Nokia (NOK) CEO Stephen Elop on Thursday shot down rumors that his company might be interested in developing Android-based smartphones. During Nokia’s fourth-quarter earnings call, the executive reiterated his support for the company’s Asha phones and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone platform, while shutting the door on earlier Android rumors.
“We are clearly innovating with Microsoft around Windows Phone, and are focused on taking that to lower and lower price points,” he said, according to TechCrunch. “You will see that over time [we will] compete with Android. But at the same time we’ve said consistently — and we’re just beginning to see it in the Asha full-touch products — that we will continue to innovate around our Asha smartphone line in order to compete with the very lowest levels of Android.”
The executive also took shots at Google (GOOG) and the openness of its Android operating system, or lack thereof.
“The situation that Android is facing, where the amount of fragmentation that you’re seeing is increasing as people take it in different directions, is of course offset by Google’s efforts to turn an open ecosystem into something that’s quite a bit more closed as you’ve seen quite recently,” Elop said.
Elop concluded by saying that Nokia is “not in a situation where we are considering something other than Windows Phone combined with what we’re doing with Asha.”
