Windows Phone 8 is right around the corner. However, let’s not forget about Windows Phone 7.x. WIndows Phone 7.x is running on every single Windows Phone out there and every single one of those device will not update to WP8 and instead get an intermediatery update called WP 7.8. What happens to WP 7.x after 7.8? Nobody knows. Here’s a better question though: What happens to Windows Phone 7.x after Windows Phone 8. Remember that all WP7 apps run on WP8 and the vice versa isn’t true so do you see developers compiling apps for WP 7.5 now? For couple of months – sure (you can’t miss out on millions of potential customers) but we are going to see WP8 apps being developed even more quickly than WP7.x apps in no time.
Now the interesting part: Our trusted source has revealed to us that WP 7.5 won’t just die off after WP8. Nokia is going to go a step further and release cheap Lumia 610 like device in India running WP 7.x instead of WP8 after the launch of Windows Phone 8 and probably some other countries we haven’t been able to confirm. This is an important piece of information which could mean a parallel OS approach from Nokia. Nokia Asha sales are doing pretty well. However there’s still a gap to be filled between top end of Asha and Lumia 610 which is exactly where most of the sale takes place in India. Another thing our source revealed, we are going to see Windows Phone 8 devices in India late October / early November (Remember the date 23rd October) and most importantly – Nokia IS going ahead with the launch of Lumia 900 with the price tag of nearly 30k Rupees next month. This is probably the dumbest thing Nokia has done since the “Asha” branding. Imagine buying a device for 30 k Rupees and next month a device pops out with the same price and next generation OS. That would be painful. Oh well, you can’t stop them now.
We are extremely excited for September 5 Nokia Windows Phone 8 reveal. However you must keep in mind that low – mid end is where Nokia was the king and with WP8 it will be hard to reach lower segments considering the minimum requirements so using both the OS parallely makes a lot of sense to me. Let’s see how things pan out next month. Keep tuned in for more.
