So Mobile World Congress wrapped up in Barcelona last week and everyone's still talking about the Galaxy S5 (fingerprint scanner, heart rate monitor bolted onto the back like a Fitbit had a baby with a phone, whatever). I don't really want to add to that pile. What's been rattling around in my head since Monday is a much weirder announcement that I don't think is getting enough attention: the Nokia X.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it because they were busy reading about Galaxy S5 specs for the ninth time. Nokia announced a line of phones (the X, X+, and XL) that run Android. Actual Android, forked, no Google Play Store, no Gmail app, no Google Maps. Instead you get Nokia's own store, Microsoft's Bing for search, Skype and OneDrive baked in, and a tile-ish home screen that's obviously trying to nudge you toward Windows Phone without actually being Windows Phone. The cheapest one is 89 euros, which is somewhere around $122 depending on the day you check the exchange rate.
Here's the part that makes my head hurt a little: Microsoft is in the middle of buying Nokia's entire devices business. That deal hasn't even closed yet (last I checked it's supposed to wrap up sometime this spring) and Nokia is out here launching Android phones. Not "Android-adjacent," not "runs some Android apps if you sideload them," but built on the actual Android Open Source Project, the same codebase Samsung and HTC and everyone else uses. Microsoft is about to own a company that just shipped a Google-flavored operating system with the Google scraped out of it and Microsoft services poured back in.
I get the strategic logic, I think. Nokia's Windows Phone lineup (the Lumias, which I actually like a lot more than most people seem to) never cracked much market share outside a few countries. Meanwhile Android app developers already exist by the truckload, and building on AOSP means Nokia gets access to that whole ecosystem, sort of, without having to convince anyone to write apps for Windows Phone specifically. It's a bridge device for markets where people want a cheap smartphone and don't particularly care what's running underneath, mostly in places like India and parts of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Fine. I understand the spreadsheet reasoning.
But as an actual product I think it's kind of a mess, and I'll say that plainly: I think the Nokia X is going to confuse people more than it helps them. You buy a phone that looks like Android, uses Android apps (the ones that work — plenty won't since there's no Play Services), but doesn't behave like the Android phone your friend has. No Gmail syncing the way you expect. No Play Store, so you're hunting around third-party app stores or Nokia's own catalog, which is nowhere near as deep. I tried explaining this to my brother-in-law over the weekend and after about four sentences he just said "so it's not a real Android phone then" and honestly, yeah. That's basically it.
Also, and this is a small thing but it bugs me, the marketing around this launch keeps calling it "Android" without much qualification, and I think that's going to bite Nokia later when reviewers start pointing out everything that's missing. You can't borrow the reputation of an ecosystem and then hand people a stripped version of it and expect nobody to notice.
None of this is to say cheap Android-ish phones are a bad idea. A sub-$150 smartphone that can run WhatsApp and Facebook and a browser decently is genuinely useful for a huge number of people who've never owned a smartphone before, and that's the actual target market here, not people like me who already own three phones I don't need. I just think Nokia picked a strange, cluttered way to get there, at exactly the moment when its own future is being decided by someone else's org chart.
Anyway. I've got a Lumia 1020 sitting on my desk that I still think has the best camera of any phone I've used, and I'm mildly annoyed that the company that made it is spending its last few months as an independent phone maker shipping something that runs on its rival's operating system. Corporate acquisitions make everyone act strange for a while. This is apparently what strange looks like.