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Nokia’s Stephen Elop Outlines Windows Phone Release, Talks Strategy

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In an interview, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who had made radical changes to the world’s leading phone-maker since taking over the helm, has outlined Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 release strategy. Elop says that the company’s debut Windows Phone 7 handset will be coming in the fourth quarter of this year, and would be released in succession of one country after another rather than a simultaneous launch.

As Elop as a former Microsft executive who had made his way to Nokia and radically steered the phone-maker from its Symbian OS to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system, there has been consistent rumor that Microsoft would acquire Nokia, similar to the Google-Motorola announcement, and Elop continues to deny such speculations, saying that Nokia will forge its own path independently.

So now that Nokia will be utilizing the same OS as many of its big-named rivals–HTC, LG, Samsung, Huawei, and others–the company will need to not only work together with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7, but to also be able to differentiate its handset from rival manufacturers. The deal with Microsoft, announced in February, gave Nokia complete access over Windows Phone 7 code, a move that Microsoft had not, and is not, granting to other licensee of its mobile OS. According to Elop, Nokia isn’t just working on the smartphone hardware, but also is influencing Windows Phone 7 software development, and the Nokia CEO says that we’ll see the fruit of that work beginning with Apollo.

Apollo is believed to be the next major version of the Windows Phone platform after Windows Phone Mango. Between Mango and Apollo, Microsoft is believed to be delivering a minor OS release called Tango that is aimed at taking Windows Phone to low-end markets and would generally not affect the high-end phones that we know today. Tango’s move would help Nokia, which has strong reach in developing countries, deliver Windows Phone to that demographic and would allow Microsoft to compete with entry-level offerings from Android.

In addition with working with Microsoft, Elop says that Nokia will also offer differentiated experience. Though it’s unclear what that may be at this time, Nokia has offered its own services with its Symbian platform, and some of those services–such as Nokia Maps for navigation–may be ported to Windows Phone 7.

You can view the full video interview with the Nokia CEO here.

Via: My Nokia Blog

16 Comments

16 Comments

  1. Steven Zahl

    09/09/2011 at 5:28 pm

    NOKIA is TOAST

  2. Avatar Roku

    09/09/2011 at 6:03 pm

    Seeing all the legal trouble that Android manufacturers are getting into and Google buying their competitor, Motorola, it really seems like Nokia made the right decision to not make Android phones.

  3. Craig Inglis

    09/12/2011 at 12:30 am

    if microsoft buy nokia you cans say bye bye because pooing in a ferrari aint good (windows 7 + nokia) and just because a + and a – can equals a + dont mean that this is a good strategy. nokia in my experience make excellent phones, i have countless times thrown a nokia phone in temper and not damaged it. i think nokia should have taken a year off and built a totally new os from scratch because theyre good at doing that but they forgot to change it after too long so people got sick and tired of the same old outdated os and chose another.

    R.I.P. NOKIA

    • Manney

      10/13/2011 at 1:46 pm

      Hey Craig, I couldn’t disagree with you more. I have used numerours nokia phones, window mobile phones(yes i know :-) , iphones, android, windows phone 7, blackberry and now the windows phone 7.5 mango, and I honestly think that it is a breath of freash air as far as a phone OS goes. It is fantastically easy to use and intuitive, very stable and a whole world away from Microsoft’s previous attempts at the mobile market.  I really think that if Nokia produce a great handset, as we all know they are capable of combined with a first class OS,  there can only be 1 outcome, and I personally can’t wait.

  4. Abe Froman

    09/12/2011 at 4:17 am

    Nokia’s board was sadly swept the overrated Silicon Valley/Seattle Ex MS hoopla.  NOK would have been far better off not buying into the faux geniuses and sticking with Texas for it’s common sense North American Ops.

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