Elop: Microsoft sale to Nokia rumour is baseless; S40 getting smarter and smarter (smartphone?:p)

Elop had an interesting interview with PCMag. A lot of good questions asked. Some of the more interesting ones.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398755,00.asp

Are Nokia selling the smartphone division to Microsoft?

As we’ve described it before, the rumors are baseless, and some people who seem to enjoy generating rumors are running out of fresh material, so it seems to have come up again. I have nothing else to say.

They also ask Elop on the Smarterphone Purchase.

We haven’t provided details of a key element here of our overall strategy. Last February we announced three pillars to our strategy. And one of those pillars was about increasing the R&D investment in the mobile phone space. You’ve talked there of the fact that QT would be the development platform for that initiative. Clearly there’s some new work going on, new investments, you’re seeing little bits and pieces of acquisitions and things happening. We haven’t been more specific than that, but clearly there’s an initiative underway there that relates to our mobile phones efforts to connect the next billion people to the Internet.

So, smarterphone for the next billion with Qt as the development platform. PC mag asks if it could take over S40.

So again, we haven’t provided any details, but S40 is a platform that continues to see significant investment. It’s getting smarter and smarter with each successive device and release, so there’s still a lot of activity there.

Smarter everyday. LOL S40 is getting SMARTER. Smarterphone OS 😛 Meltemi, S40. Getting so smart that eventually it’s a smartphone?

I’m also excited to hear what Nokia’s New disruptions team are doing. Remember, they were tasked to

find that next big thing that blows away Apple, Android, and everything we’re doing with Microsoft right now and makes it irrelevant—all of it

Elop is asked about other WP manufacurers who may have fancier specs. He kinda implies he’s more interested in the actual performance of things rather than what’s on paper. Knowing HTC’s 16mp, Elop says:

“I’m going to differentiate on “fancier specs,” because the specs that I appreciate are who takes the best picture, who has the best video-conferencing imagery and so forth.

What we’ve done with the Lumia 900 is we’ve done a lot of work around the optics of the camera. We demonstrated this during our press conference; for example, with the primary camera, we showed how with a variation in focal length and wide aperture, our pictures…get a much wider collection of the information, regardless of pixel count or anything like that.

Part of this is part of our marketing opportunity, to help show people the results. Where is the best picture? And that is the spec I’m most interested in.

That would seem to suggest that hopefully the Nokia Lumia 900’s camera has much better performance that what we’ve seen from the 800 where it hasn’t performed as well as expected (may be due to the processing but even N9 wasn’t fairing that well on camera comparisons).

PC Mag asks how Nokia will communicate the quality instead of what companies are doing now and just inserting higher numbers for the sake of it. 16MP. Really? It seems to be that Nokia is focusing on the key specs that matter. The ones that may have significant impact to the user’s overall experience. Excuses or someone who’s got the right priorities?

It’s the same argument on many different functional specs. You’ve got N+2 of these, we have N; is that better? Often it doesn’t matter, or it’s even worse. Part of our marketing opportunity is to help explain and show the experience, so when you pull out a Lumia and see the experience with that processor, with that screen and say, wow, this is fast, it doesn’t matter that someone else has something that appears to have more of something.

There’s more questions to check out over at

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398755,00.asp

Cheers Shymon for the tip!

Category: Nokia