All that hard work I did for editing the Nokia N9 image to add Windows 7 UI were deemed useless by this Wired report which quotes Watts Marting, a former Nokia employee saying that the rumors of Nokia and Microsoft partnering for a phone are pointless. “There is no guarantee of that at all, because it is stark raving loony. A lot of the reporting on Nokia I’ve seen seems to miss a fundamental fact: they are, in their fashion, just as insistent on control over their ecosystem as Apple is.”, Martin wrote on his blog. He also says, “Nokia really does have their OS strategy figured out, and it’s a good one. What they don’t have figured out is user experience design, a way to compete with the “$85 smartphone” Horace Dediu envisions, and, oh yes, the whole damn North American market. The good news for them is that over the last year they’ve started to take all those problem seriously. The bad news is that they needed to have been taking them seriously in 2007.”
I sorta believe what he says since I’ve been seeing Nokia trying to compete with cheap phones, dual-sim phones, and even the North American market with their recent releases. It’s also well know nthat Nokia has always believed in Symbian and never did try to partner with any other OS vendors in the past. And once when the tried to build something based on a different OS (Linux), they customized it entirely to create Maemo 5 (the OS in Nokia N900).
The rumors of Nokia and Windows 7 Phone not happening don’t make me sad but I seriously hope Nokia leaves Symbian and joins the Android camp. After all, they were the first company I associated with simple, yet powerful phones.
