Last week, we got hold of some leaked images of Nokia‘s supposed Android interface. It seems that mister @evleaks has gotten his hands on some further images, giving us a closer look at the UI on Nokia’s Android handset, called Normandy.
To be completely honest, it does look a lot like Windows Phone. This begs the question why they would build an ecosystem that is a forked version of Android, but looks the same as their native OS. What does forking mean, you ask? Well, let‘s take a moment to explain.
Think of Android as a bunch of code. There are two portions ““ the open-source parts, which is what AOSP is, and the proprietary parts that Google keeps to itself. If someone wants to take Google Android and make changes to it, they will download the code to use as a base, and form their own project with it. Samsung, LG, Sony, HTC and almost everyone else does that. That‘s what we are referring to when we talk about a company‘s Android “œskin.“ Anytime someone takes existing code, and starts an independent (that’s an important distinction) project based on it, they’ve created a fork. Many developers will check out code, edit portions of it, and then send their changes back upstream in their entirety, which is not a fork.
This has the implication that most normal Android apps will in fact not work on the forked version. Amazon raised quite a few eyebrows when it forked Android to build the OS for the Kindle Fire line. I mean, would you want a device that doesn‘t have Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and YouTube? They would need to write their own third party apps to use those services.
Right, so let‘s get back to the Nokia interface. As mentioned, it looks a lot like Windows Phone. It has a number of tiles that provide access to apps like Skype, Twitter, Vine, Facebook, and BBM. Some of the tiles are identical to the same colour scheme used in the equivalent Nokia Windows Phone apps. It also has a notification centre / app centre which display missed calls, notifications, and recent app activity.
Some potential specs have also been mentioned. Normandy is said to include a 4-inch display, Qualcomm S4 processor, 3-megapixel camera, 4GB of storage, and 512MB of RAM. The handset is clearly a low-end model, but we‘re told it will also include a microSD slot to expand the built-in storage. Apparently Nokia want to include their own services on the device as well, like Here Maps, lending further credibility to the fact that it will be a forked version of Android.
We are hoping the device will be unveiled at MWC next month. But with the Microsoft acquisition of Nokia still going through the legal motions, we still don‘t quite know the fate of Normandy.
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