Opinion: Lumia Devices WILL get WP8/Apollo

I honestly wasn’t planning on posting this here as it has no basis and is just speculations which is why I wrote it up on my side-project blog; but once I saw that Jay posted a bunch of rumors together I decided to hell with it let’s join in on the fun.

The whole basis of my assumption relies on one basic factor: “BT transfer”. Currently Bluetooth on WP 7.5 devices is almost useless beyond headset/car pairing and pairing to PC (not even sure if that’s possible); so why on earth would Nokia bother implementing NFC into the Lumia 610?

Let’s dig a little deeper, the current build of WP doesn’t even support NFC (which was the excuse used when Nokia was asked why it was excluded from the lumia 800); so why would you put something in a device if you can’t even use it? Short answer- because it will soon enough. Recently Stephen Elop went on record saying that one of the features to come along with WP8 is the ability to send V-Cards via BT (a perfect use of NFC- “tap to send V-Card”). At this point I’d like to point out that the C7 also had an NFC chip that was disabled until Symbian Anna supported it; so it wouldn’t be the first time that Nokia implemented technology that isn’t fully supported in a device with plans to activate/support it in a future update.

The last piece of “evidence” is the interesting timing of the NFC-Lumia announcement; if your going to make a modified version of a device shouldn’t you wait till the first version hit’s the stores at least?? Further more why not announce it at MWC which was less than a month before the 610 NFC announcement (which was also surprisingly pretty quiet). My thought on the matter is that they had a NFC 610 up and running but weren’t sure if it would run Apollo/WP8 but once they got the thumbs up from MSFT that it could support it (maybe there were questions about the lower RAM capabilities? or possibly MSFT had’t given them the complete requirements for WP8?) either way it does deserve the question to be asked, could it be that the 610 can run WP8.

Also just a reminder NFC support was one of the “leaked” features of WP8:

Support for microSD cards is also added, along with NFC support. The latter will work either via NFC built inside a smartphone or via NFC enabled SIM cards.- VIA

NFC and Wallet. Windows Phone 8 will allow users to securely pay and share via NFC and manage an integrated Wallet experience-VIA

And if the 610 can really run Apollo then by default that should mean that all other Lumia phones should run it too (considering that the 610 is the only one that’s under-powered).

Of course this little tweet just helps strengthen my case:

@MS_nerd

Time to drop the biggest effin’ #tip bomb: Nokia & Microsoft are testing a build of Apollo on the Lumia 610. Not ‘performant’ enough. Yet.

Well of course I might be crazy or maybe it’s all the studying getting to me but I’m currently inclined to think that all 2nd gen WP devices will get the thumbs up to apollo. Your Thoughts?

Go ahead and check out my original post here: http://bit.ly/HYpkgw

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Category: Nokia, Symbian, Windows Phone