A little over 5 months ago, at an investor relations meeting in London, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop got on stage and announced that the Finnish handset maker has essentially given up on Symbian, is going to halt development on MeeGo, and will switch their smartphone operating system of choice to Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Since then the stock has tanked, twice, the second dip caused by issuing a revised outlook to their Q2 2011 financial results that says the handset maker will break even … barely. The question on everyone’s mind since that day in February is when exactly are we going to see the first Nokia Windows Phone? And no, we’re not talking about the recent leak that showed Elop giving a demo of a device that looks identical to the MeeGo powered N9, but is instead running Windows Phone, we mean when is said device going to appear on store shelves? The official word from Nokia is that they “have increased confidence” that they’ll get a device out to market by the end of the year, which can be translated as: “We’ll hopefully sell 100,000 units boxes start arriving at retailers the week before Christmas.”
In order to get the public pumped at the prospect of a Nokia Windows Phone, UK publication Marketing Magazine has it on good authority that beginning this October Nokia will launch a 6 month campaign due to cost around 80 million British pounds (127.5 million U.S. dollars) that will hopefully stop people from picking up an Apple iPhone or something running Android. Here’s the thing, when the CEO of Microsoft admits that Windows Phone isn’t doing all that great, what makes Nokia think that a few nonsensical commercials created by overpriced London based creative agencies will change the situation? Worse yet, with this campaign beginning in October, if the first devices aren’t going to come out until December, and will probably not be shipping in volume until the Spring, will people get annoyed at seeing the same ads over and over and over again with no hardware to show for it at their local phone retailer?