Earlier this week Nokia held their annual Nokia Connection conference in Singapore where they unveiled the N9, which is both the first and last smartphone they’ll make running the MeeGo operating system. Back in February Nokia announced that they’re going to scrap their plans to use Symbian for low to mid range handsets and MeeGo for premium devices, instead they’ll be using Microsoft’s Windows Phone for all their smartphones. The question on everyone’s mind since that announcement is when exactly is the first Nokia Windows Phone going to come out? Stephen Elop, Nokia’s new CEO as of September 2010, recently said that he has increased confidence that by the end of the year they’ll be Windows Phones on the market, and his statement was further reinforced by Victor Saeijs, Senior Vice President at Nokia Europe, who said that in Q4 we’ll see Windows Phone on Nokia handsets hitting a limited number of EU countries. So they’ll be out this year, that’s good, but when are they going to be announced?
Enter Nokia World, another annual event the world’s largest handset maker hosts. Right after Nokia Connection finished the @Nokia Twitter account tweeted: “That’s a wrap for #nokiacnxn – see you at #NokiaWorld in London October 26-27! http://nokia.ly/mveemr“. The event has traditionally been held in September, so this is a bit later than usual, which would make sense since one of promises Stephen Elop made soon after taking over Nokia was that he would reduce the time between a device announcement and when said device would actually come to store shelves. That’s something that’s been of a pain point over the past few years, most notoriously the Nokia N8, which was announced in late April 2010 and then hit the market half a year later in October.
So mark your calendars, in 4 months we might finally get the information we’ve all been waiting for!