It seems to go without saying that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is not going to be a fan of competing mobile operating systems. In this case, Android. After all, Nokia has several Windows Phone handsets available. That said, speaking at a recent press conference that was held to discuss Nokia’s Q4 earnings, Elop had some interesting comments about Android.

Mainly, Elop talked fragmentation and about a closed system. He spoke about how Android is facing a situation “where the amount of fragmentation that you’re seeing is increasing as people take it in different directions.” Going on to say that the fragmentation is only being “offset by Google’s efforts to turn an open ecosystem into something that’s quite a bit more closed as you’ve seen quite recently.”

Taking that statement, specifically the quite recently part at the end and it becomes a bit harder to determine what he is referring to as he didn’t go into any specifics. Speculation suggests that he may have been referring to Google’s recent decision to quit offering support for Exchange ActiveSync.

Of course, this is far from the first and likely not the last time we are going to hear about fragmentation within Android. Not to mention, there is always room to criticize on both ends. This also seems like a clear case of Elop making a push for hardware and software that he supports — namely, Nokia branded Windows Phone devices. If nothing else though, this seems to make it clear that Elop believes Nokia can move forward without Android.

[via The Verge]