Back in February when Nokia announced that they were going to dump Symbian, kill off MeeGo, and switch to Windows Phone, their stock price dropped like a rock. Betting your future on an unproven platform, and worst of all telling customers, operators, and partners, that the ecosystem they’re currently invested in will cease to exist, tends to freak people out. We knew Nokia wasn’t going to do as well in 2011 as they did in 2010 because this transition is going to be … rough, to say the least, but now the Finnish handset maker has decided to warn investors ahead of publishing their Q2 2011 financial results next month with an updated forecast. It states: “Nokia now expects Devices & Services net sales to be substantially below its previously expected range of EUR 6.1 billion to EUR 6.6 billion for the second quarter 2011. This update is primarily due to lower than previously expected average selling prices and mobile device volumes.” They also retracted their full year 2011 forecast because they believe “it is no longer appropriate to provide annual targets for 2011”.
Being a Nokia fanboi is going to be increasingly difficult going forward, and many of our readers have talked to us offline about how they’re no longer carrying a Nokia and are throughly enjoying the experience provided by Google’s Android operating system. But forget about the Q2 results for just a second, how are Q3 numbers going to look like? The July to September time frame is when all those fancy new dual core smartphones are going to hit the market in volume and by then there still isn’t going to be a single Nokia Windows Phone out on the market. When Nokia does launch their first Windows Phone, is it going to be as terrible as the 5800 XpressMusic, their first touch screen smartphone running Symbian?
We hope not.