Nokia's first Windows Phone to be launched in a year's time

okia will launch its first Windows Mobile phone in roughly 12 months from now, the Finnish firm’s India MD, D Shivakumar said. Shivakumar also defended the deal with PC operating system maker pointing to Microsoft’s strengths in areas such as socia networking, search and other software.

In a regulatory filing in the US on Friday, Nokia had said that it expected most of its smartphones to migrate to the Windows Mobile platform only in two years, setting off speculation that it will take two years to implement the strategy.

Nokia and Microsoft had announced a deal last month under which Nokia promised to build smartphones only on Windows platform, and to abandon other platforms like Android and Symbian.

According to Canalys, a global IT market research firm, the share of Windows in total smarphone sales had plummeted to just 3% during the last quarter of 2010 despite having been present on more than half of the smartphones in the early 2000s. In comparison, Symbian, which is being discarded by Nokia, had a marketshare of 31%.

Critics and consumers dismissed the last major version of Windows Mobile, called Windows Mobile 6, as being clunky and resource-hungry, though they have been kinder on the new version -- Windows Mobile 7, unveiled earlier this year.