Nokia Had an Android Phone In Development

puddingebola writes "Perhaps influencing Microsoft's $7.2 billion acquisition, the New York Times is reporting that Nokia had an Android phone in development. From the article, 'A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company's Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft's $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.' Perhaps Nokia feared they had put too many eggs in one basket? Whatever the case, the project is most likely dead at this point."

Comments

Nokia is volume

[fermion]

If one is going to be a volume business in the mobile phone business, one has to sell android. It is the only thing that competes with Apple. Nokia is volume. At it's height Nokia had about twice the sales of Apple phones sales. Ms has been at this for 15 years and has never broken 20% of the market, and has generally had duds. Now with MS money they can be a boutique shop selling phones that do nothing. Unless Google stops backing up Android with lots of free to the user stuff, or unless MS starts supply free stuff to the end user(big skydrive, free cloud exchange, free online office) people are not going to pay for the phone then monthly fees to use MS services. Even Apple keeps prices low.

Re:Nokia is volume

[Sir_Sri]

Windows phone picked up about 3.7% of the market in 2Q 2013 - or 8.7 million devices. Of those Nokia shipped 7 million, and Samsung 1 million + other.

Now lets look at android. Sure, samsung shipped 73 million devices, but numbers 2-5 each shipped between 10 and 12 million units. LG, Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE

So while Nokia - and everyone else is getting completely smoked by samsung, they're actually catching up to the second tier of the pack at around 10 million units a quarter.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24257413

So sure, nokia is managing about 1/4 the sales of apple with MS. And had 77% year on year growth. That'... well, is surprisingly good honestly. Even if they get half that much growth this year they'll be in the 2nd rung of smartphone makers behind samsung. Which given that they don't have semiconductor fabs is about as good as you can hope for.

Re:Microsoft buys Microsoft

[symbolset]

They are the preventer of progress, destroyer of compatibility. At one point they decided they had destroyed every competing browser vendor, declared their browser "done" and fired the team who produced... IE6.

Re:Like a Nokia Android wouldn't have bombed?

[symbolset]

Samsung only sells half the Android devices. So what you are saying is that a consortium of non-Samsung mutually opposed companies are colluding to build 400 million devices this year, selling them for perhaps $120 billion, and losing money on every one. Because they love Google, I suppose, and want them to do well despite their duty to their own shareholders. C'mon Hairy. Did you bring enough of whatever that was you took to share with everybody?

shipped vs sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Shipped and sales are not the same thing. You are comparing apples and oranges. Nokia might have shipped that many but sales are much lower. Almost no one who has experiences Windows on the desktop wants that on their phone.