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An AT&T executive confirmed today that the company is in negotiations with Nokia to sell its Windows Phone smartphones in the U.S. next year.
Glenn Lurie, head of AT&T’s tablets unit, revealed to Bloomberg that the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier was working out the final details with the Finnish handset maker.
“We look at every promotional period separately and decide what we’re going to spend our dollars on and what we’re going to put our efforts in,” Lurie said in an interview at a conference in Barcelona. “But nothing to announce there on that yet.”
The partnership would be a boon to Nokia, which has steadily lost market share since Apple’s iPhone was introduced in 2007. It has gone from 40 percent of the total market in 2009 to less than 20 percent in the most recent quarter.
Nokia unveiled its first two Windows Phone smartphones last month at the Nokia World Conference in London. The handset maker said the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710–the first two devices in its revamped smartphone portfolio that will support the Microsoft Windows Phone platform–would be available through 31 European carriers.
However, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said U.S. consumers would have to wait until early 2012 for the Windows Phone devices. But he promised support for 4G LTE, as well as CDMA, which is a good indication that a deal with Verizon Wireless may be in the near future.
