 Billion EUR. Downsizing is simply not about that it could go horrible wrong it's a god damn reality if they are successful. That is not the disaster that is the success. The success would be making a company with a lot less employees, about zero software developers in Finland and so on. But the complete failure a bankruptcy of Nokia would probably be better for the finns. Simply downsizing and restructuring means none of the assets will be left. Nokia as a brand particularly in the states might be a success, but it would be the same way Motorola is a success. Not by being a strong company which can steer development and innovate. It's simply boring just seeing empty companies that's nothing but a brand. If you dead set on seeing a few million high quality WP devices in the states I could see the draw for that though. But in Europe we don't want the be like Motorola or Sony-Ericsson really. SE is just seen as a big pain. The future outlook does indeed not look great when most of the market is gone from a company, and for certain that's what Nokia is accomplishing by fudding Symbian, MeeGo and so on. We have already seen this from other companies. It's not what the critics of the way the deal was handled accomplish. You can wish all you want but Elop has already stated that he will in fact restructure the company and let many many more go.
the nokia stuff sounds good, but i wonder how long it's going to take to actually see a phone? if they come out with one of those cool sliders with the hardware keyboard, but with a decent screen and WP7, that'll be a solid phone.
What gets me about this speech is that HTC is promoting HTC Sense to steer people towards their UI as being more than just a skin but additional layers of programming API that can be used to enhance software.
This is all great but it means developers would have to forget general Android compatibility and just stick with HTC Dev API compatibility.
Fragmentation is bad and this will introduce more applications that don't work or look right on other Android devices.
It's already bad today that many apps that I download have to be deleted and refunded because they don't work properly and there's no compatibility spec on Android market.
I own a Nokia N95 8GB for a few years in Europe. This was my 1st and will be my last Nokia experience, waiting for HTC EVO 3D to be available here to move to Androïd. I will never forgive Nokia not making their N95 8GB Flagship work "basically" in that many years, despite multiple firmwares up-dates that solved nothing, and erased all my copy-protection music keys each time, like badly educated rippers. Key point is I lost 4 points on my driving licence because of Nokia voice recognition never worked. I had a Sony Ericsson V800 3G phone before, was Symbian too, and voice recognition was perfectly working. Was basic, you could record a voice stream for every phone number recorded for every contact in your list, and it could just recognize when you say same stream again, with 99% accurancy. So OS was not the issue, iddue was Nokia implementation of that OS. On N95 8GB, no way to record any stream, phone is supposed to be so intelligent that it does not need needs that, as he could recognize anything on the fly....but in fact recognizes NOTHING with me. None of my familly names, nothing not even "home" put in English. Never mind you try the voice recognition on the phone or on the hands free car devices, this device could not get anything. And since that was never corrected in so many years, only explanation I have is that Nokia Execs never used their own Smartphones themselves. How could they have tolerated that otherwise ? 2nd key point was that while Lotus Notes support had been marketed by Nokia, when that phone was announced, they did not follow up with that, and when Notes moved to V8 everything stopped working. No calendar, no contacts replication any more = Death. And since that I could not find a way to reconnect that with all new SW discussed in forums. Not only I think that Nokia could not developpe an OS themselves, but they could not even implement a good one on thier "best hardware" handsets. Not sure we should expect any progress with MW OS implementation. Since the best HW is useless without a good SW implementation, they will never count me a customer again, till they may solve that.
Well, so far WP7 is a good OS and with the Mango update it will be on par with iOS and Android. Coupled with Nokia's great hardware it should be an excellent option.
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Ikefu - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
I have to say I'm becoming more and more intrigued by WP7. I like their development package (now merged with XNA) and have been toying with doing some app development for personal use.But, when do we see the first Nokia WP7 hardware? Do we have any tentative dates yet?
TIGGAH - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
I read early 2012 but there are lots of different time lines going around. There are plenty of great wp7 phones out right now though. I have the Focus and it has the highest customer satisfaction rate of any phone on the market right now. It's an awesome phone.bk212 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Elop has said multiple times that they are confident first WP7 devices in 2011 Q4. He carries a prototype WP7 with him.boe - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Actually you got one of the few decent ones. Most have a small screen or small battery or are bulky.I'll be happy when I can get something with a big screen, large capacity battery (e.g. 1600 mah or larger) in a SLIM design. Frankly I'd love something with the screen, battery, and depth specs of a high end Android phone - wouldn't mind the ability to turn on 4G for when I tether either. They didn't need to release WP7 on crap hardware the first time around. They could have just said you can turn on 4G when mango is released.
Xenon14 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Nokia has a nice Power Point presentation, but it's missing one slide. The one that explains why me, or anyone else, is going to buy phones running their software vs Android or iOS.bk212 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Office, One Note, Office 365 and Skydrive, Outlook with Lync and SkypeDaniel Egger - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Who cares? They're trying to sell advanced *connected* *mobile devices*.You want to edit a Word or a Powerpoint document on that? That didn't roll too well back in the Palm days but now it's even more irrelevant.
With their cloud services Microsoft will have to be very careful to provide other OS support because otherwise they will take a huge hit themselves; they're simply not in a position to demand OSes in this particular case and sensitive markets will not pay for expensive upgrades if they have to take the risk and pay the price to switch many other systems at the same time. At the moment Outlook for example works just fine with iOS. If they wanted to loose a lot of their well paid for Skype customer base as quickly as possible they'd better drop other OS support right away. ;)
WP7 just has no real relevance in this world yet and they'll have to work very hard to achieve some -- if it will be possible at all...
bk212 - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Nice Office apps and integration with Sharepoint is a bad thing??Not sure why people take these things so personally. Light editing of Office documents on your phone is a handy feature. You can't be at a computer 24/7.
Windows Phone is a good platform. Don't understand the hostility here. Read the user reviews on Amazon, Sprint or Verizon.
jjj - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
I deepliy dislike Elop and if M$ does end up buing Nokia we know what his job was as CEO.The guy decided to go for the riskiest option,new OS without market share that lacks many things made by a very slow giant (that's also afraid to innovate) and then commited suicide by actually announcing it before having devices ready.Now Nokia is falling a lot faster than it would have if the deal was not made public and if WP fails they got no back up plan since they will lack the resources to restart developing Symbuian and MeeGo.
It would be very hard to do things worse than he did.
@prev comments :the first WP device(s) should show up in Q4 check Nokia's latest press releases (the one about cutting outlook published a few days ago).
@ Brian Klug "which possibly puts to rest the rumor that Nokia will be using ST-E SoCs in its WP7 devices " I'm not gona go looking for links to provide proof but they should be using ST-E in a second wave of devices in Q1-Q2 next year,while the first devices should be on Qualcomm.
Brian Klug - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
"I'm not gona go looking for links to provide proof but they should be using ST-E in a second wave of devices in Q1-Q2 next year,while the first devices should be on Qualcomm."That's actually an interesting idea, and perhaps after Mango the WP7 team will afford Nokia some liberty to move onto a different SoC vendor, I'd definitely buy a rumor that they'll start with Snapdragon and move to ST-E later over them launching with ST-E. Very interesting.
-Brian
Solidstate89 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Anyone who still uses "M$" in this day and age loses absolutely all credibility.Kenuzara - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - link
So all 1.1-1.2 billion users of Windows have zero credibility?! You must not walk out your front door for fear that you will be screwed over by all the unscrupulous folks that surround you.What OS do you think people use exactly? OS X? There's only about 50-54 million people using OS X. So what OS exactly would you consider credible?
Gondorff - Thursday, June 9, 2011 - link
Reread his post and don't miss the " " this time :)scook9 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
So it looks like he could not even be there in person to talk up his platform? Impressive Nokia.....I also enjoyed him giving criticism to Android as if it will soon be all locked up......how much hardware diversity is there on WP7 right now? Oh ya, NONE
bk212 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Elop was at D9 conference in California which was more important.Solidstate89 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
I don't really believe it'll be entirely locked up, but to be fair they have to release the source code for Honeycomb.Brian Klug - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
Oh no, he was here at Uplinq today. Yesterday he was up at D9, but today he came down here and said very similar things.-Brian
jjj - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
To clarify something, they will most likely use more than one vendor going forward,it makes little sense to use just one so most likely they'll use the 2 already mentioned+ maybe others.I remember Nvidia saying at some point that as Nokia goes Windows there is a natural intersection point,but they can't say when that will be.
Anyway ST-E announced some exciting 32nm SoC so i'm looking forward to see how those perform.
Penti - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Actually Nokia did just use one. ST, moving to ST-E (for Maemo and Symbian devices). ST-E already was in the process providing BSP and support for MeeGo. Basically they screwed their hardware partners too. And now it does indeed look like they will be Qualcomm exclusive, otherwise their first device would have been ST-Es platform which will also get WP support. ST-E was indeed their exclusive future supplier before. Basically Elop doesn't seem to care for the company or industry at all. Certainly the move weren't popular at Nokia and with all the thousands and soon tens of thousands that will have to go from the company that did run a profit until he stepped in.Daniel Egger - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
So Microsoft decides to go in late into this game with an inferior system which was already adopted by other vendors (with little success) aims at one of the smaller ecosystems (because the others are either "closed" or "too crowded") while abandoning their previous small ecosystem but open strategy (MeeGo) and plan to expand the system to actually catch up with the huge advantage iOS, Android and heck even WebOS already have?Now if that's not a sound plan...
R3MF - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
this WP7 business is lovely i'm sure, but i want one thing from Nokia and that is a Meego phone.Penti - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Sorry Finland too, but Elop and Microsoft just destroyed Nokia and every single engineering and manufacturing job along with it. It's clearly not a technical reason to drop Symbian/Qt/MeeGo. But they manage to destroy themselves and all their credibility by doing so.WP7 can never sell the 110 million or so devices that Symbian sold last year, it can never replace Nokia's dumphone lineup. It can never do anything except not earn them any money at all. It's a falls choice that is portrayed here. You could say it's simply to rob Nokia of it's billions of investment in Navteq and it's efforts creating Ovi Maps, because that's the only thing Microsoft really gets from it.
Elop has even managed to destroy Nokia on the hardware side ruining all their partnerships for next gen platforms. Downsizing a company to make it take losses rather then the other way around is just plain stupid.
Nokia could take some qualcomm chips and ship some Mango-phones but they will never sell more then 20 million of them so what is really the point at all. Common it's a great platform ones they finish Mango and gets everything rolling but it's not a mass platform. It's simply wrong for a company like Nokia. Sorry but Elop isn't ready for anything. The vision for three platforms with Microsoft being the largest on smart phones is just delusion. Nokia needed the developers to continue, their UI to be finished so they can get along with a new (updated) branding of themselves and the new platforms on ST-E to be released, not kill themselves. What will happened with the excess capacity of 100 - 200 million devices that will build up now? Will you just destroy those billions in investment? Looks like it. Nokia needed Symbian and MeeGo jointly running their Qt environment, that was an platform that could reach several hundred millions devices and stuff like Ovi maps did distinguish themselves from the competition. It's not a matter of old and new, the legacy software framework from the S60 days was already legacy on Symbian with new apps being built in new tools and new framework. The kernel it self is certainly more flexible then Microsoft have shown WP to be any how, and it's a fairly slim nanokernel realtime OS. Certainly not a lot of legacy to be dealt with and the OS that was driving the Qt/QtMobility development. Certainly an interesting platform that together with MeeGo could have run on devices from 60 Euro to 600 Euro. Nokia certainly did not look anything like the failed companies of Motorola or Sony-Ericsson with UIQ and Motomagx. It was moving along and was profitable. The mobile wing held their network business afloat actually. But they rapidly replaced S40 devices with Symbian and now they have no platform to fill the void, their only option is to massively downsize the company to something like 1/3 of what it was. Tablets and other stuff that won't sell won't help them.
FrederickL - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
It is fascinating to see any thread on the subject of Nokia and MS here at Anandtech or indeed any of the other popular tech-sites. There is always, without exception, a group of "contributors" who log on to tell all the rest of us, at length, how this partnership is certain to be an unmitigated disaster. The degree of malevolence we often see in such postings is so obvious that it is a wonder that these people think they are going to convince anyone when it is very clear that they are talking about want they *want* to happen, not what they genuinely believe *will* happen. Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with anyone who says that Nokia have taken a big gamble, anyone who claims that they "know" what the likely result will be is just serving up a load of bs. Whilst it could certainly go horribly wrong for the Finns it *could* go right for them. There is a genuine business logic to the alliance - though it of course remains to be seen whether it actually will work. I wish them well, (I run a Desire Z and am very pleased with it and have no immediate ambitions to rush out and buy a "Nokiasoft" when they become available) - it is in all our interests regardless of which phone we choose to buy that there is as much diversity and competition in the marketplace as possible.
jamyryals - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
I enjoyed this well reasoned comment without all the FUD.Penti - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Well it's still a choice not a gamble a choice to dismantle most of the business.WP simply can't sell 100 million Nokia devices next year and everything below it means big changes for Nokia. Not just for the software developers but for the engineers and technicians and all who work on the hardware and manufacturing and related parts of the company. It's simply set up not to be a success. Not in that regard at least. For Microsoft a success is 20-30 million devices under next year though. So you do have to separate those things. And the products will still be great in of it self even if nobody can really live on them from the handset makers perspective. Microsoft gains Nokia's map and navigation technology but that is certainly not paid for in full by Microsoft to begin with so how would that help the other part of the partnership. Nokia still could be alive as a brand, but not much more then that after a few years of this. It's a massive change to the industry. Microsoft's other competitors will be the ones contributing most from it too. Microsoft doesn't take over the market by just removing some of the competition. Which they of course know.
Change in the business is however good, but this time it's clear it's about downsizing a company to save it from seizing to exist thanks to the change in strategy before they failed with their own tech. It also means any mobile OS development outside of North America is dead. So you can't be all positive about them going exclusive and revamping their previous profitable business, which wasn't stagnant, it's simply a lie if you insinuate that it will be more successful from the companies perspective with selling a few million WP devices. The company will have a much smaller turnover, have to fire the majority of it's employees and have to give up and write off billions of investments in manufacturing facilities and so on. It could give some to the shareholders eventually (it's undervalued today so the stock price might suit the new company). But it's hardly the shareholders choice, and that would be years off and with years of losses before. Those investments simply wont go up in smoke with no consequences. It's simply not a magic move that will make the shareholders a lot of money.
It will be a though job to make the New Nokia profitable and it will be a totally different company doing totally different things. And it means Nokia will shrink and soon be surpassed by Samsung as worlds largest terminal manufacturer. You might be fine with all that, and Nokia simply won't go under and disappear but it will be something different. Might need even bigger restructure then even I could imagine. And it's challenges will be more then the success of Windows Phone. Nokia will never be making 40 Billion EUR on Windows Phone they will not even be ever making 10 Billion EUR. Downsizing is simply not about that it could go horrible wrong it's a god damn reality if they are successful. That is not the disaster that is the success. The success would be making a company with a lot less employees, about zero software developers in Finland and so on. But the complete failure a bankruptcy of Nokia would probably be better for the finns. Simply downsizing and restructuring means none of the assets will be left. Nokia as a brand particularly in the states might be a success, but it would be the same way Motorola is a success. Not by being a strong company which can steer development and innovate. It's simply boring just seeing empty companies that's nothing but a brand. If you dead set on seeing a few million high quality WP devices in the states I could see the draw for that though. But in Europe we don't want the be like Motorola or Sony-Ericsson really. SE is just seen as a big pain. The future outlook does indeed not look great when most of the market is gone from a company, and for certain that's what Nokia is accomplishing by fudding Symbian, MeeGo and so on. We have already seen this from other companies. It's not what the critics of the way the deal was handled accomplish. You can wish all you want but Elop has already stated that he will in fact restructure the company and let many many more go.
Penti - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Sorry for long post.softdrinkviking - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
i hope HTC can see sense for what it really is.the nokia stuff sounds good, but i wonder how long it's going to take to actually see a phone? if they come out with one of those cool sliders with the hardware keyboard, but with a decent screen and WP7, that'll be a solid phone.
vision33r - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
What gets me about this speech is that HTC is promoting HTC Sense to steer people towards their UI as being more than just a skin but additional layers of programming API that can be used to enhance software.This is all great but it means developers would have to forget general Android compatibility and just stick with HTC Dev API compatibility.
Fragmentation is bad and this will introduce more applications that don't work or look right on other Android devices.
It's already bad today that many apps that I download have to be deleted and refunded because they don't work properly and there's no compatibility spec on Android market.
FREEPAT75014 - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
I own a Nokia N95 8GB for a few years in Europe. This was my 1st and will be my last Nokia experience, waiting for HTC EVO 3D to be available here to move to Androïd.I will never forgive Nokia not making their N95 8GB Flagship work "basically" in that many years, despite multiple firmwares up-dates that solved nothing, and erased all my copy-protection music keys each time, like badly educated rippers.
Key point is I lost 4 points on my driving licence because of Nokia voice recognition never worked. I had a Sony Ericsson V800 3G phone before, was Symbian too, and voice recognition was perfectly working. Was basic, you could record a voice stream for every phone number recorded for every contact in your list, and it could just recognize when you say same stream again, with 99% accurancy. So OS was not the issue, iddue was Nokia implementation of that OS. On N95 8GB, no way to record any stream, phone is supposed to be so intelligent that it does not need needs that, as he could recognize anything on the fly....but in fact recognizes NOTHING with me. None of my familly names, nothing not even "home" put in English. Never mind you try the voice recognition on the phone or on the hands free car devices, this device could not get anything. And since that was never corrected in so many years, only explanation I have is that Nokia Execs never used their own Smartphones themselves. How could they have tolerated that otherwise ?
2nd key point was that while Lotus Notes support had been marketed by Nokia, when that phone was announced, they did not follow up with that, and when Notes moved to V8 everything stopped working. No calendar, no contacts replication any more = Death. And since that I could not find a way to reconnect that with all new SW discussed in forums.
Not only I think that Nokia could not developpe an OS themselves, but they could not even implement a good one on thier "best hardware" handsets. Not sure we should expect any progress with MW OS implementation. Since the best HW is useless without a good SW implementation, they will never count me a customer again, till they may solve that.
sviola - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Well, so far WP7 is a good OS and with the Mango update it will be on par with iOS and Android. Coupled with Nokia's great hardware it should be an excellent option.