Nokia Announces Nokia X Android Smartphone 105
A user writes "Despite some industry skepticism, Nokia has indeed been working on an Android smartphone and finally unveiled the Nokia X today. As rumored, it's not a Google Play compatible device, running instead a Google-less AOSP build with a Nokia app store, and Windows Phone style shell. The budget phone will also not be marketed in North America. The Media seems convinced Microsoft — who are in the process of acquiring Nokia — will kill the project, but it's hard to see why Nokia would be working on such a project at this time if Microsoft had plans to do this."
Re:i have to ask (Score:1, Informative)
Considering the fact that MS owns Nokia's mobile phone division, it seems pretty unlikely they would ever allow this. I suspect this one android phone is more of a token effort than anything (a "See, we make android phones too!" token effort)
Until the day of the merger, MS doesn't actually own Nokia. This may sound like a technicality, but it makes all sorts of cooperation illegal; cancelling this program, which would have been possible before, now becomes extremely dangerous. This could easily be a way for Nokia to demonstrate independence up until the very last day as well as being a threat in case Microsoft fails to complete the merger (in which case Nokia would go instantly back into profit with an Android phone).
On the other hand, the other rumour going around is that Microsoft will kill Windows Phone very soon. That would also be very likely since they desperately need to concentrate back on the desktop. Again, Microsoft is unable to announce such a thing until it has full control of Nokia which means that anyone in Microsoft who knew about the cancellation would be unable to talk about it on the other hand everyone who talked about it could honestly believe that Windows phone is to continue (since they couldn't know unless they were directly on the merger team).
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)