Android has become the choice as mobile platform for more than 70-80% of the new phones shipped every year to the mobile market. This has prompted Nokia to launch Android-Based smartphone. The Finnish giant is expected to unveil an Android-powered phone at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, kicking off in two weeks.
Screenshots of the device, nicknamed Normandy, is already doing rounds on the web for several weeks now. It is believed that the Windows Phone is resource-intensive to run on cheap hardware, and therefore the inclination towards Android OS.
Low-end Android device will target emerging markets and will not promote some of the key features typically seen on Google’s Android platform, like the Google Play app store. This approach is somewhat similar to that of Amazon. The online retail giant it bases its Kindle tablets on a custom fork of Android and offers its own app store in the place of a Google Play.
This leaves little in fact, no scope for Google to generate any revenue from Nokia’s phone, even though the operating system is based on Android. Nokia had earlier agreed to abandon its software development efforts and use only the Windows Phone platform after it was offered billions of dollars for marketing and development.
It remains unclear which emerging nations Nokia plans to target with its Android device. However, reports suggests that it would want to sell them in none other than Asian markets, particularly China and India.
The news comes as Satya Nadella was named the CEO of Microsoft, replacing Steve Ballmer just few days ago. We will follow the wait-and-watch policy to see if Nokia would really release its first-ever smartphone running Google’s Android OS, as sources claims.
Image source: nypost
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