Has Microsoft killed Nokia X?

Its a dramatic day at Microsoft as the company has announced the loss of 18,000 jobs – and it looks as though Nokia’s X series of phones will be killed off too.

Earlier this year Microsoft completed its purchase of Nokia’s phone business. Whilst most of the company’s phones run Windows Phone (so no problems there), the X series run a customised ‘fork’ of Android… which as you might imagine, once the phone business was fully within Microsoft’s clutches painted a rather large crosshairs on it.

CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to staff “synthesising” the strategic direction to the company (yes, that’s the word he chose to use). Presumably many of the job losses are going to come from the part of Microsoft that used to be Nokia, given it only needs one team now.

The individual tragedy of job losses aside, in the email he mentions that “In addition, we plan to shift select Nokia X product designs to become Lumia products running Windows”.

What makes this an interesting change is that just last month the Nokia X2 was announced. Perhaps worse still, it means that my speculation about Microsoft keeping Nokia X as a back-up plan is damn wrong. So it looks like it is the end of the road for the Nokia Android experiment.