Nokia

Nokia Corporation (Finnish: Nokia Oyj, Finnish pronunciation: [ˈnokiɑ], UK /ˈnɒkiə/, US /ˈnoʊkiə/) is a Finnish multinational communications and information technology company, founded in 1865. Nokia is headquartered in Espoo, Uusimaa, in the greater Helsinki metropolitan area. In 2014, Nokia employed 61,656 people across 120 countries, conducts sales in more than 150 countries and reported annual revenues of around €12.73 billion. Nokia is a public limited-liability company listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. It is the world's 274th-largest company measured by 2013 revenues according to the Fortune Global 500. The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.

The company currently focuses on large-scale telecommunications infrastructures, and technology development and licensing. Nokia is also a major contributor to the mobile telephony industry, having assisted in development of the GSM and LTE standards, and was, for a period, the largest vendor of mobile phones in the world. Nokia's dominance also extended into the smartphone industry through its Symbian platform, but it was soon overshadowed by the growing dominance of Apple's iPhone line and Android devices. Nokia eventually entered into a pact with Microsoft in 2011 to exclusively use its Windows Phone platform on future smartphones.

Windows Phone

Windows Phone (WP) is a family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone features a new user interface derived from Metro design language. Unlike Windows Mobile, it is primarily aimed at the consumer market rather than the enterprise market. It was first launched in October 2010 with Windows Phone 7.Windows Phone 8.1 was the last public release of the operating system, released to manufacturing on April 14, 2014.

History

Development

Work on a major Windows Mobile update may have begun as early as 2004 under the codename "Photon", but work moved slowly and the project was ultimately cancelled. In 2008, Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile group and started work on a new mobile operating system. The product was to be released in 2009 as Windows Phone, but several delays prompted Microsoft to develop Windows Mobile 6.5 as an interim release.

Windows Phone was developed quickly. One result was that the new OS would not be compatible with Windows Mobile applications. Larry Lieberman, senior product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Developer Experience, told eWeek: "If we'd had more time and resources, we may have been able to do something in terms of backward compatibility." Lieberman said that Microsoft was attempting to look at the mobile phone market in a new way, with the end user in mind as well as the enterprise network.Terry Myerson, corporate VP of Windows Phone engineering, said, "With the move to capacitive touch screens, away from the stylus, and the moves to some of the hardware choices we made for the Windows Phone 7 experience, we had to break application compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5."