It's a Nokia phone, not a Microsoft phone. It takes an average of 18 months to bring a phone to market. The Nokia acquisition was completed just two months ago, and the teams must be fairly independent right now. While the Nokia acquisition was being completed, Nokia was legally required to act as if the acquisition would fail.

China approved the Nokia acquisition only on April 8, what would have happened if they didn't? Without an Android strategy, Nokia would be left without any momentum for atleast a year in a fast moving market. Remember how FTC denied AT&T and Tmobile's merger?

The only interesting thing here is that Microsoft didn't immediately kill the X2 and lay off Nokia's Android team. They could do that anytime or sell that division to some other company. There would be a lot of people at MS calling for its head. The headline, story and most of the comments seem to be implying that it's Microsoft that conceived and implemented this idea which is wrong.