It's a done deal! Microsoft-Nokia merger to close on Friday Microsoft has finally cleared all of the international regulatory hurdles that it needed to overcome for it to close its acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services business. "The transaction will be completed this Friday, April 25, when we'll officially welcome the Nokia Devices and Services business as part of the Microsoft …
I just got myself a Lumia 1020 this weekend and can honestly say it is the best phone I have ever owned, including my previous Android phones, both HTCs - the Desire and the One X. Mainly purchased for the camera which does not disappoint.
As long as Nokia keep making phones like the 1020, I don't care who owns them.
It can be hard to believe just how good the pictures are, especially when there is enough light.
I also hope that future phones are similarly brilliant but I am set for a couple of years at least.
PS. Buy the wireless charging sled and a pad if you haven't got one. The sled makes for some drop protection and wireless charging makes you never want to go back to cables.
Interesting that after what many do see as a Trojan horse, Elop is still in Nokia having to deal with the internal fallout he's created.
That being said, the 1020 stands alone if you want an interesting device. It's a good telephone, it's imaging abilities are well documented & the mapping second to none.
If Elop can keep making things like this then he may end up being the only Microsoftee that can deliver flagship mobile hardware that is actually good. That's not happened before and testament to the Nokia of old.
Despite the Lumia growing me, I still have the N8, now repurposed in an underwater case as a camera / timelapse device, we won't see another phone like it after these events and that is a bit sad.
For the days when plugging in extra things to your thing was a thing.
The Trojan Horse theory, while vaguely plausible, I still believe to be far less likely than the two simplest and most obvious explanations.
1. Rightly or wrongly, he liked Windows Phone and thought it was a good way to differentiate from all the Android makers out there.
2. He was promoted above his ability and, faced with not having a clue what to do, did what most people do when that happens: He went running back to what was familiar, in this case Microsoft and Windows Phone.
One day I will want to update my 1020. If Nokia can keep producing phones of that quality, they'll have me for as long as the platform and the devices serve my purpose.
.. "Nokia has said that it will pay a compensation package of $25 million dollars to CEO Stephen Elop .. in the wake of Microsoft's plans to buy Nokia's phone business for 7.2 billion dollars, including a portfolio of patents and services" ..
"When Elop came in as Nokia CEO, Nokia was Number 1 in smartphones sales .. It had the MeeGo OS .. This was the device Elop abandoned and threw out!"
Are you really delusional enough to believe that MeeGo would have garnered any appreciable market share going up against Android, iOS, Windows Phone and whatever else Samsung and some Chinese companies have up their sleeve? If Elop has not gone down the Windows Phone path the company would have just sunk faster.
Nokia could have tried the Android route. I don't think they stood a chance of getting anywhere with any of their in-house stuff. By the time they got desperate and hired externally (Elop) that ship had sailed. See Blackberry for details.
Personally I still think Windows Phone was a better bet than Android, as only Samsung have managed to make any money from Android handsets in the last 4 years, and they were already dominant by the time Elop could have got a decent range of stuff to market. Back when he took over there was a chance that Windows Phone might have taken off quicker. There's still a decent chance that it might prosper. It's still growing in market share - even if most of that is at the bottom end of the market.
Had Nokia gone Android I think their phone division would now still be losing money, although on higher sales, but they'd have had no-one to foist a loss-making bits on. But they'd also be struggling to make any money out of their mapping division (which they've kept and is profitable), becasue you couldn't ship a mainstream Android phone without Google maps and therefore couldn't charge for their own on top.
Failure to bring their innovation to market had screwed Nokia before Elop took over. Crap management since the middle of the last decade. Makes a nice fit with Microsoft really, about whom you could say exactly the same thing. Windows Mobile 5 and Symbian were OK, for the hardware of the time - shame they didn't bother to replace them, until the competition had shat upon them from an enormous height.
...it was up against -- without Nokia, Windows Phone would probably be dead by now.
Also, the "whatever else Samsung and some Chinese companies have up their sleeve" seems to pretty much BE MeeGo: Samsung's Tizen is a spin-off, Jolla's Sailfish a direct successor, whatever Firefox and Ubuntu are doing probably pretty similar, and while I really don't know much at all about what the Chinese are up to, that's probably because they're copying MeeGo as-is (or -was).
(For the pirates of the Yellow Sea.)
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