A venerable wince

Jean-Louis Gassée wrote an analysis of Nokia's situation which contains this key piece of speculation:

Apparently, the current Windows Phone OS is built on the venerable Windows CE kernel. Setting veneration aside, Microsoft would have decided to use a more modern foundation for Windows Phone 8. And said modern foundation would not run on today’s hardware.

Classic Microsoft, and hence the paucity of developers embracing Windows Phone. No amount of marketing can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, the people writing code have to deal with the real platform, not the glossy ads. Apple's solid Unix foundation in iOS, plus the thin Objective-C framework, are a winner in mobile. Android's Linux, plus a heavy Java framework, struggles. But a Wince OS with yet another half-baked Microsoft framework is DOA for developers.

And more from Dan Frommer, on Microsoft's terrible mobile comback and Windows 8 prospects:

But it will, again, have to be so amazing that people and/or carriers will really take notice and consciously switch their allegiance. And the odds of that happening, based on Microsoft's track record in mobile, are slim.

 The only, desperate, hope I've seen came from a comment on Gassée's piece:

An Android injunction as a result of the current Oracle-Google trial (Probability? Is anyone paying attention?) would open the doors wide open for Nokia Windows phones

 The probability is practically non-existent. At worst a judge would order payments on RAND terms, but it is far more likely that Oracle will lose in its attempts to copyright Java.