Exclusive: Nokia's Windows Phone 7 concept revealed!
Look what we've found! This is the first image you'll see anywhere of the early fruit of Microsoft and Nokia's budding new partnership. We have it on good authority that the technicolor phone on show is an early conceptual device produced …
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after Engadget reported that Nokia and Microsoft would announce a Windows Phone 7 partnership, the deal is official — Nokia's own press release confirms a 'broad strategic partnership' — and this first image of an early conceptual Nokia WP7 device gives hardware shape to what until now was pure rumor. The leak lands on the same day as the announcement itself, so it functions as visual proof-of-concept for the alliance.
The backdrop makes the stakes legible: two days earlier, sources told reporters Nokia had scrapped its first MeeGo phone before launch, with a Nokia spokesman declining to confirm or deny, and The Register already running Intel's defense of MeeGo after the defection. Reaction pieces framed the move starkly — Engadget's 'RIP: Symbian', Armed and Dangerous calling it 'Nokia's Suicide Note', and asymco memorializing Microsoft's previous strategic mobile partners.
First-order effects
- Nokia commits its smartphone roadmap to Windows Phone 7, putting its own platforms — Symbian and MeeGo — on a path toward deprecation, which is why the MeeGo-first-device cancellation reports surfaced just before the announcement.
- Windows Phone 7 suddenly gains the volume handset maker it lacked, and the Windows Phone Developer Blog is already publishing on what the deal means for Microsoft developers — the platform's credibility question shifts from apps-and-ecosystem to execution-on-hardware.
Second-order effects
- Intel must defend MeeGo as a going concern without its flagship OEM, and the broader open-source mobile community loses Nokia's engineering weight — FOSS Patents flags that Nokia's strategy shift also reshuffles the smartphone patent-war board, since Nokia remains a major patent holder even while abandoning its own OS ambitions.
- Rival Android handset makers get a competitor with Nokia's distribution and brand behind Microsoft's platform, forcing them to differentiate on ecosystem depth rather than hardware alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone market consolidates around two or three licensed platform alliances rather than vertically integrated OS owners — and asymco's inventory of Microsoft's dead mobile partnerships is the standing caution that alliance-based strategies fail as often from execution as from design.
The trend: Smartphone competition is shifting from in-house operating systems to platform alliances, with Nokia trading OS sovereignty for Microsoft-scale software backing.