He further announced that ST-Ericsson's Nova Thor U8500 will be the first chip to power these phones. This sounds plausible because STM used to supply chips to Nokia, long before the former formed a 50-50 partnership with Ericsson. Bozotti also confirmed that ST-Ericsson will be one of the two chip suppliers for Nokia's Windows Phones. Qualcomm may most likely be the other supplier, as all WP7 devices released till date are powered by its Snapdragon processor.
Since the U8500 is a dual-core SOC (system on chip) supporting Full HD (1080p) video recording capabilities, we assume that it may possess 1080p playback capability as well. In addition to WXGA touchscreen support, the processor allows simultaneous display on two discrete XGA screens. Interestingly, the Nova Thor supports multiple operating systems. We would love to see this feature leveraged for a dual boot option involving WP and Symbian OS. The U8500 is based on ARM Dual Cortex A9 processor, with the ARM Mali 400 GPU handling the 3D graphics subsystem. It also incorporates the usual bells-and-whistles such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, HDMI output, USB 2.0, GPS, and full web-browsing experience for next-generation smartphones.
Nokia may have been criticised for selling underpowered phones in recent times, but now it finally seems to have paid heed to competition from other well-specced smartphones. Moreover, as its Symbian mobile OS has already lost ground to rivals Android and iOS, Nokia will most likely bring out the best that it has got for the final stand. The Finnish mobile giant sure doesn't seem to be ill armed this time around.
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