Way back in February ST-Ericsson, a venture of STMicroelectronics and Ericsson, stated that it was looking to deliver chips for Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS platform and that these will be ready by the time Nokia kicks off production of its forthcoming Windows phones.

However, Qualcomm is still the sole silicone provider for Windows Phone-operating smartphones and even the recently unveiled Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 is powered by Qualcomm chipsets. According to ST-Ericsson, Nokia has now selected it as a supplier for future Windows Phone devices.

"We are pleased to have been selected by Nokia as a key partner for Windows smartphones, in line with our goal to be present in all segments and major operating systems," said Gilles Delfassy, president and CEO of ST-Ericsson. "Our NovaThor platforms continue to gain traction as they enable customers to bring great smartphones to the market."

Delfassy mentioned the NovaThor platforms, which is the company’s latest ARM-based multi-core CPUs, optimised to deliver highest performance at lowest power consumption.

The NovaThor U9500 for instance is a high-performance application processor for smartphones and tablets that offers dual-core processing technology, high-resolution touchscreen display support up to WXGA (1280 x 768), a high-end 3D graphics accelerator (ARM Mali 400 GPU) as well as support for full HD (1080p) video recording. Hopefully these will be the kind of specs that we’ll see in Nokia’s Windows Phone running smartphones as of next year.

Microsoft’s Andy Lees, president of Windows Phone, has recently gone on record as saying that dual-core powered smartphones and 4G/ LTE network support, are on their way to Windows Phone OS running mobile devices, but did not go into the specifics.

 

In related news Nokia also recently revealed that N9 users will be able to download a software update during this quarter (Q4) for their smartphone, which will bring usability improvements, such as music controls keys, on the lock-screen to the device. No local release date is available for the update as yet.