Nokia to Adopt Phone 7?

There is a lot of noise in the technology world right now about the possibility of Nokia adopting Microsoft’s Phone 7 operating system. This would be a huge coup for Microsoft if they managed to get Nokia to do this. Nokia is far and away the largest manufacturer and seller of mobile phones in the world.

Nokia owns about 40 percent of the mobile phone (cell phone—for my American readers) market. The next closest is Samsung with about 20 percent.

To put this into perspective Apple has about a 3 percent share.

So as you can see, Nokia is *huge*.

Microsoft have already got the number two player, Samsung, signed up for the Phone 7 operating system and I seem to recall reading that, of all the Phone 7 brands available, Samsung is currently the highest selling.

But if Microsoft can get Nokia to adopt the Phone 7 operating system then that will give them access into huge markets such as India, Africa, and a much better chance at Europe where Nokia is by far the preferred brand.

The advantages for Microsoft are obvious. The advantages for Nokia are not so obvious—but one of the key points of interest for Nokia is that by adopting the Phone 7 operating system they would then have a way of getting their phones into the corporate world. The Phone 7 operating system fits very well with the corporate world. It comes with the corporate world’s favourite e-mail client pre-installed, which is Outlook. And it can integrate—as you would expect with a phone operating system developed by Microsoft—very well into Microsoft Exchange, which is what 98 percent of corporations use as their datacentre mail system. Phone 7 also comes with useful incarnations of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft OneNote. All tools used by medium to large companies everywhere in the world.

Nokia have long wanted to get their phones into the corporate world but have never managed to put together a solution that those who set the standards within businesses were happy with adopting. The right Nokia hardware with Microsoft’s Phone 7 as the operating system might just get Nokia onto the corporate list of phones to consider when picking the next standard for internal use.