Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft was a marriage of desperation, with so many fundamental conflicts as to make it “a chemically unstable mix that won’t survive the test of time”. So says Andreas Constantinou, research director at the analyst, VisionMobile, who believes the only logical end-game is for Microsoft to acquire Nokia’s smartphone business, leaving Nokia to concentrate, in the short-term, on creating mass-market phones at unbeatable levels of supply chain efficiency.

Constantinou revealed his take on the deal in a blog post which he has kindly agreed to let us run as a Guest Column. In the post, he claims that, according to VisionMobile’s sources, Nokia asked both Microsoft and Google to bid for its smartphone business. Following a long negotiation cycle with both parties, Nokia came to a straightforward conclusion; it would back Microsoft, whose total bid equalled more than $1bn (including patents, licensing fees, marketing support and revenue shares) and not Google, who’s bid was about half that.

You can read Constantinou’s analysis of the deal here.