It has now officially been a year when Nokia and Microsoft announced their partnership, something that by far most could have never see coming just minutes before the event. Nokia’s old strategy revolved around Qt that would have tied MeeGo and Symbian together. Symbian being on the +150 euros phones and overlapping MeeGo a bit on the high end.
Nokia and Elop decided to go for Windows Phone only on the higher end, and later on to lower mid end as well. Easily just as big announcement was the dead of Symbian that was promised to be supported till 2016.
This year has been catastrophic to Nokia since they scrapped all of their other businesses in the 90′s and went for this new thing called mobile phone. Symbian sales have plummeted faster than thought and there has been plenty of layoffs. Maybe the only positive news from the partnership has been that Nokia was able to push out 2 phones in a 8 months time, compared to the usual 14 months. Even so last year saw a lot less phones from Nokia than usually, this year that has to change.
According to Elop Nokia will have it’s internal structure totally arranged for Windows Phone in the summer of 2012 (excluding MSN that has a bit over 60 000 workers, Nokia has 60 000 workers). It’s clear that 2012 will still be transitional year (said even by Nokia’s current chairman) as Apollo will be the first OS Nokia has closely worked on to truly made it their own. Even so, 2012 should tell us a lot and Windows Phones needs to start really selling. We are also most likely to see Windows 8 tablet this year by Nokia. Nokia’s entrance to the +7inch tablet market.
So you will see even more stuff concerning Windows this year, something that will keep dividing Nokia’s fan base even more.
