Nokia said on Friday that the company will be using Qualcomm chips in its upcoming Windows Phone handsets, but will also be looking at other chipset suppliers for future handsets. As we already know, Nokia and Microsoft formed a partnership back in February.
For now, the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system is only available on Qualcomm’s chips, but soon that might change. “The first Nokias based on Windows Phone will have the Qualcomm chipset. Our aim is to build a vibrant ecosystem around Nokia and the Windows Phone OS and with that intent we are naturally continuing discussions with a number of chipset suppliers for our future product portfolio,” said a Nokia spokesperson.
Under the partnership with Microsoft, Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its main Operating System for its smartphones. This will allow more phones to run the Windows Phone operating system while subsequently boosting its market share and making it a market leader. Nokia plans on sharing its hardware design and language support with Microsoft which will allow Microsoft to sell a wide range of smartphones with a wide price range to satisfy all shoppers.
Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop plans on marketing its phones in a “very low price point” and expect this to happen “very quickly.” This pretty much means that the new Nokia phones will now be pushed to a wider market base due to the lower prices. This will, hopefully, improve sales for both companies.
There has also been an uproar between Nokia’s other partner, Intel, over ARM and Atom chips. Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini recently admitted that Nokia probably “wasn’t the right partner for the company” and said that the deal was partly to blame for the delay in its smartphone chips hitting the market. “In hindsight, Nokia was the wrong partner to have picked.”
