It's as if the past 12 months never happened. Nokia is back – and we mean the “old” Nokia, the real Nokia – with the N1 tablet, a brand new piece of mobile hardware running Android 5.0 Lollipop.
It bears more than a passing resemblance to the iPad mini 3, but also boasts a decent spec that matches and in some cases even beats Apple's benchmark slab.
In fact, never mind resemblance, with a few small exceptions the N1 looks just like an iPad mini with a Nokia badge on it, right down to the design of the speaker grilles and colour options. The chassis is a single piece of anodised aluminium, and is just 6.9mm thick – a full millimetre slimmer than Apple's effort.
The display is an iPad mini-matching 7.9in panel with a 2048 x 1536 resolution, fully laminated, while on the inside there's a quad-core Intel Atom Z3580 processor running at 2.4GHz, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
The 8MP and 5MP camera combo are par for the course, and the 5300mAh battery should keep you trucking for a fair while between charges. There's also a fancy new reversible Type C USB connector on board.
So what gives? How has Nokia managed to jump back into the mobile hardware game just months after selling its mobile division to Microsoft for $6bn-odd?
The simple answer is that Nokia isn't building the N1 itself, Foxconn is – on behalf of another Chinese hardware maker. Nokia is licensing its brand name to the whole effort, and providing its adaptive Z Launcher operating software on top of Android Lollipop.
How serious is Nokia about re-establishing its name in the consumer space, and will the N1 be the first of a bunch of new mobile devices?
We don't know yet, but with the Nokia N1 only due out on February 19, there's plenty of time for the details to emerge. That launch will initially only be in China, where it'll cost $249 before taxes and subsidies, but we're told a wider rollout will follow after that.
