According to Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop, the prices of smartphones which will use the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platform are expected to fall quite fast. Nokia, last week, announced that it would start phasing out its Symbian platform and to a certain extent MeeGo as well, and will adopt Windows Phone 7 as the uniform platform for all the smartphones produced by it. This led to anxieties in the company faithful of the firm losing out on a considerable demand in the lower priced smart phone segment as the Windows phones are supposed to be placed in the middle and high range price brackets.
However, if we are to believe Elop, one of the underlying motives in the company’s talks and negotiations with Microsoft was to convince Nokia that the phones using their platform could reach very low price points in near future. And it appears that Microsoft was successful in resolving the Finnish cellphone giant’s doubts as Elop said that he was sure that low prices would be achieved fairly quickly.
With the chief goal of giving competition to Apple in the smart phone segment, Microsoft has specified very high hardware requirements for the phone models which will use its mobile platform, which in turn has increased the costs of such handsets and limited the potential market for these devices even before they have been launched. In attempts to reduce the prices and broaden its market, Microsoft has planned to look beyond Qualcomm for the chipsets which will be supported by the software. The signs, however, weren’t good for Nokia as their shares dropped by 20 points after the announcement of the deal with Microsoft. Regardless of this, the company officials still believe that the deal will be beneficial for both the parties in the end. The final agreement between the companies is supposed to be signed in the next few months.
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