No one would have expected to see Nokia struggling by 2011. But then that's what happened, after a huge drop in profits in the last few quarters and loss of its No1 status in Europe, Nokia is in shambles.
Few days back Nokia sold its symbian Development to Accenture, and gone with the company are its developers and testers as well. But more importantly few months back Nokia announced an alliance with microsoft and decided to dump Symbian for Windows Phone Operating System.
Nokia has always been associated with Quality and performance of its phones. When most phones lasted few years, Nokia devices would last twice longer. And whether it reception, battery performance or ruggedness, Nokia was the Honda and toyota of the Mobile world. Nokia was also one of the early entrants into Smartphone business, they have brought some of the popular smart phones in the last decade be it the 6600 or N70, N93,N95 and E61 etc. But Nokia is a victim of their own success, content with a aging Symbian platform Nokia failed to get on the Post iPhone , touchscreen bandwagon.
Though Nokia released quite a few touchscreen devices, the operating system was clumsy and not user friendly, crashing smartphone OS was ok during the early days of smartphones, but now they cant be tolerated. With highly competitive platforms in Android and ios, Nokia had all but failed in High End division. And low end market is populated with copycat chinese phones which perform more functionality than Nokia with half the price.
But aligning with Microsoft and dumping its symbian os is a step in the right direction, Nokia still has the best hardware in cellphones, what it is missing is the software. With Microsoft deal it achieves exactly that, and now Nokia can concentrate on improving and establishing itself the leader in this segment. Microsoft is also reinventing itself in the Mobile space, one of my Gripe was the hardware on the windows phones, it used to be either motorola or some unknown company. No major hardware player was associated with windows phones, but with Nokia, Microsoft gets just that.
With windows 7 phone platform creating so much excitement , definitely this is the best that could have happened to Nokia. With launch of N9 , Nokia did show a meego (Linux) based device, but for next few years Nokia might just concentrate on Windows Platform and occasionally release Phones for Android as well. And with a backing from Microsoft , Nokia will be finally able to break into US market, earlier due to carrier control in US , Nokia never had its best phones in the US market.
It would be just great for consumers with one more great option in terms of the phone hardware.