It’s no surprise that we’re still seeing an influx of new Nokia Symbian-powered smartphones, as the company has only just begun the restructuring of its resources to focus on Windows Phone 7 hardware. We’ll likely see that first WP7 model within a year, but what effect will that have on the company’s Symbian production? Nokia has released a rough plan for its sales goals over the next two years, showing a gradual abandonment of Symbian in favor of WP7 by 2013.

Once Nokia starts releasing WP7 devices, it’s expecting a smooth, steadily-progressing turnover in sales from Symbian smartphones to Windows models. Considering the company will still be pushing out new Symbian handsets until 2013, there’s still plenty of time left to see Nokia squeeze some innovation out of the line, but we imagine the attention of its engineers will be pretty soundly on WP7 by mid-2012.

Besides the OS transition, Nokia also sees the portion of its total sales coming from smartphones to rise slightly by 2013, though the company doesn’t expect any sort of major change-up in its feature phone operations. What it did talk about, though, was the possibility for broadening the WP7 market to include devices with a wider variation in cost. Right now all WP7 hardware is on a relatively level playing ground; if Nokia can deliver a budget model while still meeting Microsoft’s minimum specs, that could account for getting some new customers interested in upgrading to their first smartphones.

Source: Nokia (pdf)

Via: WMPoweruser