Rumors have been floating around for a while now that suggested Nokia is looking closely at the tablet market. More specifically, it would seem that Nokia is watching the Windows Surface platform closely.
Until now, there has been no official confirmation from Nokia, however. During a recent interview in Sydney, Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop discussed the future of Nokia tablets, and the possibility of a future Android iteration.
Of course, the very first thing he did is point out that the company has not yet officially announced such plans and that they haven’t made any formal decisions on the matter either. So basically, the ideas he talks about are not set in stone and could change at any time.
Elop first discussed Nokia’s strategy to expand their Lumia product line.
“It is the case that in the months and years ahead, you will see us broaden out the portfolio, which means pushing to lower and lower price points, in some cases smaller form factors and so forth.”
He also went on further to state that the company is actually looking into the tablet market.
“We haven’t announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely. We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time.”
When asked whether or not Nokia would choose to go with Android or Windows, he responded with the following.
“We would consider any option… It is important to note that the opportunity for companionship is something that any user is looking for. So, when you think about the Lumia 920, running on Windows phone, having a Windows tablet or PC or Xbox is something that will give us the opportunity to have a pretty integrated experience. Our first focus on what we look at is clearly in the Microsoft side, but we have made no decision or announced nothing.”
Clearly, you can glean from his statement that Nokia is leaning more towards a Windows based tablet. It only makes sense considering the Lumia line is deeply integrated into the Windows platform. Elop is specifically referring to a universal experience across all devices, which is certainly something that consumers find appealing these days.
Many believed that Elop’s decision to stick with Microsoft was against the grain as Android has been seeing a significant amount of success recently. Elop believes, however, that the Android market is too crowded, and Samsung’s growing dominance only proves to confirm the validity of his decision.
“On the Android side, we were very worried that we would be entering Android late relative to everyone else in the industry, that perhaps one vendor was already well on the road to being the dominant Android vendor at the expense of everyone else.”
Essentially, he believes that Samsung is stealing the spotlight from everyone else, and that leaves little room for new entries into the market.
“If we look back two years to when we made the decisions,then Samsung was big, HTC was pretty big and Motorola was pretty big. Of course what has happened in the two years is that Samsung has captured the lion’s share of it and the others have been squeezed down to much smaller market share. We were worried about exactly that pattern forming.”
Clearly, Elop believes that Nokia has more chance at success with the Windows platform. One could adversely argue that the rest of the market matters remarkably little currently, seeing as Android and iOS are dominating the mobile market.
What we can rightly conclude from this interview is that a Windows based Nokia tablet is on the way and the production of a Nokia tablet, running Android, is highly unlikely. Don’t worry though, fellow Android lovers, as Elop so openly admitted, no formal decisions have been made yet.
Source: Financial Review