Nokia Android Phone Will Have Execs Peeing In Their Pants
In case you haven’t been able to tell, it’s numbers week in the business world. Nokia was one of many manufacturers to hold their Q4 and end-of-year financial conference calls, and we didn’t follow it for obvious reasons. But one single sentence from Nokia’s Stephen Elop has people wondering: is Nokia ready to switch to Android?
Elop said Nokia needed to change rapidly in a fast-changing market, and that considering “multiple ecosystem patterns” is something that they should be doing.
Analyst Geoff Blaber of CCS Insight believes Nokia was clearly hinting at the need to adopt an established third-party operating system outside of Meego – or that they’ve already decided on it – and says that the option that would be most likely is Android.
The last time Nokia dispelled rumors of them using Android, they described adopting it as being like “peeing in your pants for warmth.” He was referring to the company’s Finnish background, where Finnish boys would pee in their pants to keep warm in the winter.
It was a clever way to say Android isn’t a viable long-term solution and is only good for short-term prosperity, just as peeing in your pants in freezing weather would just result in frozen gonads shortly after.
It’s no surprise that the man who said that – Anssi Vanjoki – is no longer with Nokia: he left the company just a few days later.
New reports out of DigiTimes also estimate Nokia won’t come anywhere near their projected growth rate thanks to the advent of low-cost Android handsets from the ecosystem’s least and even most popular manufacturers. The lows like Huawei and ZTE to the highs like Samsung, LG, and Motorola will all have affordable options scattered throughout 2011.
With Nokia’s market share not getting any better as Symbian loses mind share and while Meego has yet to ship installed on a Nokia device, it’s clear why they’d need to “pee their pants” and go with the very course of action they’ve been trying to get away from. [via Wall Street Journal]