Is Nokia working on an Android smartphone? While the idea might seem unlikely given that company was bought over by Microsoft recently, reports suggest that Nokia is working on a secret Android smartphone.
According to The Verge , which quotes company sources, Nokia is indeed working on such a smartphone. The report also says that project is “Codenamed Normandy, and known internally at Nokia under a number of other names.” The report says that device “is designed as the next step in low-end phones” and that Nokia’s Normandy will have a “special “forked” variant of Android that’s not aligned with Google’s own version” and similar to what Amazon does with its Kindle Fire.
The report also adds that a picture leaked by Twitter source @evleaks in November was of the device. You can check out the evleaks tweet below:
This is not the first report to suggest that Nokia is flirting with the idea of launching Android phones.
Previously a report in New York Times’ Bits Blog had said that, “A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company’s Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating… according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential.” Microsoft was aware of the project, according to the report.
However, according to Nokia’s former CEO Stephen Elop, the company made the right decision by sticking to Windows. He told the Guardian , “What we were worried about a couple of years ago was the very high risk that one hardware manufacturer could come to dominate Android. We had a suspicion of who it might be, because of the resources available, the vertical integration, and we were respectful of the fact that we were quite late in making that decision. Many others were in that space already.”
Whether or not the latest Nokia Normandy turns out to be an Android device, there’s no denying that the idea of an Android phone with Nokia’s hardware is still a dream for many smartphone fans.