After much heavy rumor, Nokia has just announced that it's launching its first Android handsets: the X, X+ and XL.
All the phones are built on the open source Android OS forked especially
for Nokia. The X and X+ feature a 4-inch screen, while the XL packs a
5-inch IPS display. The X+ is differentiated from the X by extra memory
and expandable storage, though it's not clear quite what that means in
terms of specs.
During the Mobile World Congress presentation, Steve Elop explained that
users will "benefit from the Android apps and ecosystem, but we have
differentiated." Essentially that means that there will plenty of
Microsoft and Nokia apps included from the get go. Skype, for instance,
will be preinstalled, and offer users 1 month of free calls to landlines
and mobiles, and Nokia's navigation apps will feature, too.
More importantly, the phones take people to Microsoft's cloud, not
Google's. Indeed, it seems Nokia is distancing itself from Google as
much as possible with these Android devices, and Elop went as far as
saying that the "Nokia X together with Lumia represents a deliberate
strategy to leverage Microsoft services." There will, though, be
plenty—"hundreds of thousands at launch," apparently—of conventional
Android apps available through a Nokia-specific app store. SwiftKey, the
swypey keyboard, will be available on the X range for free.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the UI of the X range looks like a blend of
Windows Phone and Android: there's a glance screen just like the
company's Windows Phone models, and colorful tile-like home screen where
apps sit in brightly colored bars. But there's the same familiar
Android notification bar across the top, and some subtly tweaked folders
and widgets that mirror Google's OS, too.
Interestingly, despite the Microsoft focus, you will be able to sideload
apps—including those made by Google, in fact, any APK—though some may,
apparently, need recompiling to run properly on Nokia's forked version
of the OS.
Price, you ask? Well, Steve Elop was keen to point out that the X range
is designed to be more affordable than the Lumia range, both now and in
the the future. The phone will be "broadly available globally", starting
in growth markets, and they'll cost $125 for the X, $135 for the X+,
and $150 for the XL.
They're certainly cheap, then. But with no description of the guts
lurking within these phones just yet, it's hard to say whether that
represents good value or not. Let's wait and see when we get our hands
on one.
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