According to some new reports, Nokia wasn't really a honest and loyal spouse to the Windows 8 Phone platform that it claimed to be. Before Microsoft began negotiations to acquire the Finnish phone maker, Nokia was supposedly already testing out Google's popular Android OS on its Lumia range of phones.
There was a possibility that Nokia could have made a switch to Android post late 2014, according to Nick Wingfield in New York Time's Bits blog. Why then? Because Nokia's contract with Microsoft expires around that time. A team at Nokia was testing Android on several Lumia handsets long before Microsoft started negotiating its $7.2 billion acquisition.
"Getting Android to run on Nokia's hardware was not a Herculean engineering effort, according to the people familiar with the project," says the NYT.
And here's the best Part, Microsoft was aware of this project, thereby allowing some analysts to believe that this incident triggered the Nokia acquisition as a last ditch effort to save Microsoft's future in the mobile business.
It all makes sense since Nokia is very vital for Microsoft's ambitions of becoming a devices and services company. Why? Well, Lumia handsets from Nokia account for around 85 percent of the Windows Phone market. Other manufacturers like HTC and Samsung have been struggling to woo customers to the operating system and so Nokia is their most important hardware partner. So if Nokia had ditched the Windows platforms and had chosen to go with Android post 2014, it would have been the end of Microsoft's mobile story.
We're certain that there isn't a future for Nokia's Android project since the company now sits in Microsoft's pocket.
