Fortunately for me, the topics were largely familiar, as several were topics I had written about, including layoffs at Nokia, Microsoft’s preview version of Windows 8, and the impact of the iPhone on Sprint.

Here’s a video of the show. It’s 45 minutes, but Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane and Iyaz Akhtar are a lot of fun. Plus, if you watch until the “randomizer” segment at the end, you will get to see this super crazy robotic pack mule the Army has cooked up:

“Plan B is that Plan A must succeed,” Saeijs told Swedish business daily Dagens Industri.

That’s quite a bet, particularly when success is anything but guaranteed. While Nokia has managed to ship one million of its Lumia Windows Phones to date, it continues to struggle. The company recently posted its third consecutive quarterly net loss, as smartphone shipments fell 31 percent and overall handset sales dropped 29 percent.

That said, the positive reception given the device so far does bode well for Nokia. Morgan Stanley expects shipments of Nokia’s new Windows Phones to hit 37 million units in 2012 and 64 million units in 2013.

If that proves true, there may be no need for a Plan B.

The three affected plants focus on smartphone production, and Nokia said it planned to shift much of that work to Asia, in order to be closer to its suppliers and speed up the time it takes to get products ready. Nokia will continue to do some customization work at all three plants.

“With the planned changes, our factories at Komarom, Reynosa and Salo will continue to play an important role serving our smartphone customers,” Nokia Executive VP Niklas Savander said in a statement. “They give us a unique ability to both provide customization and be more responsive to customer needs.”

The cuts will be phased in through the end of the year.

Nokia, of course, is in the midst of a major transformation, as it makes Windows Phone its primary operating system, shifting away from its homegrown Symbian OS.

The company previously announced other rounds of job cuts, including one related to the closure of a plant in Romania.

Someday.

Though its Symbian platform is burning down to ashes and it has lost its title as the world’s largest smartphone maker, Nokia is going to be just fine, says outgoing chairman Ollila. In fact, with the help of Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system, the company will remain among the top three players in the smartphone market, despite its plunging market share.

“Nokia will make it into the three,” Ollila told Finnish broadcaster YLE. “It’s completely obvious and the first signs are already there. None of the operating systems have taken off quickly. It will take time, as we have seen and as was expected.”

Well, not completely obvious — particularly after the horrendous 73 percent decline in fourth-quarter earnings the company recently reported. But Ollila says such financial tumult is to be expected from a big transition like this and the earnings slip doesn’t belie its potential for success.

“When looking at the bigger picture, it shows that three operating systems will dominate in the near future and each of them will have one strong manufacturer, with Nokia having a very good chance to be one of the three,” he said.

Nokia shipped 113.5 million units during the quarter, down from 123.7 million during the same quarter a year earlier, according to IDC. Meanwhile, Samsung shipped 97.6 million, up from 80.7 million a year ago.

That’s a nice jump, but nowhere near as impressive as the one charted by Apple, which shipped 37 million iPhones during the quarter — up from 16.2 million during the same quarter a year earlier — for a more than 128 percent increase.

That spike gave Apple an 8.7 percent share of the mobile phone market in the fourth quarter. Which really is astonishing, when you think about it. Recall that when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone in 2007, he said Apple hoped to someday claim 1 percent of the overall handset market. Five years later, the company has far surpassed that humble goal, and is well on its way to claiming 10 percent.

As part of Thursday’s earnings report, Nokia noted it received $250 million from Redmond in the first of many quarterly “platform support payments.” It’s part of what the company says will ultimately be billions of dollars in support of its shift to Windows Phone.

Nokia also notes that it pays Microsoft royalties on each phone and has guaranteed minimum commitments, an amount it also expects to ultimately be measured in the billions of dollars.

Last quarter, though, the money flow was clearly toward Nokia, with the company saying it shipped somewhere north of 1 million Windows Phones.

Those payments are going to be needed by Nokia, which noted on Thursday that its Symbian sales are slowing considerably faster than it had predicted.

Nokia had hoped to sell 150 million more Symbian devices even after announcing its Windows Phone transition. It said on Thursday that it no longer expects to reach that level. It didn’t provide a new estimate but said it took charges in the fourth quarter related to both excess inventory and future purchase commitments.

The company’s results on Thursday showed that Nokia had better hurry.

Although it managed to ship one million of its Windows Phones last year, the company notes that its Symbian business is declining faster than it had predicted.

“Specifically, changing market conditions are putting increased pressure on Symbian,” CEO Stephen Elop noted in comments accompanying Nokia’s earnings release. “In certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian’s traditional strengths.”

In other words, expect low-cost Android to be a strong competitor across the globe. Elop had held out hope that cheap Android phones would prove to be underpowered and less popular.

“Just because there is a version of an operating system at a price point doesn’t mean that it is a great experience,” he said in an interview last year.

But that experience appears to be plenty good enough for a bunch of the customers that Nokia had hoped would continue to buy Symbian devices.

When it announced its plans to move to Windows Phone a year ago, Nokia had said it expected nonetheless to sell a further 150 million devices.

“As a result of the changing market conditions, combined with our increased focus on Lumia, we now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated,” Elop said.

The company didn’t provide a new estimate, but did say that it took a charge last quarter for excess inventory and purchase commitments that it had made. It also declined to make an overall financial forecast for 2012, in part because of the uncertainty over future Symbian sales.

The company swung to a crushing €1.07 billion ($1.4 billion) loss for the three months ended Dec. 31st, down from a €745 million profit in the same period last year. Group sales dropped 21 percent to €10 billion from €12.65 billion.

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It’s great fun. But it really needs a warning, similar to those they play during truck commercials where the vehicle does a 360-degree flip, saying that you are unlikely to be so lucky.

So, concertgoers, please follow the advice and turn your phone to silent. All you are likely to get when your phone starts ringing is a whole lot of dirty looks. Or worse.

One final warning: Some have suggested this could also be an attempt at viral marketing by Nokia. If it was, it worked. The video has been viewed 1.2 million times on YouTube.

A Nokia representative in the U.S. said she doesn’t believe the company had anything to do with the performance or video. But she offered up some interesting background on the ringtone in question.

The tune, “Gran Valse,” is from a similarly named guitar piece from 19th-century Spanish composer Francisco Tarrega. Nokia has been using it in TV ads since the early 1990s; the first phone to offer it was the Nokia 2110, which debuted in 1994.

The publication surveyed 22 analysts and found estimates ranging from 800,000 to two million Lumias, with just one offering a number less than one million. The average number: 1.3 million.

Which isn’t too bad; the caveat to that being these are shipments, not sales that we’re talking about.

“The numbers look promising,” Storebrand Asset Management analyst Espen Furnes told Bloomberg. “If Nokia is able to have a strong launch and surpass at least 1 million and keep that type of momentum, this would help put them in a credible position that is crucial to winning back investors.”

Nokia reports earnings on Thursday, and analysts aren’t expecting much from them.

“In the past three years, Nokia has been squeezed by low-cost Asian players in the lower [end of the market] and the more sophisticated players in the higher end, like Apple and Samsung, and it should be a continuation of that,” said Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston. “We’ll pretty much see a recurrence of what’s happened in past few quarters: volume and value under a little bit of pressure, a lackluster level of unit shipments and possibly profit margins that are not quite as healthy as they might once have been,” he said.

That’s the takeaway from new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who told analysts this morning that he thinks the company is in pretty good shape, all things considered. Sure, in the U.S., it has been roughed up by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, but it’s still used by lots of people, has lots of fans in big companies and big government agencies, and lots of users around the world.

And the new tech that the company has in the pipeline — a revised version of its PlayBook tablet, and a new operating system due out in the fall — are great. You’ll see: “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed.”

No surprise there, given that Heins, RIM’s former chief operating officer, has been at the company for the past four years. If RIM really wanted someone to blow things up and start over again, they’d bring in an outsider.

Instead, the only external help Heins seems to think he’ll need will be the talents of a new marketing guru, whom he is counting on to reach out to consumers, in particular. But if RIM can’t make a better product than its competitors — or, at the very minimum, one that’s at least as good — I don’t see how messaging will help.

EARLIER

Time for a change. But not too much change!

That’s the messaging around Research In Motion’s CEO swap. The company has yielded to irate investors by moving out longtime co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. But they’ve moved up an insider — former Chief Operating Officer Thorsten Heins — into the top spot. And if you listen to him, RIM is doing great.

Here’s the “meet the new boss” video that the company put out last night, where Heins says that “sometimes we innovate too much.” And that he likes to ski, but that the hills around RIM HQ in Waterloo, Ontario, don’t really compare to the Bavarian mountains in his native Germany:

Wall Street doesn’t seem overly impressed with the move, or the suggestion from a Wall Street Journal source that the company refuses to consider a sale, and RIMM shares are down 3 percent in pre-market trading. [Correction: RIMM shares are up 3 percent in pre-market trading.]

Now we’ll see if Heins can help make his case in person: He is hosting his first conference call, and we’ll cover it live here, starting at 8 am ET.

8:02 am: Greetings. Apologies in advance, because our nifty liveblog tool seems to be MIA this AM, so things will be a little slower than usual here.

RIM official sets expectations: No financial guidance here. Just Heins and new BOD chair Barbara Stymiest.

Stymiest: Thanks much to Mike and Jim for building RIM. “It is, still today, one of the leading brands in the world.”

Stymiest: Runs through Heins’s resume, heaps praise on him. “The board is very excited about RIM’s prospects for the future.”

Heins: Thanks! RIM isn’t “just a device company,” it’s an integrated service company, with devices and networks. Unique opportunity. “We have an exceptional foundation to build upon.”

“RIM has undergone, and is still completing, a major transformation.” Sure, has “hit a few bumps along the road here and there,” but that happens. Purchasing QNX to create new platform for company was a bold move, and we’ll see that it was the right decision over time. PlayBook 2.0 will be great. So will BlackBerry 10.

Q&A:

Q: Please go into detail: What are your priorities for the next 100 days?

Heins: We need to get better at market communications. We have strong tech, strong customer base, growing overseas. “The U.S. is a bit different.” Public opinion there is that we’re still strong in enterprise, but we need to be better about explaining ourselves as a consumer company. “We need to engage more with the consumer base … we need to take them with us on the journey of exploring BlackBerry in the future.” Also, we need to execute better. We have to scale processes further, need to have “rigid” management for product development, etc. Gotta understand RIM has grown very quickly. But “we innovated while we were defining the product,” and “that needs to stop” — need to have “way better execution.” “I’m pretty sure this will really help us a lot, and really help our customer base a lot.”

Q: Seems like lots of your success has been in the “low-end market” in Asia. Thoughts on that? Also, thoughts on getting BlackBerry 10 out next fall as planned?

Heins: You say “low end”, I say “entry level.” We can’t make phones with less power. But there’s a big market that is still using feature/“dumb” phones, and we can move them to smartphones. They won’t go to the most powerful phones right away. We need to give them a good landing point. Once we prove to them that BlackBerry is a great place to start, we’ll move them up the ladder. “That’s the strategy behind the ‘BlackBerry for Everyone’ strategy.” As far as BlackBerry 10 — it’s not just a new OS, it’s a whole new infrastructure. Need to be clear about that. “That work is underway.” By the way, we’re also going to have an Android player with PlayBook 2.0, so we can leverage the “long tail” of all those apps, if people want those.

Q: Last year, you also were bullish about QNX. Why are you still confident about that? That seems like a “me-too OS, that is just catching up” to Android, iOS.

Heins: Again, QNX is an existing OS. Used on power grids. “It is a proven OS.” Allows true multitasking — “I mean, true multitasking.” “It is an extremely competitive OS as of today.” Very smart of Lazaridis to buy this instead of trying to build our own.

Q: On last RIM call, you guys talked about strategic options the company was looking at. Those options still available?

Heins: You mean licensing? Let me be clear: We can’t just be in the device-only business. “We are strong because we have an integrated solution … I want to build on that. I will not in any way split this up.” As far as inbound licensing requests, I’ll listen to them, and if they make sense, but “it’s not my Focus One.” Apple, “the other fruit company,” only other company with this kind of integration, and I want to take advantage of that strength that we have, too.

[Missed Q, but Heins is now talking about marketing, which he says needs to get better, specifically with consumer marketing.]

Q: You’ve been here four years. What can you do now as CEO that you couldn’t do as COO?

Heins: We were still kind of a start-up when I came on. But “start-up processes don’t scale.” So we need to change that. I’ve been able to study how the culture works. “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed”; we are “evolving.” “I don’t feel I was held back in any way to do what we needed to do.” But we do need to get better about “processes.” Again, I do want us to focus more on consumer marketing.

That was a fast call, and now it’s over.

Baldauf was Executive Vice President and General Manager of Nokia’s Networks business from 1998 until 2005. She had joined Nokia in 1983 and held several executive positions there, including VP of its Asia Pacific unit from 1997 to 1998, and president of Nokia Cellular Systems from 1988 to 1996. She sat on N Executive Board of Nokia from 1994 until January 2005. She’s also a director of German automaker Daimler and of three Finnish companies one of which is the computer security firm F-Secure.

The filing reads in full:

On January 18, 2012, Sari M. Baldauf notified the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard Company (“HP”) that she will not stand for re-election at the next annual meeting of stockholders. Ms. Baldauf will continue to serve as a director of HP until HP’s next annual meeting of stockholders, which is scheduled to be held on March 21, 2012.

It’s not entirely clear whether HP will move quickly to put another director on its board or not.