Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop was recently in Kenya, on a two country stop in Africa. In the country, Elop met journalists and developers at the iHub. Pertinent questions were what many see as Nokia's degradation of the Nairobi office and the firms strategy to adopt Windows Mobile and shun Android, even as it faces a huge on-slaught from low cost Android handsets in it's mid-end and high-end segment. Elop explained the various decisions as part of a key strategy to retain is market dominance.
 

According to Elop, a change in strategy was necessary at Nokia as the firm had become slow. After a change of strategy, Nokia was able to ship the first batch of Windows phones in a third of the time it had previously taken it to ship its devices, showing that the strategy was now working.

Nokia's acquisition of Norway's Smarter Phone will be very helpful as they invest in the lower tiers of its platforms. This will be seen in new product announcements.

Elop believes that there are a couple of competitive ecosystems . "It used to be that you would compete one device over another device," he said. With Microsoft, Nokia is building a third ecosystem. An ecosystem is the hardware, software and services on a device such as search, unified communications, e-commerce, music and gaming. "When you buy a smartphone, you are buying that whole promise. Both Nokia and Microsoft will contribute resources to the creation of the ecosystems, where Nokia would contribute hardware, software and services while Microsoft will contribute services and the Windows Phone platform .

Nokia's first Windows Phone product, the Lumia 800 has been getting a lot of market attention. In the second week of January, Nokia introduced the Lumia 900, a larger screen format device with 4G LTE radio standard for the United States, large battery and optics.The device was introduced at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest exhibitions in the world, where it won the best of show in the US, the first time Nokia has won such an award in the company's history, according to Elop. This he says is a very good perspective of Nokia's partnership with Microsoft.

Nokia's Lumia smartphone will be coming to more African countries, beyond South Africa in the coming months as Nokia focuses on markets and applications on a per country basis.

There are also plans to have the Lumia range cover the full range of smartphone price points, starting with the Lumia 900 at the high price points and future devices that will focus on lower price points.

Elop though refused to make any specific future device announcements. When asked about whether a Nokia 801 phone existed, he humorously replied "There's rumours everywhere. 801, what's that? "