Nokia Turning to Android?
There’s an interesting piece in the UK’s Guardian claiming ‘Nokia turns to Android in smartphone war’. This comes after VentureBeat’s revelation that ‘Nokia plans Android netbook for 2010′.
Why is Nokia allegedly doing this when it has spent and continues to spend huge sums on Symbian? My guess is that it’s insurance in case Android becomes very successful and/or Symbian isn’t as successful as they hope. Creating a separate product line would allow Nokia to hedge its bets.
If Nokia are developing Android phones as well as netbooks then I would expect them to produce a Nokia-centric UI on top of Android in the same way that HTC have created Sense UI for the HTC Hero. Now that Android has a native SDK, it would even be possible for Qt to be extended to create Android applications. It would be logical for a new Nokia Android UI to be Orbit based allowing Qt applications to be written across both Symbian and Android.
UPDATE: Nokia now refute this. However, it says "The world’s top cellphone maker Nokia said on Monday it was not working on introducing a phone running on Google’s Android operating system". Notice the denial of phone but not necessarily netbook.
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