Nokia Just Shipped an Android Phone With No Google In It, and I Cant Stop Thinking About It
Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona today and the phone I keep coming back to isnt the one everybody expected to be talking about. Yes, Samsung put out the Galaxy S5 this morning too, fingerprint scanner on the home button, a heart rate monitor bolted onto the back like it's a running watch, IP67 water resistance so you can supposedly drop it in the sink. Fine. Its an iterative phone from a company that iterates phones. I dont have much to say about it that fifty other sites havent already said by lunchtime.
The one that actually made me sit up is the Nokia X.
Quick version for anyone who hasnt been following: Nokia announced a phone that runs Android. Not Windows Phone, which is the thing Nokia has been betting its whole existence on for the last three years. Android. Except its not really "Android" in the way you and I think of it, because there's no Google Play, no Gmail app, no Google Maps, none of it. Its forked from the open source guts of Android (AOSP, if you want the acronym) and then dressed up with Nokia and Microsoft's own services instead, their own app store, their own cloud stuff, Bing baked in as search. So you get an Android phone that looks like Windows Phone's tiles on the home screen and talks to Microsoft's cloud on the back end, running on top of Google's engine with Google's name filed off.
Its a genuinely strange object and I mean that as a compliment.
Heres the part that I keep chewing on: Microsoft is in the middle of buying Nokia's phone business. That deal was announced back in September and is still working its way through the closing process, its supposed to wrap up sometime this spring. So the company thats about to own Nokia outright just watched (helped?) Nokia launch a phone running its biggest platform rivals operating system, at the exact moment its trying to get everyone hyped about Windows Phone. I dont know if that's Microsoft quietly hedging its bets on emerging markets where Windows Phone has basically no developer support, or Nokia doing one last weird independent thing before the paperwork closes and somebody in Redmond tells them to knock it off. Probably both. Corporate acquisitions are messy in the months before they actually close, everyone still has their own roadmap they were already committed to and nobody wants to be the one who cancels a product a few weeks before the ink dries.
What I actually like about it, setting aside the corporate soap opera, is the price. The base Nokia X is supposedly going to run around 89 euros, unsubsidized, no contract. Thats aimed squarely at people in India, Indonesia, places like that, where a smartphone at that price with a halfway decent app ecosystem (because it can still run a lot of regular Android apps, sideloaded or through Nokia's own store) is a genuinely useful thing to exist. Im not the target market. I already own too many phones, my drawer of old ones is getting embarrassing, I think I still have a Nokia N9 in there that I bought on a whim in 2011 because MeeGo seemed like it might matter (it did not). But I like that this thing exists for people who are not me.
Small aside because I havent mentioned it yet and its been on my mind: Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin exchange, has had withdrawals frozen since the start of the month and the silence out of them the last couple weeks has been bad. I dont own any bitcoin and I'm not going to pretend I saw this coming, but if you have money sitting on that exchange right now I would not feel good about it. Thats a whole separate post I dont have the stomach to write yet.
Anyway. Back to Barcelona. Ill be watching to see if the Nokia X actually ships to real people in real stores or if this ends up being the kind of announcement that gets quietly walked back once the Microsoft deal closes and somebody realizes they just told the entire industry that stripped down Android with no Google services is a better bet than Windows Phone. Wouldnt be the first time a phone announced in February never made it past May.