Windows Phone has seen some exciting news over the past few months. We"ve heard that Nokia had partnered with Microsoft and later that a large update was coming to the OS, introducing a lot of key features that many consumers were hoping for.
Since the deal was made, the details of the Nokia partnership have been rather silent, however Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop has now given an insight into some of the things we can expect, in an official interview by Nokia. He revealed that locally relevant applications were very important at Nokia and that there will always be “those global applications that everyone likes to use all over the world”. However the most intriguing point that he made was when he mentioned that Nokia would combine all of their supported platforms, S40, Symbian and Windows Phone which would lead to an online application store that is essentially a mega-database of applications from three operating systems.
In addition to this news, Microsoft’s Brandon Watson announced at a presentation in Helsinki that Nokia will bring a customized application store to their devices. “It will look slightly different on the phone from the one that’s for all the other vendors, and they will have more control over the merchandising,” “Nokia’s invested tons of money around building apps, so one of my main jobs right now is ensuring that we don’t lose a single developer to Android or iOS,” Watson said.
Expansion into the largely populated countries including China, India and Russia is now on Nokia’s checklist according to Watson as he later followed by saying “Nokia expands distribution quite a bit, including China, India, Russia — it’s very important to have a marketplace in those countries where developers can sell local apps. China is going to be very, very big.”