Well, this has been speculated for the past week or so and has finally been announced today.

What are people's thoughts?

Up until my current phone I have always had a nokia but I finally got fed up with Symbian and moved to WP7 on a Samsung (who I consider the next best hardware manufacturer).

For nokia at the moment I think this is the right move, their hardware has always been top notch in my opinion, just the software has been a pile of ****e. WP7 doesn't offer the number of features that they had built into Symbian, yet, but it offers the look and potential for a lot more.

I'd like MeeGo to be up and running already, I've had hands on with a Nokia device (one of the tech guys at CERN had it, not a mobile, but not a tablet) that ran Nokia's early version of the OS, it was good.

They looked at Android but felt that they wouldn't be able to distinguish themselves enough from the other carriers, which I tend to agree with, which then left them with only WP7 as the other choice.

With the combined resources of Nokia and Microsoft pushing WP7 forward I'd hope to see some big improvements in the next year, it does need it to keep pace with iOS and Android.

Not entirely. WP7 is meant specifically for people who don't already have smartphones or otherwise wouldn't buy one (like the people on these forums that complain about "apps"). That's why it's so dead simple. I do agree that it needs to keep some sort of feature parity, but it's not really meant to be the same thing.

But anyway, what phone are you talking about? Can you provide a link?

Oh I totally agree on the idea of keeping it simple and that's what I like about WP7 at the moment, but certain areas of the OS seem a but rough around the edges compared to others, better map navigation will be nice (which nokia are very good at), I'd like to cut down the contacts when I go to my phone book to only those that have a phone number, simple stuff like that which shows the OS is only just out of the door which Nokia will help polish and identify quick.

The nokia this guy had was either the n900 (think this is a bit new) or the n810, something like one of those anyway. I don't recall him saying it could make calls, but apparently the models I've listed can...Nokia often have variations in different europeon countries, I know for a fact what he had wasn't for sale in the UK.

I've always wanted a Nokia phone because they just look like sex, but for some reason Verizon never carried any (or if they did, they were low-end ****ty ones). Does Nokia not make CDMA phones anymore? And no, I won't switch to a ****tier carrier.

Moving away from Symbian was definitely the right move for Nokia. But will invading a weak WP7 phone market give higher returns than adopting a better "mobile ecosystem" through Android? ONLY TIME WILL TELL...

An article or something would have been nice. I had no idea if they were doing some sort of deal or if Microsoft had bought Nokia.

Nokia's concept phone already looks better than any of the current crop of WP7 handsets.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/exclusive-nokias-windows-phone-7-concept-revealed/

Who knows, who cares, I'm getting a...

I'm getting a...

****.

I think it's a great idea. I had the choice between an original iPhone and an N95, and I went with the Nokia. I have no regrets. That phone was awesome, and it was the last brilliant phone Nokia made (imo).

By the time my 18 month contract was up, the 3G was out and I moved over to Apple. The two companies have diverged so drastically in the intervening two and a half years that Nokia needed to do something drastic to make themselves relevant again. WP7 looks pretty good, if rough round the edges like poley said. More decent competition for Apple and Google can only be a good thing. I hope they do well.