Nokia: cheap Windows Phone 7 phones coming

The Gadget Show  Monday 21 February 2011

Nokia has promised affordable WinPho smartphones

Nokia has promised its move to adopt Windows Phone 7 and ditch its own MeeGo platform on its high-end smartphones won’t drive prices upwards.

Microsoft’s new mobile OS, launched late last year, demands a strict baseline spec from handsets that has pushed all the WinPho devices we’ve seen so far firmly into the luxury bracket.

However, with Nokia traditionally strongest at the more affordable end of the market, there have been fears that the company will have to give up its entry-level market share because of Microsoft’s stringent hardware requirements.

But Nokia says that isn’t the case at all, and that finding ways to make Windows Phone handsets cheaper had played a major part in the negotiations between the two companies.

“We have become convinced that we can do that very quickly,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told Finnish journalists recently.

Of course, it depends what your definition of “quickly” is. The first WinPho-powered Nokia smartphone is only expected to land around the autumn, and we’d imagine Nokia is more keen to renew its presence at the top end of the smartphone market first before getting involved in the dog-fight in the entry-level market.