Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7 devices won’t hit the market for another two years, and the company’s partnership with Microsoft carries some wide-ranging and systemic risks.
That comes from Nokia’s publicly released Form 20-F 2010 report, a massive tome submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and posted on Nokia’s Website.
A good portion of the report’s 275 pages are devoted to the wide-ranging partnership deal Microsoft and Nokia announced Feb. 11, which will make Windows Phone 7 the main software platform for Nokia’s smartphones. Bound together, the two companies will attempt to challenge Apple’s iPhone and the Google Android smartphones that control wide swaths of the market.
Under the terms of the agreement, according to the report, Nokia will apparently leverage its expertise in hardware and design to “help bring Windows Phone to a broader range of price points, market segments and geographies.” In addition, the two companies will collaborate on both development and joint marketing initiatives.
“We expect the transition to Windows Phone as our primary smartphone platform to take about two years,” the document continues. “While we transition to Windows Phone as our primary smartphone platform, we will continue to leverage our investment in Symbian for the benefit of Nokia, our customers and consumers, as well as developers.”
If you extrapolate forward from the partnership’s February announcement, that “about two years” time frame means that the first Nokia smartphones loaded with Windows Phone 7 will hit the market sometime in 2013. Previous reports had the first Nokia-Microsoft smartphones arriving sometime in 2012.
For more, read the eWEEK article: Nokia's Windows Phone Deal Carries Risks, Phones in Two Years: Report.
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