The journey of Nokia from over the years to its present state now is one that is rather surprising and its destination is quite uncertain. Undoubtedly, Nokia became the world leader when it came to the RF performance for cellphones as its devices were the best at receiving signals and holding calls. In fact, the old Nokia 3395 is capable of making calls from places where even the best smartphones now cannot pick up reception, and until LTE is fully rolled out all over the world, the old Nokia devices will be the best civilian emergency gadgets!
When the smartphone revolution began, Nokia was left behind because of its failure to adopt the Android OS, which along with Apple clawed into the marketshare that it had. Its superior RF capabilities didn’t count for much when the smartphones that featured rather cosmopolitan capabilities took the market by storm. Nokia had the Symbian OS with it but not many people liked it and its hardware was too underpowered. While it is still maintaining a strong stand in the low end market in emerging markets, it appears that the smartphone segment will never be its own. That is, unless its partnership with Microsoft works out.
Nokia and Microsoft, the most well known software giant have been developing the Windows Phone 8 platform jointly for mobile phones, alongside the Windows 8 OS that Microsoft plans on unveiling later this year. On paper and when the figures are looked at closely, Nokia looks on the verge of collapse as its revenues are down 20% and it is running at a 4.5% operating loss and giving it a market cap of a mere $10 billion. It is also quite significantly in debt with respect to its cash reserves but the integration with Microsoft might just account for something in the future. Microsoft’s Windows 8 is going to be running on most of the computers in the world and if the company manages to integrate the platforms between PCs, the Surface and other tablets and the smartphones, it might just prove a turnaround for the company. Of course, someone who is running a Windows PC might not always choose a Windows Phone smartphone but if the integration is seamless, it might become the obvious choice. For now, the future of Nokia relies heavily on the Windows Phone 8 and the results will be known shortly.
