Which is, building both Android phones and win7 phones?

Is redmond paying Nokia a lot of compensation for agreeing not to build android phones?

Take a look at this link.

http://news.ebrandz.com/microsoft/20...e-google-.html

The leader of Nokia is an X micro$ofter... Nokia will live or die without android phones.

thanks that's interesting, but Nokia was working on Linux based phone OS called MeeGo until very recently. I am confused ~

I suggest you read more about the background then. They are still officially doing meego, but it's ben open sourced, or will be, which largely means they don't want it anymore.

It's not a ' linux vs windows' thing, there are plenty more issues at stake that that dull argument.

I thought that the whole point of it was being open source?

meego wasn't open source previously, it's migrating to a community OS model over the next few whiles. The "Point" would never be to be open source, the point would be to sell lots of phones and make money.

One writer suggested that Nokia would rather be the first big maker of Windows phones, than yet another Android phone maker. It's a bold strategy for Nokia that may or may not pay off.

That in turn makes me less pessimistic than I was about the fate of MeeGo and Symbian. Nokia may want to keep them to "fall back on", should Windows phone turn out unpopular. (Which with the MS marketing machine behind it, is unlikely, though I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows phones selling more like Game Gear than Game Boy.)

One thing missing from the linked article is that Stephen Elop used to be a Microsoft exec. I suspect this move has a lot to do with that as Elop would be pretty comfortable with Microsoft's stuff and much less so with Android.

It seems that it is important to Nokia not to just be a 'me too' manufacturer. One of the problems that the Android manufacturers face is differentiation. With HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Acer, Sony-Ericsson, not to mention Alcatel, ZTE already in the game, you'd have to ask why a punter would choose one of these phones over any other? Well, the obvious answers are price and specification, but some of those manufacturers are low cost, so Nokia probably have difficulty competing there (short of badging a phone from some low cost producer). Probably, Nokia could compete on, eg, camera specification, where some of the players are a bit weak, but that is probably very much a niche market, and that's not where Nokia, as previously the largest player in the smartphone market, wants to be playing.

Now, my feeling is that Nokia doesn't know where it is going with smartphones and I don't see this as curing the problem, but I could be wrong. (And I quite like Symbian, as an underlying OS, but the user interface part seems a little dated, today. But the recent developments suggest that Nokia has no idea of how to keep Symbian in the game and has resigned itself to having S40 as a 'downmarket smartphone' or possibly 'featurephone' option.)

acid_kewpie: This is some interesting stuff that I didn't know about Nokia...

At it again, KKKenny SStrawn?!

I think you mean "still at it"... to be at it "again" you need to have stopped at some point.

No. Just mad (at the time I posted that). I was shocked to find that Nokia's chief executive used to be a Microsoft executive, but I'm all better now.

(insulting note edited out)

I just hope that whatever happens, this won't be reality:

http://www.msqt.org/