This may disappoint the Windows Phone people slightly, but while I think that the interface shows a lot of promise (read my review from October) and that Mango is an improvement (listen to the discussion on the latest Tech Weekly podcast), it's not actually that important.
Nope, the thing about Nokia is that it is a steamroller. People who have been counting it out because Stephen Elop has decided to abandon Symbian, which has of course hit employee morale.
Well, these things do hurt. But Nokia is a resilient company, and its expertise is in manufacturing (if you've compared a Symbian smartphone to an Android, iPhone or... Windows Phone device lately you'll know it isn't in software).
Nokia sells around 110m handsets per quarter of which more than 20m are smartphones; and almost exactly 50% of its mobile phone revenue comes from those smartphones. Nokia is a fantastically well-oiled machine for selling phones, and has been doing it for years; it sells more phones than any other manufacturer. And it sells more smartphones per quarter than any other manufacturer.
Nokia has enormous geographical reach, and it's virtually synonymous with "mobile phone" in a number of countries. Sure, the US and Europe have been going off it. But it's strong in other regions. It has good relationships with carriers. It can shift phones when it wants to.
So if Nokia turns up in 2012 with smartphones running Windows Phone, carriers aren't going to turn it away. They're going to be delighted. Especially if Nokia can use its legendary supply chain strengths (a hardware element) to push prices down. Once Nokia starts shipping Windows Phone products in any numbers, it's going to sell them as fast as it can make them. What's not to like? It's a friendly interface. It connects. It's not maddeningly confusing.
Look at it the other way around: how, exactly, could Nokia screw this up? Only if it can't get Windows Phone to run on its phones. Likelihood? Tiny - HTC, Samsung, ZTE (new partner), LG have all managed it.
Or, alternatively, if it prices them too high. But Nokia can make in greater volume than those others.
Or if it pushes the Symbian handsets too hard. But again, that's easy enough - price Symbian to sell, price Windows Phone to profit.
Conclusion: by the end of 2012, Windows Phone sales are going to explode. Its user interface really won't matter. It's not Mango that will make it sell. It's Nokia. Quite what its market share will be in the US and Europe - and whether it will be as large as in other regions - is less sure, but (reality check) those regions aren't the world.
A prediction? Windows Phone should easily get 20% of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. It could conceivably do better.
Luckily for me, it came with the old firmware, so when I get home I can run the Chevron tool and install the Samsung registry tool, keep it dev unlocked etc. so I'll be ready to hack Mango the second it leaks. It's going to be a chore installing all my apps again, though.
