Nokia X with Android 4.4, Snapdragon 200 listed on Vietnamese online retailer

Nokia’s anticipated first Android phone, believed to be dubbed Nokia X (and codenamed Normandy), has again been listed on a Vietnamese online retailer.
The alleged Nokia X has been listed with model number A110 and is priced at roughly $110 (Rs. 6,800 approximately). However, there is no word on the availability of the alleged Nokia X A110. The new listing indicates that the yet-to-be-announced Nokia X might be first hitting the Vietnamese market, soon after being launched.

It’s worth pointing out that in January, the alleged Nokia Normandy was spotted at a Vietnamese e-commerce site without price.

Rumoured specifications of the alleged Nokia X include a 4-inch TFT display with a resolution of 480×854 (FWVGA) pixels; a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon 200 processor; 5-megapixel rear camera; microSD card support and Android 4.4 KitKat.

The Nokia X handset was previously said to sport a 5-megapixel rear camera, however the CamSpeed benchmark hinted that the handset would arrive with a lower 3-megapixel camera.

Earlier reports have suggested that the alleged Nokia X comes with model number RM-980, which the Finnish giant has been developing for some months now, a device that is supposedly being developed under the Project Normandy program.

Recent reports suggested that Nokia has been testing the long-rumoured Nokia X (aka Normandy) in India. Further, the report also claimed that the Finnish giant has been testing a number of other yet-to-be-launched devices in India. The data was spotted on Zauba.

An earlier report indicated that Nokia, following the lead of Amazon, has been working on a fully-tailored or forked version of Android for the alleged Normandy program, like the software on the online retail giant’s Kindle Fire tablet range.

The rumoured Nokia X budget Android phone is said to be targeted at the low-cost segment as an Asha-equivalent smartphone, but with access to more traditional smartphone apps – a benefit that the report suggests has been missing in Nokia’s dated Series 40-based Asha phones. Further, the report describes the Nokia Normandy efforts as ‘full steam ahead’.

Nokia’s new phone to combine Android with Microsoft services

Nokia is to unveil a mobile phone running Google’s Android software, the Guardian has learnt, but will replace Google’s map and other key services with a mixture of Nokia and Microsoft features.

The audacious move comes ahead of the official takeover of Nokia’s handset division by Microsoft, which is buying it for €5.4bn.

The phone – believed to be dubbed the “Nokia X” and internally codenamed “Normandy” – is expected to be a replacement for Nokia’s Asha line of high-end featurephones. It could also replace low-end Windows Phones in developing markets, rather than supplanting its high-end Lumia devices running Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.

The Nokia X is understood to use Google’s Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) software, which provides the basic functionality to power a smartphone but does not include any Google services such as maps, Google’s Mail client, Google Now or the Google Play app store. Rather than Google’s services, the Nokia X will offer Nokia’s HERE maps, Microsoft’s Bing search and Outlook email, but it is unclear how many apps it will be able to offer.

AOSP is already widely used in China, the world’s largest smartphone market where, according to ABI Research, it accounted for around one-third of the 220m Android phones sold worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Nokia and Microsoft have been struggling to make headway as smartphones have shifted to become the majority of mobile phone sales. Microsoft responded to Apple’s 2007 launch of the iPhone and Google’s 2008 release of Android with Windows Phone in October 2010, but still has less than 5% of global sales.

The phone is understood to have been planned by Stephen Elop while he was chief executive of Nokia, together with Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief executive who was replaced in February 2014 by Satya Nadella. “This move indicates that Windows Phone hasn’t succeeded as Microsoft had expected,” said one industry observer.

Sources familiar with Nokia’s plans indicated that press reports about the phone – which have been swirling for months – are correct. Nokia has already announced that it will hold a press conference at the upcoming Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, though it hasn’t said what will be shown off.

“This could be huge, but what an embarrassment it could be for Microsoft if this sells better than Windows Phone,” said one person familiar with Nokia’s plans.

For Nokia, the “Normandy” is part of an effort to revitalise its smartphone efforts after being outpaced by Apple, Samsung and a number of other companies since 2011. In the fourth quarter of 2013 it shipped just 8.2m Lumia phones to mobile carriers, compared to 51m iPhones and 150m Android phones worldwide. The company did not give any figure for Asha shipments for the past quarter, but they had been flat at around 6m in the previous two quarters.