Nokia devices running Windows Phone 7 – today rumors became fact

All the speculations about Nokia teaming up with Microsoft showed up to hold true.

Today the two giants released a joint statement that they are joining forces in a strategic partnership working on the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem together.

Merged Services

Nokia is bringing it’s OVI maps and navigation in to the equation, to be integrated into the current BING solution.

The Nokia OVI store is to be merged with the Windows Phone Market, I guess this means it will be assimilated in to it.

Nokia as an enabler

I think this will be good for Windows Phone, as Nokia have a foothold pretty much all over the globe. They are great at getting devices out there and can surely help with the localization of the OS.

Nokias cooperation with mobile carriers will help in getting the products out to places that Microsoft has had a hard time reaching due to the need for credit card based transactions when you want to consume services on the phone that need monetary transactions.

This will probably also mean that there will be more WP7 devices available in lower price ranges, which is needed if Windows Phone is to be a prolific ecosystem.

This is what Steve and Stephen had to say:

A quote from the joint press release:

There are other mobile ecosystems. We will disrupt them.

There will be challenges. We will overcome them.

Success requires speed. We will be swift.

Together, we see the opportunity, and we have the will, the resources and the drive to succeed.

The joint press release can be found here.

Keeping MeeGo and Symbian

Nokia also announced that they won’t be dropping MeeGo, which I had feared they would. I think this will be good in the long run for them. They also said that they will be releasing the first MeeGo handset this year, contrary to what the rumors have said.

They are also keeping Symbian and expect some 150 million units still on the Symbian platform.

Developers, developers, developers

Despite the famous Steve Ballmer moniker, there are some unhappy faces among the developers in the Nokia camp today.

As the new cooperation means that they won’t be using Nokias own development platform for the Windows Phone 7 devices, instead it will be the Developer Tools for Windows Phone supplied by Microsoft. And this of course adds another code base to produce and manage if you want to release your apps for all Nokia platforms.

This will probably lead to some segregation between old school Nokia developers and quite a few that will just aim for the Windows Phone platform. But they will also get the Windows Phone developer base “for free”.

And Microsoft is producing some great developer tools, so hopefully a few more developers will chime in form the Nokia camp and thus enable even further growth of the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Devices

During the journalist Q&A session PocketLint asked when any devices would be ready. Elop answered that there was no finished devices and no date would be given, but that he thought they would be able to execute on these new devices faster than ever before.