Barcelona this week, aka Mobile World Congress, and the thing thats stuck in my head isnt the phone everyone expected to be the big deal. Samsung did their thing Monday night, Galaxy S5, fingerprint scanner on the home button, a heart rate sensor on the back next to the camera (why), IP67 water and dust resistance so you can supposedly drop it in the sink and itll be fine. Fine, whatever, its a flagship, it does flagship things a little better than last years flagship. Ill believe the heart rate sensor is useful when I see literally anyone use it more than once.
What actually got me was Nokia.
Nokia announced three new phones on Monday, the X, the X+, and the XL, and they run Android. Not Windows Phone, which is the thing Nokia has been betting the company on since 2011. Android. Forked Android, technically, no Google Play, no Gmail, no Maps, none of it. Instead you get Nokias own store, Bing baked in as the default search and maps provider, Outlook.com, Skype, the whole Microsoft stack sitting on top of the Android open source project like a costume.
Heres the part that makes my head hurt a little: Microsoft is buying Nokias phone business. That deal has been sitting there since September, its supposed to close sometime this quarter, and everyone assumes itll go through fine. So a company that in a few weeks might literally be a Microsoft subsidiary just stood on a stage in Spain and launched a new line of Android phones. Not "heres one more Windows Phone at a lower price point," which would've been the boring, sensible thing to do. An actual Android phone, with a home screen that apes the Windows Phone tile look so hard its almost funny, like Nokia couldnt quite let go even while jumping ship.
I get the business logic if I squint. Windows Phone still cant buy real developer attention at the bottom of the market, and theres a whole tier of buyers in India, Brazil, wherever, who want a smartphone for something like 90 euros and dont especially care what's running under the hood as long as WhatsApp works. Android app compatibility (mostly) solves that overnight in a way years of Windows Phone marketing never did. So from a pure get-cheap-hardware-into-hands standpoint, sure, it tracks.
But I cant stop picturing the meeting where this got approved on both sides. Somewhere in Redmond someone signed off on their soon-to-be-owned hardware partner launching phones that run their biggest rivals operating system, dressed up to look like their own OS, in the same quarter the acquisition is meant to close. Thats either extremely confident long-term thinking or somebody just wasnt talking to somebody else. I know which one my money's on, and it isnt the confident one.
(Side note, completely unrelated: I spent forty minutes on hold with my own carrier this week trying to sort out an upgrade date discrepancy on my account, and the rep kept insisting my contract renewed in April when I have the confirmation email from November sitting right in front of me. Nothing to do with Barcelona. Just needed to say it somewhere.)
The rest of the MWC lineup is fine. Sonys Xperia Z2 looks like every other Xperia with a slightly better spec sheet bolted on. LGs G Pro 2 has a knock-code unlock thing thats mildly clever and Ill probably forget exists by April. None of it is going to stick with me past next week. The Nokia X will, mostly because I dont think Ill ever fully understand what problem it was solving that a cheaper Lumia couldnt have solved just as well, minus the identity crisis.
If youre the kind of person who likes betting on corporate strategy the way other people bet on football, keep an eye on how Nokia prices these once they actually ship. Rumor going around is somewhere in the 90-115 euro range depending on the model, no carrier subsidy needed. At that price, in markets where a first smartphone is still a big purchase, spec sheets and OS purity matter a lot less than does-it-run-the-two-or-three-apps-I-actually-want. Which, again, is exactly why Android and not Windows Phone. Doesnt make it any less strange to watch happen live, on a stage, in real time, from a company that by summer might not even get to make this decision on its own anymore.