Although chief executive officer of Nokia Corp. pre-announced Windows Phone smartphones almost a year ahead of their release and killed sales of Symbian-based handsets, Stephen Elop seems to be too shy to talk about the company's plans for media tablets. The only thing that is for sure is that Nokia sees Windows 8 operating system as "an opportunity" for the tablet market.

Microsoft Windows 8 will support both high-performance x86 and low-power ARM microprocessor architectures, which means that it will be able to provide the nearly full Windows experience on ultra-portable devices and even run certain Windows applications. Microsoft specifically does not allow to use Windows Phone operating system on tablets claiming that the latter should have the same feature set as desktops or notebooks. In general, if Nokia wants to keep its strategy aligned with Microsoft, it should use Windows 8 for its tablets.

Stephen Elop does not exclude entering the tablet-computer market, though he said the company hasn’t announced plans to do so. Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8, which will have a tiled user interface with dynamic updates similar to Windows Phone, is like a “supercharged” version for tablets, Mr. Elop said in an interview with Businessweek.

"There s a new tablet opportunity coming. We see the opportunity. Unquestionably, that will change the dynamics of the tablet market," said Stephen Elop.

Earlier this year the chief executive of Nokia said that he would not like to release a unique tablet, not just another one on the market. Since then, Nokia has dumped MeeGo operating system and the only viable choices for it are Google Android as well as Windows 8.

"There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace, only one of them is doing really well. My challenge to the team is I don't want to be the 201st tablet on the market that you cannot tell from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia prospective and so the teams are working very hard on something that would be differentiating relative to everything else that's going on in the market," said Mr. Elop.

Perhaps, there is no need to release the 201st tablet for Nokia. Nonetheless, given the fact that there are loads of Android-based media tablets and there is iOS-based iPad family from Apple amid lack of Microsoft-based media tablets, it is clear that the whole Windows platform lacks a very important element. Unfortunately, Nokia does not seem to have immediate plans to correct this.

Tags: Nokia, Windows, Windows Phone, Windows 8, ARM