Today at the Slush conference in Helsinki, home-town hero Nokia — the part of the business that did not get sold off to Microsoft, that is – has revealed its first device: the N1, a iPad-like small tablet with an aluminum shell, a 7.9-inch screen and the Android Lollipop OS. Selling for $249, it will be sold first in China by way of a manufacturing and distribution partnership with Foxconn and initially at least will be WiFi-only.
“They said Nokia is dead,” Nokia’s head of devices Sebastian Nyström, pictured below, said as he started out his presentation today. “I say, they couldn’t be more wrong.” After the N1, there will be more products to come.
He then launched into an emotional (for a Finn!) speech about Nokia’s focus on great design, engineering and a consumer focus — areas he said the company could not leave behind with the sale to Redmond.
You can see our a video demo of the N1 here. This the first device announced by the company since the sale of its devices and services business to Microsoft for over $7 billion. That deal prohibited Nokia from making smartphones or handsets for 30 months, up to January 2016, but that deal didn’t cover other devices. The other product from Nokia since then has been an Android homescreen, the Z Launcher. Now it’s clear that the Z Launcher was laying the groundwork for today’s integrated hardware news — it runs using the launcher, complete with the neat features that the launcher includes, such as the ability to scribble a letter on the screen to call up a specific app.
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