Nokia yesterday finally confirmed it would be debuting new Windows Phone 8 devices on September 5, and that seems to have emboldened Chris Weber, the company’s executive vice president of global sales and marketing.
In a tweet last night, Weber said, “Samsung take note, next generation Lumia coming soon.”
While the tweet doesn’t seem like much on the surface, it’s actually pretty rare for phone makers to call each other out directly (outside of court disputes). It’s also a direct shot at Nokia’s biggest competitor — don’t forget that Samsung toppled Nokia’s 14-year run as the world’s top phone maker back in April. In terms of overall phone sales last quarter, Samsung held 21.6 percent, while Nokia lagged slightly behind at 19.9 percent, according to Gartner.
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Windows Phone 8 will modernize Microsoft’s platform by offering new features like multicore processor support, better support for businesses, and a revamped Start screen, but we haven’t really seen much from the OS to get us truly excited. So far we’ve been expecting slightly bigger and faster versions of Nokia’s Lumia line for Windows Phone 8, but Weber’s chutzpah could point to features that will truly differentiate the new phones.
We loved Nokia’s Lumia 900, but the device only had a few months on store shelves before Nokia announced that it wouldn’t be updated to Windows Phone 8, potentially killing much of the excitement for the device from gadget hounds.
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