Nokia may now owned by Microsoft who builds Windows Phone OS, but it’s not stopping them to build a smartphone running Android. Nokia at Mobile World Conference held in Barcelona announced the X family of Smartphones – the Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia XL, that built on Android Open Source Project.
Nokia’s X family of smartphones run on an forked AOSP version of Android just like Amazon done for its Kindle tablets. Nokia has built a X software platform on standard Android open source, and then on top of that built the Nokia user experience layer or the Lumia styled Nokia UI. As it’s a forked Android, the devices will not have access to Google Play store, instead Nokia has loaded its own Android store along with third-party app stores and several Microsoft services. It also include the popular swipe-based notifications and multitasker, Fastlane, allows fast access to the people, apps and information that are most important to user.
Coming on to the hardware specification Nokia X got a 4 inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 800 x 480px. It’s powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8225 dual-core processor paired with 512MB of RAM. It got support for microSD cards up to 32GB and has a 3 megapixel camera on the back. It’s available in green, black, white, yellow, cyan and red colors.
On the other hand Nokia X+ is a little bump to the hardware of Nokia X with 768MB of RAM and carries more internal storage with 4GB card included.
Nokia XL carries the same hardware specification of Nokia X+ but with a bigger 5 inch IPS LCD display. It also got a better rear camera of 5 megapixel with autofocus and flash and includes a 2 megapixel front facing camera.
On the connectivity front all three smartphones are Dual SIM capable and supports ESGM and WCDMA networks (3G supported). On the software front the devices takes users to the Microsoft’s cloud instead of Google’s cloud. The devices come with a range of Nokia and Microsoft services including HERE Maps with turn-by-turn navigation and offline maps, Nokia MixRadio offering hundreds of free streaming and offline playlists, 7GB free cloud storage from Microsoft OneDrive, Outlook.com email service and Skype with a month’s free calls to international landlines in selected markets. The devices also come pre-installed with several third-party apps including BBM, Plants vs. Zombies 2, Viber, Vine and Twitter.
The most affordable of the three Nokia X smartphone is priced around 89 Euros (around Rs 7600) and will be available immediately in the coming weeks (March 2014) in India, Asia-Pacific, Europe Latin America, the Middle-East and Africa. Nokia X+ and Nokia XL is priced at 99 Euros (Rs 8500) and 109 Euros (Rs 9300) respectively and will be available in the second quarter of 2014.