Microsoft formally announced Windows Phone 8 yesterday.
There were some interesting technical details in the announcement: it permits running native code, will apparently support individual app distribution centres for corporate users, and has a less boring home screen.
They also confirmed, as expected, that there will be no upgrades from Windows Phone 7.
I’m not sure this will be such a big deal for existing users. I think it’s easy to overstate how much users generally care about updates, and at least this way there is certainty—in contrast to Nokia’s update mechanism for Symbian which involved announcing the update first, then rolling it out to devices over a period of months or in some cases not at all.
It can’t help the sales potential of current devices though.
What are Nokia trying to sell?
Looking at Nokia’s UK site now, it shows 24 phones (that’s down from 105 phones and a laptop, just before the February 2011 reshuffle).
Of those 24, four run the Windows Phone 7 whose non-upgradeable successor was just announced.
A further four, I think, run variants of Symbian. The most up-to-date (Belle) was recently effectively canned. But hey, only one phone ships with that anyway—the rest come with even more out-of-date variants.
The remaining 16, if I’m counting correctly, run the S40 Java-mobile feature phone platform and are presumably sold at pretty thin margins.
Nokia are I suppose hoping to have WP8 phones out by Christmas. That’ll be nearly two years after their “burning platforms” strategic reset, and they’ll be pretty much back where they started: abandoning three legacy platforms, pinning their hopes on a new one starting from zero market share. How much cash have they got left?
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