Nokia India has unveiled its first Android based forked Android based Smartphone – the Nokia X in India with a price tag of Rs 8599. It’s the first device in the Nokia’s X family of smartphone been launched, the other two devices Nokia X+ and Nokia XL will be launched in the second quarter of 2014.
The major highlight of the smartphone is that it run on a forked AOSP version of Android just like Amazon done for its Kindle tablets. So there won’t be any Google Play store or other Google services like Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps and so on. Instead Nokia has loaded its own Android store along with third-party app stores and several Microsoft services.
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 underneath its Android, developers can easily port any Android apps to run on the Nokia X devices. They only need one thing to make sure of, their apps don’t use any of the Google’s APIs, instead they need to use the Nokia’s APIs.
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 connectivity front Nokia X got Dual SIM support with 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. It also include the popular swipe-based notifications and multitasker, Fastlane that allows fast access to the people, apps and information that are most important to user.
- 4 inch IPS LCD (800 x 480)
- 1GHz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 CPU with 512MB RAM
- Dual SIM
- 4GB internal storage with support for microSD cards
- 3MP rear camera
- WCDMA, GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth
- Stereo FM radio
- 1500 mAh Battery