Nokia And Microsoft... But How About Android?

Putting together the Microsoft-Nokia alliance announced last week with Gartner’s new figures on the smartphone market, and you would think the entire device world revolves around Nokia’s focus on keeping runner-up Research in Motion at bay.

And at first glance, you’d be right. The alliance does a number of things for both Nokia and Microsoft.

• For Nokia, it makes Symbian-based smartphones a less-expensive alternative to RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise Server, because it won’t cost enterprises extra to manage Nokia devices using Exchange, and the alliance makes Microsoft Office into a native Nokia application; more . . .