The two companies seek to establish themselves in the smartphone space
Finnish handset manufacturer Nokia has teamed with Microsoft for its latest generation of phones, a move that starts moving Microsoft’s smartphone operating system further into the mainstream market.
The move comes as the two partners seek to establish themselves as major players in the smartphone market. Nokia has been seeing very strong erosion of its position in the last year, dropping from owning 33% of the smartphone market in the third quarter last year to 14% this year. Microsoft, while garnering solid reviews for its OS, has not seen that translate into wide scale adoption.
The two have been working together for eight months and Microsoft’s Windows 7is a major upgrade for Nokia over its aging Symbian operating system, one that was failing to match the latest features of the rival Android and iOS platforms.
However Microsoft, never a power in the smartphone OS, has also seen its share in this space decline. A recent report by analytic firm ComScore showed Microsoft’s share drop from 7.5% to 5.8% between March and June 2011.
The two phones in this release are the Nokia Lumia 710 and the Nokia Lumia 800, with the 810 being the model targeted at the Apple iPhone and high end Android offerings. Currently available in Europe the smartphones are slated for rollout in Asia later this year. Nokia said that it is in talks with all four major US carriers and intends to release them in the US in the future.
The Lumia 800 has an 8-megapixel camera and a bright 3.7-inch OLED display that’s slightly larger than the screen in the iPhone. It has 16GB of storage and the phone is powered by a single core Qualcomm 1.4GHz processor. It includes an 8 megapixel rear facing camera.
The entry level Lumia 710 features the same processor and comes with 8GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rear facing camera and 3.7-inch WVGA display. The smartphones will run on high-speed 4G networks that use a technology called LTE, or Long Term Evolution, as well as on older 3G networks.
The Windows operating system still appears to be catching up to its rival iOS and Android rivals but is now a much fuller featured OS and includes cut and paste and other features that show it is on the road to parity. However it is a long road.
The Windows 7 OS uses “smart tiles” that show information about an app without needing to launch the app. It comes with a range of apps built in- People Hub, Pictures Hub, Microsoft Office Hub, IE9 Mobile, Xbox Live, and 25GB SkyDrive storage. There are currently tens of thousands of apps for Windows 7 but that seriously trails Android and iOS apps, which now number roughly half a million each.
This looks to be a good first effort for the pair but they still have a ways to go, particularly in getting both more features in the OS and a greater app market. Many top sports sites make no mention of Windows support at this time. However with the massive number of Microsoft developers out there this looks to be a relatively easy issue to fix.
