Finnish group Nokia aims to revamp its feature phone offering this year and add more and cheaper Windows Phone smartphones to fight back against the fast-rising popularity of Google's massmarket Android phones.
"We are addressing this with our planned introductions in 2012 of smarter, competitively priced feature phones with more modern user experiences," the company said on Thursday in its annual report.
Though smartphones - such as Apple's iPhone, which provides a platform for third-party application developers - are where the industry's growth is concentrated, feature phones - which have only limited support for third-party software - still account for most units sold.
Rumors that Microsoft is about to buy Nokia's smartphone division are "baseless," Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in an interview with PCMag.
At the CES 2012 trade show, Elop promised a broader array of US smartphones along with more announcements at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in February, but stayed coy when asked about recent Operating System (OS) purchases.
The interview after the break has been edited for length, but it's all Elop's words.
Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, is developing a Linux-based mobile OS that will power its low-cost smartphones as it bids to sell a billion of such under-US$100 (€75) device.
The Nokia OS project called "Meltemi" and led by Executive Vice-president Mary McDowell, was revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
An Emailed statement from a Nokia spokesman described the plan as part of exciting projects of the Nokia Mobile Phones team."
The "next billion" Nokia low-end handsets will be made touch-capable and app-enabled through Meltemi, according to Thenextweb.com.
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