Nokia Plans to Launch Multiple Windows Phones in 2011

Since the partnership announcement earlier this year, talk about Nokia's plans for future Windows Phones has slowed down to a crawl. We were fully expecting Nokia to have a presence at MIX '11 and even yesterday's Mango Preview Event, but sadly that never happened. However, it could just be that Nokia is hard at work on their next Windows Phones and in a talk with Forbes Jo Harlow, Nokia's Vice President of Smart Devices, basically said as much. Not only that, but if Nokia does manage to hit their end of the year deadline, Harlow said that we're likely going to see more than one Nokia-powered Mango handset. She also teased that the Nokia concept renderings that we saw at the beginning of the year "are not characteristic" of what they plan to go to market with, saying that their heritage of hardware innovation is what they will bring to the platform. Plus Harlow hinted that those rumors of a dual-core Nokia Windows Phone isn't entirely out of the question.

Here's the full quote with all of those juicy details:

[Nokia's target to launch their first Windows Phone] won’t be a single phone, either. Harlow says the first batch of Nokia Windows Phones will be a “small portfolio” of multiple devices.

There has been speculation that those early devices will largely resemble current Nokia (Symbian) phones, in part because of the time crunch and in part because soon after its February announcement Nokia released design renderings that appeared similar to existing Nokia phones. Harlow, however, says those early renderings are “not characteristic” of the first Windows Phone devices Nokia will release. “One of the differentiations we intend to bring to the Windows Phone platform is hardware innovation,” said Harlow. “You will see that in our first devices and our future devices.”

That differentiation may extend to more capable processors. To date, Nokia has avoided the trend of packing a lot of horsepower into mobile devices. Harlow said that will likely change, in both Nokia’s Windows Phone and its Symbian handsets. While she cautioned that dual-core processors need to be integrated carefully into phones to maximize performance and preserve battery life, she said such upgrades are “directionally the kind of investment in performance Nokia is looking to bring [to its devices].”

We already know that Microsoft has Nokia handsets running Windows Phone and that Nokia will be launching their first handset with Mango, but hearing it from someone at Nokia makes us all the more excited. Are you ready for some Mango action on your next Nokia smartphone?

Via: Engadget
Source: Forbes