Nokia was caught between a rock and a hard place - committed to using Microsoft's Windows Phone software but needing Android software to reach more cost-sensitive customers, CCS Insight's head of research Ben Wood said.
So this means that they will use arch rival Google's Android in the low cost segment and run WIndow's on the expensive segment of the market.
This looks like a desperate attempt of branding Windows as an exclusive and superior Smartphone OS - for the rich and successful (Apple style?) - while the poor will have to settle for Android.
The Microsoft technology also does not work on the chip sets found in cheaper smartphones, the fast-growing market crowding out Nokia's Asha feature phones, which lack the full Internet capabilities of smartphones. Windows is to expensive to maintain and to bloated for low HW specs.
For Nokia, it was a question of making this humiliating reversal in its strategy or facing irrelevance in this category of phones, Wood said.
In reality this is an admittance of a failed strategy :
"That a soon-to-be Microsoft-owned company, which is the owner of the original operating system, is moving to Android is almost an admission of failure," he said.
So even NOKIA now will now be surfing on the success wave of Linux Android. Android is rapidly becoming the one OS to rule them all.
Apple has a 15 % market share; the rest is pretty much Android dominated. Windows has not managed to play a big role in the Smartphone market.
NOKIA X will be auto-connected to the Microsoft "cloud" - not Google's.
