Nokia Announces Nokia X Android Smartphone

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."

WTF Nokia

[Nemyst]

So wait, you guys had trouble making the Ovi Store attractive for devs, you haven't managed to make the Windows Store have anything worthwhile in it, and so your answer to WP failing is to make yet another app store you won't know what the fuck to do with? Brilliant.

If you wanted to have Android on the side, you don't make it rely on some rather complex software infrastructure like that. I really don't see Nokia as having the resources necessary to keep up with their full software stack. Even big players like HTC and Samsung aren't using an alternative app store and many alternative skins suck really bad. Just keep in mind that Amazon's Kindle Fire HD is still on a derivative of 4.0.3 and probably will stay that way.

What's so hard in understanding this simple three-step formula:
1) Make some nice hardware.
2) Put vanilla Android on it with a clear upgrade path to the latest version.
3) Profit!

Re:Sounds like a Niche, not a future

[Howitzer86]

I was under the impression that this phone was a low cost offering for developing countries. Hackers DO like that kind of thing, but I doubt it was made with them in mind. I agree with your suggestion that it might have been the successor to the Maemo platform. If so, this was something in the works since before the buy-out plans by Microsoft, and that MS, rather than kill it all together, decided to let them get it out there in order for them to make a return on their investment, provided they at least make it look like the Windows Phone OS.

This will definitely be wanted by hackers though with Android drifting ever-away from AOSP, it's almost assured to be considered a dead-end phone.

Re:Why now?

[Karlt1]

Dalvic is a JIT system, so no, there's no significant slowness caused by apps being shipped in bytecode form.

Just because Java proponents have been saying that for 20 years doesn't make it true.