Nokia X and X+ mark Nokia’s long-awaited entry to Android

Nokia has made official not one but two Android-powered smartphones. We’ve heard a lot about Nokia’s X phone in the lead up to this official announcement and now we have a chance to delve into the details.

The Nokia X and the X+ are one and the same with the only differences being that the latter is a dual-SIM variant of the former. the Nokia X has just 512 MB of RAM while the Nokia X+ has 768 MB of RAM and buyers of the X+ get a free 4 GB sd card.

The Nokia X phones run a heavily forked version of Android based on AOSP with everything from the tile-based interface to the lack of Google apps and access to the Google Play Store further confirming what we knew all along: the Nokia X won’t have anything Google to do with it save for the base AOSP and the Linux kernel (not Google’s). In short, the Nokia X phones are not Google Play certified so you won’t find that all-too-familiar Google suite of apps like Chrome, Maps and the like. Instead, Nokia is using the device to get the entry level guys to join Microsoft’s world not Google’s. There’s tight One Drive integration, there’s Skype, there’s HERE Maps and there’s access to tird part app stores like Yandex which will take care of a dynamic user’s app needs instead of Google Drive, Hangouts, Google Maps and Google Play. It is understandable though. None of us expected that to be the case.

The devices being Android-based will however be able to access all apps available on Android through sideloading so this should not be much of an issue to core Android users though clear they are not the target maket for this device.

The specs of the Nokia X phones are as follows:

• Display: 4 inch (480 x 800 pixels) IPS LCD touchscreen
• Processor: 1 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4
• Memory: 4 GB internal storage // 768 MB RAM for the Nokia X+ and 512 MB for the Nokia X
• Camera: 3 MP
• Battery: 1500mAh
• Others: 3G connectivity, dual-SIM support

The Nokia X and X+ will be available in emerging markets alone and won’t ship to Western Europe or North America. The Nokia X will go for 89 Euros while the X+ will go for an extra 10 Euros (99).  For those specs, that’s decent pricing and this is a steal for sure.

Update

An earlier version of this article stated that the only difference between the Nokia X and the X+ is that one is a single SIM device while the other has dual-SIM support. This is wrong and has since been corrected. Apologies for that.