> Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.
Can you elaborate? It's hard to understand in light of all the extra cruft the carriers put on their Android devices.
Nokia wanted to use its maps and not Google's, but still be a Google services licensee. That's a no go as far as Google is concerned. Microsoft let Nokia replace its Bing maps with Here, and in fact licensed it as a replacement for the Bing mapping data.
Third party apps on carrier devices that have the Google Play store are in addition to the Google services, not replacing them. The Google services are all there, even if they're hidden.
And, as a fairly long article in Business Week (I think) detailed a couple years ago, Android was actually the first choice over Windows Phone, but Google and Nokia couldn't come to terms: Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.
Having said all that, I can understand some of the conspiracy mindset around this. Nokia wrote Elop's contract in a way which basically gave him a huge golden parachute if the handset division was sold to someone else, and that really is nuts -- I doubt the intention was to explicitly reward failure, but it's damn easy to paint it that way. But this whole "secret mole" thing? Frankly, whatever one thinks about Microsoft's business practices, I don't think it's plausible that they're really clever enough to pull this off.