Nokia Will Not Make A Windows-Mobile Device

This story has been all over today, that supposedly Nokia and Microsoft have been chit-chatting about the Finnish handset manufacturer building a Windows-Mobile powered handset in the future. I’m amazed at how this story started at ITwire saying (accurately) that Microsoft was urging Nokia to consider the idea and has exploded to the point that apparently now Nokia is seriously considering this.

‘They obviously have significant investments in Symbian but there are a lot of places where we have significant synergies and we would love to see the day where those synergies would extend completely with Windows Mobile,” said John Starkweather, Microsoft’s mobile communications business international marketing director (kinda sad I had to copy and paste the guy’s title, no?). ‘We work closely with Nokia and we would love to have them go all the way,” he said. ‘It’s something we talk about all the time.”

Here’s three reasons it shouldn’t happen:

1. Windows Mobile is in direct competition with Symbian S60. Palm is the only company on the market to offer two competing OS on their smartphones, and check out how far they’ve come.

2. Nokia is heavily invested in Symbian S60. They’re one of the largest investors in Symbian, and they own S60, which is the UI overlay. They’ve spent millions in R&D to improve S60 3rd Edition, and are continuously moving forward with updates to that. They’re expected to officially show off the touch-enabled version next week at the Mobile World Congress.

3. Symbian is the most widely-used smartphone OS on the planet, and Windows Mobile is losing more and more to both RIM and now Apple’s iPhone. Why would Nokia, the market leader, want to hook into that?