14 DAY TRIAL // Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is reported to be working on the development of a new handset that should land in September at the Nokia World event, running under Google's Android platform. While rumors about a possible Nokia device featuring Android have been on the market for quite a long time now, with nothing really consistent surfacing, this time around it seems that the odds are that the handset will indeed prove to be real.
As many of you might already know, the world's largest mobile phone maker has been losing ground on the market lately, and the move towards Android should help it strengthen its leading position. According to a series of industry sources, cited by the Guardian, the company will indeed unveil the touchscreen smartphone at the upcoming September event. At the same time, the device is reported to come with full integration of Google's Android operating system.
The move towards Android is rather surprising for Nokia. On the one hand, the company has been struggling to enhance the presence of its Symbian OS on the market, while, on the other, it has also announced plans to turn the platform open source. This move should help it gain more market share, and the process has started already, with the Symbian expected to fully turn open source sometime in mid-2010. Moreover, the company also has another OS, Maemo, which it is enhancing in the background and which is expected to reach full maturity in the near future.
Although the trend on the market is to move into Android's courtyard, Nokia was not expected to join the move. Not only that the company hasn't said anything until now about the possibility that it would be working with Google's platform (although it hasn't denied it either), but using it would mean that it has failed to promote its own OSes well enough. It still remains to be seen if the traction Android has seen among manufacturers has caught Nokia as well, or whether the company will remain faithful to its 'ready to become open source' platform, so stick around to learn more on this.