Andy Abramson had an interesting concept in his blog this week about Intel and Nokia working more closely together. The basis of the concept starts with the battle in silicon right now. Its and interesting question to contemplate for a number of reasons.
1) The WiMAX, ATOM revolution has not produced the momentum that Intel would like. Google, Comcast, Sprint and all the other elves involved with Clear are not enough to get the billions of cellphone devices looking to include Intel in the their space. So forging a relationship with Nokia where they could have a stronger presence in the 3G world makes sense.
2) If the goal was not to be a device company but to turn Nokia into a platform strategy, that would have a lot of value to Nokia, which has been coping with a market that is heading towards less customizaton. Nokia has been stuck delivering lots of phones with nuances to carriers, why not make this more like the PC market. You could even bring the PC manufacturers into the mix and have them be the private label.
3) It allows Nokia to get reset on so much of its legacy Symbian flavoring. Bringing the Nokia Developer community to the web where it can stop the internal battling and take advantage of the tools coming of age as we head toward HTML 5.0. The IPhone has everyone scrambling and it maybe that the goal should be to keep the apps as close to web development as possible.
While it is fun to speculate, I am not sure this is the move, that Intel wants to do next. I can see more advangates to Nokia, but it maybe that I just see the flaws in Nokia’a armor right now. Intel can afford to have several missteps in this market and unless their PC manufacturing customers are ready to attack the ARMy of cellullar players it maybe that all these things can be done with Nokia without the merger.
But if does happen, remember Andy said it first.