How long will it take for other competitors to come up with something very near to Apple’s iPhone? What are the necessary steps to be taken to outshine the iPhone? Here we have some strategies straight from the desk of Nokia. Nokia has come up with a plan to tie up with Microsoft to fight the Smartphone battle and Microsoft reportedly has agreed to give whatever is needed to see the iPhone replaced by what is supposed to come out of this Micro-Nokia union.

Microsoft has agreed to provide Zune software to Nokia to produce something that is innovative and unique like the iPhone. For Nokia this is maybe the last resort as the giant mobile maker is slowly losing its foothold in the smartphone market. Another reason that possibly bothers Nokia is the iPhone making to the Enterprise club while it still struggles to even hang on in spite of having produced many E-class gadgets. Nokia has finally realized that its wide ranges of symbian mobiles are no match to the lone OS X iPhone in terms of multi tasking and speed.

We’ve been hearing rumors that Microsoft will come up with its own answer to the iPHone, maybe the zPhone. It now looks as if Microsoft is content to stay low and watch the battle, but supply software armaments to those willing to compete with Apple. Later this year, Nokia will be launching one “iPhone killer” in  5800 Tube model and will possibly support iTunes type of music functionality. We first need to see how successful is this first attempt.

Nokia tying up with Microsoft is an interesting development, and we do expect something substantial to result from it. But some basic questions remain: Nokia runs on Symbian, and probably has no idea what Windows Mobile looks like, even. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, isn’t too fond of operating systems other than Windows. So how exactly are they hoping to pull this off? The actual iPhone Killer, if it ever gets made, is far in the future; in the meantime, this  collaboration promises to be quite entertaining.