Well well, now it's time to look for a new job.
I was on vacation and a friend texted me a moment ago that we were laid off.

How fun is life?

Have you heard rumors spreading on the Finnish discussion boards about the Nokia-Microsoft contract? Based on the authors, Nokia has signed an exclusive agreement where it will not start any other smartphone projects in the future than based on the Windows Phone. Current projects, which can be useful for the Windows Phone platform will be completed, but the products will get minimum marketing. This has been (based on the rumors) the requirement for the platform support from Microsoft.

This may be the reason why Nokia did drop the support for the N9 phone. It had an agreement with Intel to make at least a one developer device with keyboard (N950) and a touch screen consumer model (N9) to several countries. This phone has been discontinued now. Also Pureview Symbian phone has been released too, because the project was very expensive and cannot be inplemented in the Windows Phone OS in a short time. Other new phones are S40 based (like Asha) which are considered as feature phones and may not risk Windows Phone platform success. N9 design was copied to Lumia 800/900 (+ part of the look and feel to S40 Asha) and Pureview is promised to be part of the Windows Phone 8 platform.

This agreement is rumored to be five years. If this this true the company has painted itself into a corner and cannot make Meltemi like products (which would be considered as smartphones), more MeeGo products (definitely smartphones) or develop new Symbian phones (which are smartphones). To make an Android phone, Nokia should pay all the platform support back to the Microsoft and maybe there is a fine multiplier too in the contract.

Some rumors also state that the Windows Phone channel is full of phones now and operators are not willing to take any more until the current ones are sold to the consumers. For example LG has not made any Windows Phones this year and they are still available in many countries.

The WP7/7.5 platform is based on the Windows CE and the new WP8 platform will be NT based with the new hardware. They are not upgradable from 7.5 to 8. Current OS will get a feature pack, but not full support of the WP8 features. The applications will be compatible from the previous version to WP8. It means, to get the WP8 features (like multitasking), you need a new phone. An ice cold shower for many users.

There may be only 3.5 million devices sold to the consumers until Q1/2012 during the WP lifetime (Google: "Microsoft Has Only Sold 3.5 Million Windows Phones To Date"). For example Samsung sells more Bada devices in a quarter and Google activates the same amount of Android devices in a week. This may be true if you look at the number of the Facebook application users. It has only 2 million users and the amount has increased very slowly according to the WMPowerUser stats. And these stats consists the whole Windows Phone platform, not only Nokia Lumias.

Nokia did bet on the dead horse.

Posted by: Otto | June 14, 2012 at 02:19 PM

Originally Posted by Rugoz

^

Makes no sense, otherwise they would have stopped meltemi dev. earlier

Originally Posted by Bernard

... I just hope Qt at least releases an update for the QtSDK that includes Qt Creator 2.5, as the previous one has some nasty bugs when developing for N9.