For the past couple of months we have been hearing a lot of rumors about Nokia working on an Android smartphone. At one point it was even rumored that Microsoft was pressuring the Finnish company into giving up this project primarily because in the near future, its hardware division is officially going to be a part of Redmond. Nokia seems to have went ahead anyway, with The Wall Street Journal running with a story today, claiming to have heard from people familiar with the matter that the Nokia Android phone is going to be released this month.
Nokia is actually expected to unveil said smartphone, apparently codenamed Normandy, at the Mobile World Congress 2014 later this month in Barcelona. The report claims that Nokia’s Android phone has been developed in such a way that it doesn’t promote a number of key features that have originally been developed by Google as part and parcel of its Android platform. Basically one can expect the software to be quite similar to what we see on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, essentially a highly customized variant of Android. It is also claimed that this Nokia Android phone won’t promote Google Play Store, instead its going to come with a Nokia app store that will host Android apps. Here Maps and Mix Radio are also expected to be onboard. The phone is said to be geared towards emerging markets, though its price hasn’t been mentioned by the sources.
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