Microsoft’s recent announcement has put the analyst community into major turmoil - Windows Mobile coming to Nokia devices! Today/Tomorrow? But its coming…it’s the end of the world! Gaah/Eek/whatever! While I personally think that a lot of this is just a knee-jerk reaction of analysts with significant investment in to S60, the general perception of the importance of operating systems for mobile devices is outdated and - deeply - flawed.
Before we get to Microsoft’s actual announcement, we need to look at something else. At hardware. At processors. Every major mobile device nowadays is powered by the same processor architecture(in fact, many devices even share the same CPU type). Screen resolutions have become standardized at a few fixed points based on QVGA(ignoring Palm’s legacy, 160-based system for now) - in the end, device hardware does not differ much between operating systems.
This(and the advent of platform-builder style, easy OS deployment) have led to operating systems becoming no-brainers. A company called HandEra has developed a device capable of running both Palm OS and Windows Mobile some time ago, and many evaluation boards can run Palm OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile. In fact, I think that Nokia could “crossgrade” most existing Windows Mobile Smartphones to S60 devices.
So, why shouldn’t Nokia tip a toe into the Windows Mobile marketplace. Creating a Windows Smartphone flash image for an (outdated) device and putting it onto the market as a WMS box won’t take a lot of R&D; and if it pays out, why not do it?
We aren’t talking about Nokia giving up S60 here - we’re just talking about a second line of business….
Why not?
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