The Smartphone Wars: Nokia’s fallback?

Here’s an interesting news story alleging that Nokia has ported Android to the N9. There are pictures at engadget.

It’s unclear what, if anything, this means. If Nokia’s management were sane and competent, it would be easy to conjecture that they’re preparing a fallback strategy in case WP7 continues to bomb. But it would be pretty difficult to sustain any theory that Nokia’s management is sane and competent on the facts of the last two years.

And it’s just gotten more difficult, since the CEO of Nokia has announced that he will kill Meego on the N9 even if it’s successful! Which of course guarantees that nobody will buy the soon-to-be-orphaned N9, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Good Goddess…after his one moment of insight as he wrote the burning platform memo it it has come to look as though Stephen Elop is so utterly incompetent that he couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse. He’s just gone from mere strategic stupidity to active sabotage of his own company.

This is really sad. Call me sentimental, but I mourn the Nokia that did a fine job of flooding the world with cheap, well-designed cellphones back in the 1990s. The only good thing about this stumbling, shambolic finish is that the Nokia/Windows alliance probably completely scuppers Microsoft’s already miniscule chances of getting any traction in the smartphone market.

UPDATE: Changed an idiom that confused several readers.

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