Yesterday, our own Michael Murphy wrote about speculation as to what Nokia’s next OS would be, seeing their choices as either Android or Windows OS. Well, today per a press release from the cell phone giant, Nokia made it official…they’re partnering with Microsoft to create a “a new global mobile ecosystem”.
According to the press release, this will mean many things for Nokia. This includes driving Windows Phone as their “principal smartphone strategy”. Bing will now power Nokia’s search, and Nokia Maps will be brought into Microsoft’s mapping services. This also includes joint marketing initiatives, use of Microsoft development tools to create Nokia Windows phones, integrating Nokia’s content and application store into Microsoft Marketplace, and much more.
Not everyone is happy about this new direction for Nokia, though. According to Engadget, over 1,500 workers at Nokia’s Tampere — who were mostly folks who built and worked on their Symbian OS — office have simply walked out, staging a strong, unified, non-violent protest.
While this news saddens folks who were hoping one of the world’s largest handset makers would switch to Android (like me), it’s good in terms of competition for the marketplace, in which place the consumer always wins. It will be interesting to see what kind of awesome handsets we see in the future as a result of this partnership.
[Via Nokia]