Thursday, April 4, 2013
Nokia CEO Teases About Windows Based Tablet
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop hinted during an interview with Australian Financial Review that his company will be venturing once more to the tablet category. Back in 2007, years before the iPad, Nokia introduced the N800 Internet Tablet, which was followed by the N801 the year after. They looked more like phablets by today’s standards and like other tablets before the iPad, they did not take off well.
“We haven’t announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely,” Elop told the newspaper. “We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time.”
It is pretty inevitable that Nokia’s future tablet will run on Windows, especially that Microsoft is Nokia’s partner in its Lumia line of smartphones. However, Elop is not discounting the possibility of developing a Nokia tablet that runs on Android, but they might be late in the game.
“On the Android side, we were very worried that we would be entering Android late relative to everyone else in the industry, that perhaps one vendor was already well on the road to being the dominant Android vendor at the expense of everyone else,” Elop added. “If we look back two years to when we made the decisions, then Samsung was big, HTC was pretty big, and Motorola was pretty big. Of course, what has happened in the two years is that Samsung has captured the lion’s share of it and the others have been squeezed down to much smaller market share. We were worried about exactly that pattern forming.”
