Nokia has had it fairly rough these last few years as it struggled to compete against Android and iOS with the fledging Symbian platform and decided to go ‘all in’ with Microsoft and the new Windows Phone platform. Of course, this also meant the death of the symbian platform and many in the company lost their jobs and many more lost their faith in the company.
The Finnish outfit once denied that they would even consider moving to the Android platform to the ire of Google and of course, many avid fans of Nokia. Phones from Nokia have always been superb pieces of hardware that are well designed and built to last. However, the software side of things was always lacking and still is, to many that don’t like the Windows Phone platform or see any value in it.
There isn’t much to be said about Windows Phone as a platform today, with it’s small 2.2 per cent share of the mobile market and a small selection of apps to be had. The partnership between the two firms hasn’t been too much of a boost to either of them and it’s not going to stop Android or other platforms from solidifying their leads.
In the week Nokia held a conference call that was anything but time for celebration, in the call was announced plans to lay off roughly 10, 000 in order to cutback. These cutbacks are aimed at sharpening their strategy to compete with Android aggressively at the low end as they’ve struggled competing at the high end. The way that Nokia has hit the low end so far with Windows Phone is to produce phones with meagre amounts of RAM that led to certain apps incompatible with the devices such as Skype. Another thing to consider is that low end phones running Android have no costs to license the OS as Android is open source and Windows Phone needs to be licensed and this may well lead to an increase in price.
Android has always scaled relatively well to budget phones and this year has been no exception with devices like the One V setting new standards for Android on a budget.
[Source: Wired]