Make sure you have a lot of salt for this rumor, as the Times Online is saying that Nokia may be working on a Windows Phone.
In a bullish piece about British high-tech firms, the publication slips in a little line that could have a major impact on the dynamics of the smartphone world.
However, some of the pain was lessened last year after [Wolfson Microelectronics] was selected by a leading mobile phone manufacturer — believed to be Nokia — to provide some of the technology for its new Windows Mobile handset.
Is Nokia really going to pump out a Windows Phone 7 device? I don’t think it would be such a bad idea. The Finnish company can still provide some bad-ass hardware (the specs list on the N97 can make anyone drool) and the Symbian operating system is really showing its age. I would buy a tricked-out Nokia phone running Microsoft’s latest mobile OS in a hot second. The two companies have been pretty cozy lately, as they just released an enterprise app for the E-Series handsets. Additionally, Wolfson does have chips in multiple Microsoft products including the Zune HD.
Of course, I don’t really see this rumor really panning out because Nokia has a long, long history with Symbian. While that OS is now open source and technically part of the independent Symbian Foundation, we all know it would go nowhere without Nokia. If the world’s largest handset maker could get its act together on the high-end front, it probably wouldn’t even need WP7 depending on how good the awfully-named MeeGo turns out to me.
So, let’s not get our hopes too high for this one but it’s definitely an intriguing thought. How say you, IntoMobile readers? Would you like to see a Nokia smartphone with WP7?
[Via Times Online, photo]
