As it turns out, we might not have to wait much longer to own a Nokia product again. Even though it struggled for years and then made a string of poor decisions leading to the sellout to Microsoft, Nokia has now demonstrated that it has no intention of getting out of the consumer product space and letting its brand die. Licensing terms might not allow it to sell smartphones for some time, and so we have the remarkable new N1 tablet leading the charge.
Nokia is showing off the N1 at its booth at the Mobile World Congress, currently under way in Barcelona. The N1 is already shipping in China, but Nokia won't say anything about when it might launch anywhere else other than the fact that it is committed to launching it in Europe next. It costs the equivalent of $249 (roughly Rs. 15,500) and, says the company, it is highly in demand.
The buttons on the sides, camera in one corner of the rear and even the positioning of ports and speakers feel strongly inspired by Apple, yet also complement the designs of phones such as the Nokia N9. In fact there are a lot of Apple-inspired touches even beyond the design. Nokia is clearly positioning the N1 as an inexpensive alternative to the iPad mini 2.
Fascinatingly, Nokia uses the USB Type-C connector for charging and data. This is the first example we've seen of a shipping product with the new, reversible standard. Nokia has styled the port on the bottom of the N1 to look just like one of Apple's Lightning ports. Interestingly, only USB 2.0 speeds are supported, whereas most Type-C implementations will support USB 3.1 speeds when the standard becomes widespread.
The tablet is powered by a 2.3GHz Intel Atom Z3580 processor and has 2GB of RAM. Only a 32GB storage configuration is available, and so we hope that larger capacities are planned for when the N1 launches in other parts of the world.
SPECS.
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