> I think it's best that they leave it to MS.

If they do it, they'll be a commodity phone maker and will have to compete in price with other WP7 phone makers. All three of them.

If they don't, past experience suggests they'll end up with smartphones that no one in North America will want to buy.

> they'll end up with smartphones that no one in North America will want to buy.

It's not like everyone in NA wants to buy a WP7 phone now. If they change the UI enough, maybe someone will want it.

I don't disagree. I just haven't seen any evidence from Nokia, based on their own UIs, that they can make the WP7 UI more desirable, rather than less or the same.

Having the choice between 100% certain doom and 95% certain doom, I'd go for the second. Just not very enthusiastically.

I think this argument could go either way. As a "commodity" WP7 phone maker, Nokia might be able to get 20% of the WP7 market on brand recognition alone. But a crappified version of WP7 might earn them 0% of the market instead.

As someone who values a fairly broad oligarchy of phone ecosystems, I'm frightened that Nokia will have 20% of a WP7 market that is perhaps a little more than one or two million devices per year, and stagnant.

WP7 (or 8 for that matter) isn't going to be helped in this kind of scenario by a bleeding vendor that can't sell more than a few hundred thousand devices. As consumers, we're not going to be helped by the death-by-a-thousand-downsizings of Nokia (a business that has a good record otherwise of innovation in technology and market development, at least until the last few years) and a side show of a user community that can't support development of innovative software and business models.

> All three of them.

Three? There's atleast 4 in the US, HTC, Samsung, LG and Dell.

Fair enough. All four of them.

How many do they need ?

They have the two largest smartphone manufacturers outside of Apple and RIM, in HTC and Samsung.

Among the large manufacturers, all they are missing is Sony Ericsson and Motorola. And I believe only Motorola has hinted that they are Android only.

And Nokia is still larger (not for long) than #2 and #3 in terms of worldwide sales.

Actually, they could line up a couple dozen WP7 phone manufacturers and still fail. What they need is not manufacturers, but people buying and using the phones. This is not happening.

They also need developers creating content for the platform, which isn't happening either. Chicken and an egg there, though.

>They also need developers creating content for the platform, which isn't happening either. Chicken and an egg there, though

It is, WP7 marketplace already has around 15,000 apps and is growing faster than the iPhone and Android stores at a similar stage.