Nokia has confirmed that it will indeed release a Windows Phone in 2011.

Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO said that "step by step, beginning this year, we plan to have a sequence of concentrated product launches in specific countries, systematically increasing the number of countries and launch partners." Ray Haddow, Senior Manager for Nokia communications has confirmed the CEO's statement in a report from thisismynext.com.

Nokia has partnered with Windows earlier this year and promised to build hardware for the Windows Phone OS even though the manufacturer has its own OS, the MeeGo to toy around with. Coming from a disastrous quarterly financial loss which saw the company lose 368 million euros and far greater than the projected 1.4 million loss, the Windows Phone news was the slim glimmer of light for the Finnish company. Of course in a smartphone market already dominated by Apple and Android both Nokia and Windows are gambling on their alliance to get a foothold in the competitive market.

Early word on the Mango, the Windows OS is generating good buzz but it's still up to Nokia's Phone hardware if the partnership could work. The company's first produced handset, codenamed Sea Ray, has similar specs to the N9 MeeGo handset that Nokia released a month ago. Sea Ray specs are unclear, but the N9 has a 3.9-inch AMOLED display with 854-by-480 resolution, a 1 GHz processor, an 8-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, a polycarbonite body and either 16 GB or 64 GB of storage.

The Sea Ray will be released this year but it won't release the same time in every country. According to previous reports, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the U.K will be the first launch markets.