[metachris]

He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. "It just didn't feel right," Elop says to the crowd. "We'd be just another company distributing Android..."

Sounds kind of fair of Google to not give Nokia special concessions their other Android partners don't get. Nokia could have used Android anyway, just without Maps and the Android market.

[recoiledsnake]

And then fall behind the curve as Google makes new builds available exclusively to partners? Fork it and risk another Meego/Maemo fiasco?

Without Google apps and Android Market, its hard to sell a phone. To make the requisite alternate software, it will take a year plus, all while parallelly developing hardware, might be a bit too much even for a huge company like Nokia especially seeing that they seem to lack software dev skills.