Could this be Nokia’s Windows Phone 7?

If you haven’t heard already, Nokia has announced a partnership with Microsoft, making Windows Phone 7 (WP7) their “primary smartphone strategy”.

Nokia will also integrate their existing ecosystem into Microsoft’s. For example, Ovi Maps will become a core part of Bing’s mapping services and Ovi’s apps will be, through some way, brought into the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Watch the following press conference:

The partnership has provoked a tonne of negative criticisms. Most users and observers are shaking their heads, saying that Nokia should have gone with Android instead. Nokia’s stock price seems to agree, taking a nose dive shortly after the announcement.

But while we were hard at work trying to Photoshop a mash-up of Nokia phones with the Windows Phone 7 user-interface to go along with an article announcing that very piece of news above, Engadget obtained images of what could well be the very first Nokia WP7 handsets!

As you can see from the picture, the hardware design is distinctly Nokia. The chiseled back and striking colours look gorgeous. We would have preferred a physical keyboard, though.

Still, keep in mind that these pictures are merely conceptual. But we like to think that “conceptual” means “anything goes”, so this phone might well have a 2GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM and 80GB of storage. Oh and the screen looks like it has a resolution of 1,280 x 800 – can you hear the Retina Display crying?

Jokes aside, would you buy a Nokia-branded Windows Phone 7?

(via Engadget)