It doesn’t matter if Nokia launches a Windows Phone…

An excellent post, for sure. This is something that many of the people clamoring for Nokia to pick up Android (myself included, at some point) often miss. As Vanjoki said, it’s a short term strategy that doesn’t really solve any problems – it only sweeps them under the rug temporarily.

Worse yet, it relegates Nokia to a simple hardware manufacturer – unless they can somehow manage to integrate Ovi into Android, it’s a complete waste of resources, both for the future and for all the past resources that have been sunk into Ovi.

To be honest, I don’t see Nokia picking up any other platform. Unfortunately, I don’t have any real suggestions as to what they should do to keep using Symbian/Meego and not continue to sink. Guess that’s why I’m not CEO.

This:

“…and I’ll be liberally hitting ‘Mark All Read’ in Google Reader.”

I’m very interested to see what Nokia plans to announce. Win Phone 7 doesn’t really make them any more relevant in the mobile ecosystem.

A partnership/merger with Intel is more along the lines of what Nokia needs. Merge into a cash-rich company and use the cash to innovate by developing the Meego ecosystem. Similar to what happened with Palm.

My thoughts are that this situation really bears watching. “The future looks bright” is not the statement most applicable to either Windows (in need of a mobile replacement for their desktop income stream) or Nokia (they need a future *everything* after some doldrum times) so it will be very interesting to see what hatches. And, as you rightly say, what’s the one after that?

Integrating Ovi into Android isn’t impossible – or even difficult really. Once the services are built in Qt, Nokia can adopt and official stance on Qt for Android (currently community run I believe) and create an Android device with Ovi Maps and Store, their own UI “withOUT Google” (yes, I’m saying Nokia can do a UI. Just agree with me for the sake of argument there Ricky) and differentiate itself based on UI/hardware. Of course, the same could be said for WP7 – MSFT just has to open the kernel a bit to the Qt team and you can develop Qt apps/services on top of WP7.

Now, all that said, I agree with you Ricky – I just don’t see them picking up another platform just to get some marketshare in the US (or elsewhere). I really do hope the ‘solution’ is bigger and something that just hasn’t been discussed yet…something that makes the world go “Ah crap, the sleeping bear is awake!”

edit

While porting Qt to a new platform is entirely possible, it’s wise to take a look at what it took to port Qt to both Symbian and Maemo (now Meego). While the latter was reasonably fast, Qt for Symbian still suffers from several issues caused by porting Qt into a completely new OS. Since WP7 doesn’t share much of its code with Windows Mobile 6.5 (which has Qt), a port would certainly be a big hurdle and not something that could be done quickly.

As everybody, we at Nokia are also anxiously waiting for what’s going to happen, but my personal opinion is that the company ends up adopting a 3rd. party platform, it should adopt it fully and not try to port yet another layer on top of it.

Daniel

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Thanks Ricky. It’s certainly a tricky one.

The more I think about it though the more I struggle to see the value of Ovi services being ported to platform with identical (and native and more mature) equivalents. And that’s even before you start to consider 3rd party developers issues with it…

But why would a Nokia Android (or WP7) device without the platform’s native features be even remotely appealing to consumers. The UI may be less horrible than Symbian but you lose the benefit of everything that’s already available to consumers.

From an Android perspective, you can still sell it as “Android” and it’d be like Sense or MotoBlur with Ovi services. Remember, stock Android is a back seat UI to the OEM customizations (at least in the USA).

For WP7, it’d be a mix of MSFT’s native features + Ovi Services and Qt apps…as long as MSFT opens up and adopts Qt.

Think abuot what this could me to the developer: Qt apps can run on Symbian, WP7, MeeGo, Windows, Linux Desktop and OSX…

That’s a fascination point I hadn’t considered… If MS opened up to Qt there could be a real migration of talent and consumers. It might be a way to avoid the rather gloomy options I presented.

It hadn’t even occurred to me as a possibility. It feels incredibly unlikely (and I can’t see why MS would do it – what’s in it for them?) but I guess we should look for someone senior from MS at tomorrow’s session.

I agree – it’s a long shot due to the “arrogance distortion field” that has Ballmer as its centerpoint BUT where does WP7 rank on the developer priority list? Seriously, for devs not getting money from MSFT, devs would be hardpressed to have real answers to decline coding in a language to support 3 mobile OSes and 3 desktop OSes. It opens up the entire (non US) world of devs to WP7…in theory that is…

I agree – it’s a long shot due to the “arrogance distortion field” that has Ballmer as its centerpoint BUT where does WP7 rank on the developer priority list? Seriously, for devs not getting money from MSFT, devs would be hardpressed to have real answers to decline coding in a language to support 3 mobile OSes and 3 desktop OSes. It opens up the entire (non US) world of devs to WP7…in theory that is…

Absolutely. Would require some back-pedalling on whatever answers the MS spin machine gave to people asking ‘why should we bother’ about WP7…

There certainly isn’t a value of Ovi services to the consumer – Nokia has yet to really show why Ovi is worth the investment, in my opinion. The ecosystem is non-existent and the vast majority of the Ovi services are crap, and even most Nokians realize it.

The value would be for Nokia to continue to have an ecosystem to talk about – aside from Ovi, Nokia is a hardware manufacturer, and nothing more.

For consumers I agree, but the Ovi store (at least) is a source of revenue. Ovi Music must be too with potential to monetise the others (by ads if nothing else). Can Nokia give-up on this revenue?

[...] Windows Phone customisationsby Ben Smith on 14th February 2011   View CommentsWell, they did it and the details are now starting to dribble out.Last night, in his pre-event press conference new [...]

[...] surprised by the news, as was I — a little. As soon as I started hearing the rumours of a Nokia adopting Windows Phone it immediately made [...]