MICROSOFT BUYS NOKIA FOR $7.2BILLION

It was once the phone in everyone’s pocket, but now Nokia has been bought out by computer corporation Microsoft.

The US firm is paying £4.6billion for the Nokia conglomerate’s phone-manufacturing division as it attempts to wrest the mobile  market from Apple, Samsung and Google.

Nokia, which was the world leader in mobile phones for 14 years, selling one billion handsets since 1982, has fallen behind in the era of the smartphone.

The Finnish company’s handsets, such as the Lumia series, already use Microsoft’s Windows system.

The firm has been outstripped by both Samsung, which uses Google’s Android software, and Apple’s iPhone, which runs on Apple’s own system. Only 7million phones running on Windows were sold in the second three months of 2013, compared with 31million iPhones and 187million on the Android software.

In Nokia’s heyday, its unmistakeable ringtone, an excerpt from a 1902 composition called Gran Vals, became the signature sound of the first mobile-phone generation.

Microsoft rose to international ubiquity with its Windows operating system for personal computers and is now trying to follow Apple’s lead by combining production of software and gadgets. As well as developing Windows for smartphones, it has launched the Surface tablet to compete with the iPad.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer described the Nokia purchase as ‘a signature event’.