One of the most remarkable events of the entire Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was when it was presented Nokia X and its two sister terminals. These phones are the arrival of Nokia to Android. With the Finnish company's track record, this move must be described, at the very least, as singular. We want to analyze the implications of this movement and the operational reality of these terminals.
The manufacture of a new line of terminals with the OS that Google mainly controls was something that many users asked for but it seemed difficult to happen. Much controversy has been generated as well as many possibilities.
No Google apps
Nokia has not used pure Android, but thanks to the terms of the AOSP it has been able to take the code and modify it to its liking by doing a fork, based on version 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, as Amazon did at the time for the Kindle Fire.
Likewise, the Google applications that we usually find on most Android devices have been left out. The services they provide us have been replaced for their Microsoft counterparts and Nokia itself. For example, Gmail for Outlook, G Maps for HERE Maps, Hangouts for Skype, Play Music for MixRadio, Drive for OneDrive, etc ...
More importantly, Mountain's app store, Google Play Store, has been dispensed with.
These applications can be installed in some cases by loading the APK of each of them, but it will not always work. In fact, it has been found that services such as Maps or Gmail are not doing too well.
From Android a path to Microsoft
The creation of one own app store, an alternative to Google Play, is one of the most significant points of Nokia's intentions. That way, they take part of the pie in the profits per sale from Mountain View. Curiously, they will allow the use of other alternative stores, such as Amazon.
If we look at the aesthetics of this fork, we will see that the user interface is more reminiscent of a Windows Phone than to an Android device, making use of something similar to mosaic with its tiles.
Finally, it will allow regular Android users to learn about services already present on Windows Phone. The factor is not loyalty to an operating system but price. For many consumers it is not vital or simply possible to have a high-end device. All the major platforms compete in this section, but in the low end there is a clear dominance of Android.
Nokia has its ASHAs as a parallel and even cheaper strategy, but with these Nokia X, X + and XL at 89, 99 and 109 euros they will be competitive in that segment and in emerging countries. With this, they will present Windows Phone services and aesthetics as options for the future to some consumers who were going to receive Android in all probability.
Nieves Justribó, General Director of Nokia Spain, recognized this in an interview with Europa Press, although it has not yet given specific dates for the launch in our country.
But there is something more powerful and suggestive still, the presence of Windows Phone applications on Android.
Run Windows Phone apps on Android
One of the aforementioned apps, MixRadio, has never been on Android and is possibly not expected. The question is clear, how can it run in a terminal with this OS?
The answer lies in the Xamarin platform which is specialized in carrying the framework .NET from Microsoft beyond Windows. In short, it makes it possible to use applications written in the parameters set by Redmond for their OS in other environments without having to rewrite them from scratch.
This opens the possibility that in the future Microsoft and Nokia could more easily launch their own applications on the X line and perhaps also on Android in general, without having to program them from scratch as they have already done with many services such as Boing, OneDrive, OneNote, etc ...
BBM for Nokia X and Lumia
These launches coincided with the news that BlackBerry Messenger will be available for download from the summer for the Lumia and Nokia X. Obviously in the second case, it will simply be to bring the title already present in the Play Store to the Nokia store. In the first case, it is a condition of possibility to also reach Windows Phone, something that will be done later.