It’s all well and good that Nokia is trying to resurrect their glory days by partnering with Microsoft and releasing Windows Phones, but until they step foot in America then nothing they do matters. That’s the sad truth of the situation. We already know that T-Mobile is going to make an announcement tomorrow saying that they’ll be offering the Lumia 710 to their customers, but what about the flagship Lumia 800? In its current form it isn’t going to be making the trip across the pond from Europe to Freedom Land. Instead Nokia has a super secret 4G LTE enabled Lumia handset up their sleeves that’s currently being tested by both AT&T and Verizon Wireless. We don’t have any additional details about said device, but if we had to take a guess we’d say it’s going to have a larger screen than the Lumia 800, it’ll likely be running Tango, the as yet to be announced update to Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and we’ll see it in less than a month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That’s the best case scenario.
Now if Nokia and Microsoft really want to annoy the other Windows Phone partners, then Nokia could announce that Microsoft gave them special permission to tweak Windows Phone in order to add 4G LTE support to Mango, but the likelihood of that happening is infinitesimally small. Nokia’s goal is in fact the opposite, to work with Microsoft to enable Windows Phone to run on cheap smartphones that they can sell in emerging markets. Earlier this year we heard that’s what Tango would be all about, making Windows Phone run on low end hardware, while also adding 4G LTE support for higher end devices.
We have to wait until the second half of 2012, when Windows Phone Apollo is released, to see Microsoft’s platform gain support for dual core processors and higher resolution screens.