Consumers should expect to see the first Nokia-branded Windows Phone by the first quarter of 2012, according to the managing director of the mobile maker's Indian arm.
In a story by Mumbai-based Daily News & Analysis, spotted by Boy Genius Report, D Shivakumar said the first Nokia Windows Phone would launch in roughly 12 months.
Mr Shivakumar gave a similarly vague timeline to The Economic Times saying a Nokia Windows Phone would appear ''sometime in the next 12 months''.
He reiterated a position given in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing that Nokia would transition its primary smartphone platform from its Symbian OS to the Windows Phone OS within around two years.
In what appear to be fairly contradictory statements, Mr Shivakumar said Nokia would phase out Symbian during that two year period, but later denied that the company was abandoning Symbian, saying it remained a ''great product''.
He told Daily News & Analysis Nokia plans to launch around 50 new phone models in 2011, including around 20 smartphones built on Symbian. He suggested Symbian-based smartphones would continue to be vital in emerging markets such as India, where Nokia plans to connect ''the next billion'' to the internet.
''So we will have significant innovations in browser and form factor among other new things, because in India people will connect to the Internet more on the mobile phone than on the personal computer,'' he said.
Following Mr Shivakumar's comments, Nokia's strategy for capturing the low-cost smartphone market appears fairly unclear - Symbian would seem to be the company's best option for such devices at this point, with Microsoft targeting the Windows Phone platform at the higher-end smartphone market. What the company plans to do with Symbian out of the picture is unknown.
Of course, two years is a long time in the mobile game, and what the market will look like once it comes time to call curtains on the Symbian platform is anyone's guess.
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