Nokia running Android?

Nokia to run on an Android?

So would Microsoft really allow, it's soon to be purchased subsidiary, Nokia, to build and release a mobile phone running Android? It's my belief that they will, and in this article I will layout the reasons why they would be crazy not to.

To fully understand what is at stake here, you need to go back to September 2013 when it was announced that Microsoft where buying Nokia. A big surprise and a big story that might have lead you to believe that it was the whole of Nokia that Microsoft where purchasing, in fact it was only the mobile phone part of the business, with the rest of the company remaining in Finnish hands.

If you look at what Microsoft are getting you see a business with two distinct sections, smart phone and feature phone, and many believe they only took the feature phone part of the business to get the smart phone part they wanted. This is being disingenuous to the feature phones that Nokia produce, because if you look at Nokia's most recent quarterly results, they shipped 55.8 million units, compared to only 8.8 million smart phones, and this is why even today Nokia are still in second place as far as sales of mobile phones are concerned, behind Samsung, but ahead of Apple.

And this gives Microsoft a problem, technically Symbian, the operating system that run's these feature phones has been retired, and until Microsoft came along, the developers at Nokia had been working towards a forked version of Android replacing it. So what has changed?

In reality nothing, Symbian is only being used until a newer operating system is put in place, and the Windows Phone operating system, for the feature phone part of the business, isn't it. We all know that the Lumia range of smart phones is being heavily subsidized by Microsoft, but even they cannot 'give away' the phones for free, especially in the volumes reported in the last quarter.

Microsoft could lower the bar as far as the minimum hardware spec for Windows Phone, but they won't, and they shouldn't, doing so will give a poor impression of the operating system, and ultimately under value it. The fact is, there is a large number of people who want a cheep mobile phone, and Microsoft cannot let those customers go, it would almost be commercial suicide, they need to keep building phones that will be sold for under $30.

Microsoft only have two options, one build an entirely new operating system from scratch, that is designed for low spec hardware, and looking at their history shows that they are not able to do this successfully. Or two, take an existing operating system, that works on low powered hardware, and cut out all of the unnecessary features. And this is the way that it looks as though they are going, forking the Android Open Source Project at version 4.4, stripping out those parts they don't want, and don't need, and then producing a home screen that will probably look more like the Window phone than Android.

From where Microsoft stand, the Android option is one they would want to take if there were others on the table, but they way can look at it is that this might not have to be forever, as an Agile development they could surprise again in a couple of years time with a version of Windows that can scale all the way down to these low powered devices.

It is also worth remembering that Android is already a bit of a cash cow to Microsoft it gets royalties from ever device sold that is worth a total of $2 billion per year.