Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia’s French division manager let slip a revealing piece of news to the Parisian daily Les Echos, saying the company was prepping a Windows-powered tablet for next summer. “In June 2012, we will have a tablet that runs on Windows 8,” Paul Amsellem told the French newspaper. A company spokesperson soon sought to backtrack from the comments, saying the company has no official commitment to the tablet market. The company recently announced plans to release a sophisticated Windows Phone 7 handset at Nokia World, the company’s annual event for customers, partners and developers.
The tablet could build on the Nokia Lumia 800, which features one-touch social network access, grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9. It features a 3.7 inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display and a 1.4 GHz processor with hardware acceleration and a graphics processor. The Lumia 800 also contains an instant-share camera experience based on Carl Zeiss optics, HD video playback, 16GB of internal user memory and 25GB of free SkyDrive storage for storing images and music. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Lumia 800 will be approximately $566, though no U.S. release date was specified.
The Lumia 710 can be personalized with exchangeable back covers and is designed for social and image sharing, and a browsing experience through IE9. It is available in black and white with black, white, cyan, fuchsia and yellow back covers. It offers the same 1.4 GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor as the Nokia Lumia 800.
Both smartphones include Nokia programs optimized for Windows Phone, including Nokia Drive, which delivers a personal navigation device (PND) with free, turn-by-turn navigation and in-car-user-interface and Nokia Music introducing MixRadio, a free, global, mobile music-streaming application. The Lumia 710 is scheduled to be available first in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan toward the end of the year alongside the Lumia 800, before becoming available in further markets in early 2012, the company noted.
In an update delivered later this year, Lumia users will also gain the ability to create personalized channels from a global catalogue of millions of tracks. Also integrated in Nokia Music is Gigfinder, which provides the ability to search for live local music, as well as the ability to share discoveries on social networks and buy concert tickets also coming in the Nokia Music software update delivered later this year.
“Eight months ago, we shared our new strategy and today we are demonstrating clear progress of this strategy in action. We’re driving innovation throughout our entire portfolio, from new smartphone experiences to ever smarter mobile phones,” said Stephen Elop, Nokia’s president and CEO. “From the Lumia 800 to the Asha 201, we are bringing compelling new products to the market faster than ever before. I’m incredibly proud of these new devices – and the people of Nokia who have made this happen.”