WNA

Today Nokia introduced a brand new family of smartphones, the Nokia X family. It’s based on Android, but has features from Nokia’s Windows Phone.

Nokia has created a Windows Phone-like tiled home screen that looks similar to Microsoft’s own UI. But this is not a Google-certified project and thus the X phones don’t run the Google Play Services such as the Play Store, Gmail and Chrome. Users will be free to sideload any Android app they want and can download new apps easily from the dedicated Nokia store and Yandex Store, popular in Russia.

All three combine Lumia-style design with low-cost hardware. The 109-Euro XL features a large 5-inch screen while the 99-Euro X+ has a 4-inch display. The X will be released for just €89 in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, and a few other global locations, but it won’t be making its way to North America.

The sub-$100 Nokia X is a massive opportunity for us,” said Nokia’s outgoing CEO Stephen Elop.

“The Nokia X takes people to Microsoft’s cloud, not to Google’s cloud,” he added.

If you put the Nokia X side-by-side with the company’s Lumia 520 handset it might be hard to tell them apart, says The Verge. The same striking colors and design are available on both, and they each use the same 4-inch display.

THE X phone runs Nokia HERE Maps, as well as the Microsoft OneCloud (former SkyDrive) and Skype. The Nokia X+ and XL share the same chipset – a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 with 768MB of RAM. The Nokia X is the only one with just 512MB of RAM.