AOSP phones equipped with Nokia's store and Microsoft's services.
In Barcelona today, Nokia once
again laid out its plans to capture the next billion smartphone users. The new
approach: Nokia X, a third line of smartphones to slot between the low-end Asha
and the high-end Lumia range. The Nokia X range will run the Android Open
Source Project (AOSP) operating system, but without Google's stack on top of
it. Instead, it'll have a Nokia store, Microsoft services, and a custom front
end.
The company announced three Nokia X handsets, the X, X+, and XL.
They all have a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, an 800×480 screen, 4GB
internal storage, and microSD expansion. The X has 512MB RAM; the X+ and XL
both have 768MB. The X and X+ both have a four-inch screen and a 3MP camera.
The XL bumps the screen to five inches and the camera to 5MP. They will all be
available in a bunch of colors and will all support dual SIMs.
The point of these phones is,
of course, the software. As former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop described the phones,
they will take people to "Microsoft's cloud, not Google's." Instead
of using Google's Play services and APIs on top of an unspecified version of
AOSP, the X range will offer a set of Nokia and Microsoft services instead.
Mapping, for example, will come from Nokia HERE. Search will be provided by Bing.
Microsoft apps such as Skype and Outlook.com e-mail will be preinstalled.
While apps that use only AOSP should run on the X phones
directly, any apps that, for example, integrate with location or store services
will need porting, a process that Stephen Elop said should take a few hours.
Nokia will have its own store with features that include
try-before-you-buy and billing via your mobile carrier. It will also support
some other non-Google storefronts. For example, in Russia the Yandex store and
services are a major player. Yandex will be installable from the Nokia store to
give access to apps written for the Yandex APIs.
The X phones won't look much
like Android to use, thanks to a custom shell that's more or less a fusion of
bits of the Windows Phone user interface with various elements taken from Asha.
It includes Nokia's Glance, to show information on the lock screen, along with
a tile-esque main screen and app launcher. There's also a feature called
"Fast Lane," taken from the Asha interface, that shows recent
activity and apps.
Elop positioned the phones as a gateway to more expensive—and
more innovative—Lumia handsets. He said that the price of Lumia handsets would
continue to come down and that X would be positioned below Lumia, with only a
little overlap between the lowest Lumia devices and highest X phones.
The Nokia X goes on sale
immediately for €89 ($122). The X+ and XL will go on sale next quarter, priced
at €99 ($136) and €109 ($149) respectively. They'll be promoted primarily in
emerging markets.
Aiming lower still, Nokia also launched a new Asha smartphone,
the 230. Priced at just €45, this is the cheapest Asha phone yet, while still
offering a full touch experience on its 2.8-inch 320×240 screen.
The company also announced a new featurephone, the €29 Nokia
220. This was described as the cheapest data-enabled, Internet-enabled phone
the company had ever produced, with Facebook and Twitter support built-in.
Listing image by Nokia
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