According to BGR India, Nokia is not only working on the Android phone, it in fact has started rolling out the smartphone codenamed “Normandy” to developers in India. The website also claims that Nokia is planning to do various campaigns during the popular IPL event, scheduled to start in early April.
The long rumored Nokia Normandy will be the first Android smartphone by the Finnish giant. The handset will be running an AOSP version of Android, an open-source project anyone can venture into, and will be lacking Google services, including, and especially, the Play store.
BGR India also reports that Nokia is building its own App Store, called “Asha on Linux (AoL)”, and it has brought in most of the top 100 apps from the Play store. According to a source who spoke with the aforementioned website, porting the apps to AoL has been pretty easy. “The only thing developers have to ensure is there are no Google services callouts in the app. If the app does not call out any Google API, one can even sideload the same app APK that is available on the Play store”.
The $100 smartphone is expected to be announced at Mobile World Congress next week. “Nokia does not want to price the phone too high and then slash it a couple of months later, which has been a problem for its Lumia smartphones,” a person familiar with the development told BGR Ind. “They are also planning a marketing campaign that will coincide with IPL”, he added.
Normandy, or Nokia X, as it may be called at the time of launch, is said to be running on Android 4.4, better known as KitKat, and powered by the Qualcomm MSM8225Q Snapdragon Chipset and Dual-core 1 GHz CPU. The device will have 4 GB of internal storage, coupled with 512 MB RAM.
