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The Engadget Interview: Nokia head of sales operations Matt Rothschild

More interviews? Don't mind if we do. Nokia's got plenty to talk about on the Lumia 1020 front, and it also has plenty of people to do the talking. After a sadly brief interview with CEO Stephen Elop, we thankfully got to spend a bit more time with the Matt Rothschild, the company's head of sales operation for North America. Like Elop before him, Rothschild seemed visibly excited to show off the company's latest flagship device, locking it into the camera grip in front of him, which was itself screwed into a magnetic Gorilla Pod. "The next time you're at one of these," he said with a smile, "you'll be shooting it on a Lumia."

As his Australian accent betrays, Rothschild's done his fair share of traveling, a fact that's certainly given him a bit of a global perspective on what truly is a global company. We kicked things off by asking the executive how the North American market stacks up to the rest of the globe. Rothschild seems positive on that front, suggesting that, in spite of having stumbled a bit over the past few years (our words, not his, incidentally), Nokia is in a good position to offer an alternative to a smartphone field so dominated by the likes of Samsung and Apple.

Rothschild, sadly, was unwilling to give us any numbers, even refusing to engage with our suggestion that the company might be bullish as of late. He suggested that he didn't want to take any of the focus away from Elop, who will be announcing something far more tangible numbers-wise during the quarterly earnings report in a few weeks. Until then, we're left with a little bit of insight into the retail experience the company will be getting by way of AT&T retail locations, when the device goes on-sale on the 26th. It's an experience that will, naturally, focus on the camera's capabilities, centered around the image re-framing that Elop was so keen to demonstrate during our talk earlier today.

Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.

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