Stephen Elop: Next wave of Lumia WP8 smartphones to offer better differentiation

The first Windows Phone 8 Lumia smartphones might still be a few months away but that did not stop Nokia CEO Stephen Elop from teasing what might or might not be a part of the first Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8 operating system. During today’s quarterly earnings call Elop stressed on Nokia’s location services and said he wanted Nokia to be the “where” company while Facebook and Google are the “who” and “what” companies. He also hinted at future phones that would be full of sensors and probably even measure the user’s pulse rate.
When asked about how the next Lumia smartphones would be different from the current ones, Elop explained how Nokia did not have much time last time to differentiate its products from others since the tie-up happened pretty late in the software development life cycle. However, this time he promises the next wave and wave after that of Nokia Lumia devices will offer better differentiation than the current lot. He mentioned Nokia has been working closely with Microsoft since the beginning during this cycle and the both companies are dependent on each other – Nokia for the platform and Microsoft for Nokia’s location services, which will become the default maps and navigation service across all Windows Phone 8 devices irrespective of the vendor.
We expect Nokia to experiment more with materials and industrial design in its next portfolio of Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8 operating system. Nokia has already announced its PureView camera technology will come to a Lumia smartphone in the future and we think it could happen with Windows Phone 8, which has been built from scratch and shares its core kernel with Windows 8 operating system.