Nokia N1 Android Tablet Revealed | Hacker News Reader

Nokia N1 Android Tablet Revealed

phoneradar.com

122 pointskenrick95128 comments

This is the first product I've seen to feature the new reversible and just generally very promising USB C-type connector. Just wanted to point that out, since it's fun when new tech enters the market.

I just noticed too, this is awesome. But on the product page it says USB 2 Type-C, which is weird, since I've thought Type-C would start from USB 3.1, but it seems the standards can be mixed and matched. It would have been great since you'd have the DisplayPort Lanes on the connector as well, allowing for full 4k output over that small connector.

Apparently the chipset they had to use to support the Intel CPU tops out at USB2.

"And, it again isn’t the standard Android OS"

Why is this a good thing? Does it mean that it's going to lag behind, and at some point stop running the latest version of Android leaving you with a device that can't be updated?

According to The Verge it will run stock android 5.0, just with a custom launcher installed.

Thats the Z Launcher which Nokia had released months back for Android.

This is correct.

But that does not mean the Android OS will be updated.

It will be a good thing if Nokia or someone else creates and alternative for Android Play Store.

There are alternatives for Android Play Store already. The Chinese have several, there is the one from Amazon, ... There is no reason to think one by Nokia would be any more different or successful than those.

The biggest problem with all other stores is that they dont come pre-installed on the device.

uh, even nexus devices only get two versions and then are abandoned.

the one and S only got two revisions of a single version even

Uh, wrong. The Nexus 7 2012 launched with 4.1 and has seen upgrades to 4.2, 4.4 and now 5.0. The Nexus 4 also has had 3 major upgrades.

This is from the independent Nokia that makes HERE Maps, not from the division acquired by Microsoft.

So Nokia sold their worthless Windows Phone part and started making android devices a year later? Their strategy is suddenly making sense.

This is what I've been wondering. Is there any source that this is the case?

It looks like 7in iPhone. Even the connector looks like a lightning jack from the renders. And at 6.9mm its thinner than every iPad other than the Air 2 and is even thinner than the 6+ (its as thin as the 6).

Also a quad core intel atom. Are there any consumer devices running x86 Android? Seems like an interesting choice, I wonder how long intel can squeeze that battery.

Really interesting design choice on Nokia's part, but it seems too recent to actually be a copy-cat in design. Really can't wait to get my hands on one.

It looks amazing (and much more unique) in person. You'll have to try it! :)

Are there any consumer devices running x86 Android?

Acer, Asus and Lenovo have all gone Intel for their Android Tablets

> Are there any consumer devices running x86 Android?

Tesco Hudl2 8-inch tablet, popular in the UK. Battery life is fairly dismal, from personal experience.

And a dozen or so tablets in the Chinese market, few of which reach 'our' shores.

Do you find the Hudl2 any good other than the battery? Did you have a Hudl 1? If so, how does it compare?

Also, what sort of battery life do you get?

Fantastic screen on the Hudl2, exceptionally sharp. Good snappy CPU and wife reporters that it plays HD films without breaking a sweat.

But we usually have to charge it every night by when it has dropped to 30% capacity. Full to empty when watching films and browsing is less than 24 hours, sadly. Despite An enormous battery.

Also very hard to root and charging sometimes stalls and requires a reboot to restart.

Thanks for the info. My mother-in-law has just bought one (despite our protestations) after she dropped her iPad (!) so we'll likely be inundated with calls on how to use it!

Samsung tab3 10in also has a x86 cpu

>Even the connector looks like a lightning jack from the renders

You can hardly blame Nokia for the design the USB committee chose.

Certainly you cannot. However, even the connector receptacle resembles Lightning ports.

There's a perfectly reasonable reason for that, though. The design seems to have avoided most (or any) angles, which makes the receptacle rounded, too.

It looks exactly like an iPad mini, to the point where I may have difficulty telling them apart.

There are x86 Android devices, have been for a while, although they are more rare than I anticipated. Should be an interesting device indeed.

I doubt that, considering it's lacking the Apple home key.

Anyway, apart from specs, to me it really looks more like a bigger iPhone 6(+) than an iPad mini. I'm not saying it's not influenced by Apple's design, but TBH there's only so many ways you can build a unibody-device from aluminium if you wish not to introduce angles (which annoy me when trying to hold a Surface device, for example).

> Are there any consumer devices running x86 Android?

Motorola RAZR-i (2012) was one of the first I think, there have been many since.

There's actually been at least one phone (in the UK) that uses an x86 chipset:

http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/orange-san-diego/

The official product page: http://n1.nokia.com/

Nice, when trying to sign up to the newsletter it says i'm blocked.. On all addresses, what gives?

Kind of weird to see a picture introducing the tablet and it has the letter "F" written on it.

I'm guessing this is the first example of device created with the Nokia brand as part of the licensing deal mentioned earlier this week [0].

They're simply cashing in on the value of that brand, and I worry ultimately it'll end up worthless.

[0] http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/17/nokia-licensing-its-iconi...

Would be interesting to see what the new zero gap screen looks like in person. For people who don't know, screens often have spaces between the front glass, actual LCD, touch sensor, etc.. Zero gap/laminated should improve display quality.

Battery live measurements would be nice too with the Intel processor maybe helping or hurting.

Most modern smartphones already have this to a certain extent, I don't think that what Nokia calls 'zero gap screen' is much different from what we see today. All iPhones since the iPhone 4 have this, same with the Samsung Galaxy line (at least since the SIII, I didn't follow them before), and I'm sure most other mid/high end phones also use this. It's not only a question of improving display quality, this method allows manufacturers guarantee that there will be no dust between the lcd and the touch panel. It also makes the display module thinner, but then makes repair much more difficult - you either have to replace the entire module or painstakingly separate the LCD from the glass.

The technique is called "optical bonding", where an adhesive is poured on the LCD front glass and then the touchscreen/cover glass is adhered to the LCD. The upside is that the assembly can be thinner and the LCD closer to the user, but the downside is what you said. Impossible to repair.

Not impossible (but certainly much more difficult):

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4018

Interesting: Intel inside ("Intel® 64-bit Atom™ Processor Z3580, 2.3 GHz")

Interesting especially Nokia adopting Android now.

I'm not so sure. It's clear to me MS want Windows phone to look like a premium product all of its own merit and not just anything with a Nokia badge on it. Even the cheaper phones are targeted to be more top end for developing markets. Nokia must be a massive thing to have acquired solely to crank out windows phones.

Do MS still go hunting for patent money from android manufactures? So they can potentially undercut everyone in the android game now right?

if they do then that sucks, Nokia has a LOT of industry patents, including a few on bluetooth.

Well, I think it's tough to tell whether it's Nokia adopting Android or the company that's licensing the Nokia name (a Chinese hardware manufacturer) that's adopting Android. I don't doubt they had sign-off on the Android aspect (and, hopefully, actual device quality) prior to lending their name to it, but it seems like, given their plan to license off the Nokia brand, their "adoption" of anything is kind of moot.

N1 is their product. They just use contract manufacturers just like Apple does. They are also hiring new people for tablet development.

Nokia only sold their phone manufacturing and design to Microsoft. Nokia is Nokia Networks, Mobile Broadband- and Global Services, Nokia HERE ja Nokia Technologies (previously Nokia Research). They also own the patents (just licensed to Microsoft)

Nokia has however been shopping its brand around to third parties looking to slap the Nokia label onto their own designs.

> They just use contract manufacturers just like Apple does.

They do more than that; they have outsourced also the business execution (i.e. including selling, warranties, etc.) of the device to Foxconn. They just share in the revenue by licencing the use of their brand and design (and software).

Talk about overkill. That's a quad-core x86-64 CPU clocking up to 2.33Ghz. I realize Atom microarchitectures aren't wide as Haswell and ilk, but that's still some serious horsepower.

It's also interesting that Intel doesn't mention the TDP on their site.[1] I wonder if it eats more power than a comparable ARM CPU.

1. http://ark.intel.com/products/81195/Intel-Atom-Processor-Z35...

Atom is less powerful than Celeron, Intel's low-budget/low-power family. Plus, it will be throttled, to reduce power consumption/heat, like all mobile CPU... but... it certainly does seem like a desktop-class CPU.

It would be interesting to find the median power of a desktop CPU for each year; and the power delivered by a mobile CPU that's sustainable (i.e. without throttling/overheating - 2.33GHz is the "burst frequency"). Then, for example, you could say it's a "2003 desktop class".

As a super-flawed estimate, the first time a PC CPU was available at or above 2.3GHz was in 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology (Opteron, AMD) But this Atom may be a bit better, because that was high-end, not median; not 64-bit; not using fast memory or other advances; and single core not quad. How much they offset the crippled architecture of Atom and throttling, I don't know. It also has 2MB cache; my median PC in 2006 had only 512KB cache...

I'd guess it's around 2006-8 desktop class.

It's tricky as RAM was a lot slower, most of those were single core with hyper threading wheras these are quad core. Definitely interested in the same thing.

What do you mean by overkill? That chip is less powerful than an Apple A8 or Nvidia Denver, and probably even the Snapdragon 805 inside the Nexus 6 and latest Motorola phones and Note 4.

I thought that Microsoft was getting rid of the Nokia brand?

They are.

This is not Microsoft making tablet with Nokia brand. This is Nokia the company making their own Tablet.

Nokia only sold its ‘Devices and Services’ business to Microsoft and licensed its brand for transition period to MS.

They did, because it's Nokia's brand, not Microsoft's. We (Nokia) are doing this independently of Microsoft.

Probably not the right place to ask but any guarantees N1 will not go Nokia X way?

I think that Nokia X was "product of Microsoft" (although planned long before the deal). This is product of Nokia, that means remaining parts of Nokia after mobile division was sold to Microsoft. So two different companies, same brand.

Which part of Nokia? Networks, HERE or Technologies?

To be blunt, this iPad copying is very Nokia-unlike. I associate Nokia with high quality original designs, eg. Lumia devices. This isn't a real Nokia.

you're not a real scotsman

" The OEM partner is responsible for full business execution, from engineering and sales to customer care, including liabilities and warranty costs, inbound IP and software licensing and contractual agreements with 3rd parties." [1] It really isn't a Nokia device, it just has the brand tagged to it.

[1] http://company.nokia.com/en/news/press-releases/2014/11/18/n...

So can anyone who's looked at the specs explain where they're cutting corners? The aluminium body makes this look like a "premium" tablet, but at $250 I just don't see how that's possible/profitable. Even the 32 GB Nexus 7 was more than that at launch, and that had a plastic backing. Is the CPU and/or GPU on the low-end?

I've read that those Intel SoCs may cost negative dollars.

It's Intel's money; they've been rumored to be doing whole BOM subsidization (so the x86 is almost zero, and the non-Intel components are subsidized too).

This is how INTC booked a $1B loss on $1M revenue for mobile in the most recent quarter. Cynically I wonder if they just merged mobile with the revenue positive CPU business to better bury the bad news every quarter.

So Microsoft only buy Nokia for Phone brand, Nokia cam still make other related device that other phone using Nokia brand.

To be precise, Microsoft didn't buy Nokia's brand for use in phones, they licenced it, for about a year for smartphones and a decade for the so-called feature phones.

That IS a surprise. Maybe Nokia can finally rise up on its own after all.

It'd be amazing if this was a step towards bringing their awesome Maemo designs back (like the highly praised N9), and not just becoming yet another Android manufacturer.

Meanwhile in 2012 ... http://slatd.deviantart.com/art/Nokia-N1-298087658

Be careful linking to deviant, probably due to some suspect ads. After having the page open for awhile (a long while in another tab) it redirects to spamware sites that want me download an .exe (I'm on Ubuntu). Shame as Devianart has been a great site.

Very nice! Hope they'll release some Android phones, too.

Whatever phone shop I enter I found myself loving the Nokia sets the most, but I just can't use Windows.

I'd just like to point out that Windows Phone has almost nothing to do with real Windows, no matter what Microsoft's marketing is trying to say.

It's Microsoft Windows, I don't care what exactly is under the bonnet.

I think that they cannot release phone until 2016.

It's also worth mentioning that the CEO has recently stated that they're not interested in returning to the mobile handset market[1]. Of course it's anybodies guess as to how much stock to actually place in that statement.

[1]http://www.zdnet.com/nokia-says-no-return-to-handsets-as-ceo...

It's actually a Foxconn product with a license acquired for using the Nokia brand. Only the launcher software and the case design are by Nokia.

Yeah, a cursory glance at their marketing shows a bunch of Chinese market apps. I'm confident this is Foxconn's product.

Interesting to see firefox for android in the stock photos. Does anyone know if that is going to be the default browser?

Note that since it doesn't have Google Play, they can't use Chrome.

Is it me or does the site not load in Chrome? Initially, text flashes quickly then a blank page.

People should have a copyright on the name N1.. Oppo N1, Nokia N1..

On the subject of this tablet (too little, too late), there is a nagging question, that maybe someone could explain:

Why has there not been any criminal investigation at all, into the infiltration and acquisiton of Nokia?

1. Microsoft exec becomes CEO of Nokia

2. He bankrupts the company (burning platform memo, etc.)

(Not only does he bankrupt it, but in all the history of corporate business, this is one of the most spectacular flameouts ever...)

3. Microsoft buys Nokia for peanuts

I mean, wouldn't there at least be a bit of an investigation into this? The moment Elop became CEO, I had a suspicion that this was going to happen, and it did! I wouldn't say I'm particularly smart or well-informed - certainly everyone else saw it coming too....

(edit: clarified a couple points)

Which country would investigate?

Exactly! and whose loss is it?

Finland or EU (not a country (yet?), I know), of course. Nokia was a Finnish asset and EU should be looking into these deals to begin with.

Yes like when Europe fights against Mittal when they close profitable steel factories or screw them with no investments and R&D, oh wait.

And your point is what exactly?

That the EU commission approved the MS / Nokia deal and usually don't do anything to protect these business practices.

Sadly it no longer is enough to be profitable, you also have to make enough profit (~20% in the banking sector), which is why Thyssen decided to focus on high technology steel products, instead of competing with India/China on price.

I thought it was already established that "megacorporations" are above the law of any country.

2 and 3 are highly contentious. Nokia's mobile phone division was in huge trouble long before Elop showed up, and there is no indication that anything he did made it worse. And given the state Nokia was in, the deal they got from MS was extremely fair.

Nokia was 4 months away from shipping the "Lumia" running MeeGo when February 10th happened.

People were pretty angry.

Source: I was working there on the project at the time.

As a MeeGo fans since back when it was called Maemo (I even had an N810) I'm as sad as the next person to never get that phone. That being said I am not at all convinced that going with MeeGo over WP wouldn't have left Nokia in worse position than the one it ended up in.

Nokia had Qt+QML and the opportunity to take this cross-platform, plus an innovation advantage with Meego (no Java overhead) and patents. Now Microsoft is attempting to take C# cross-platform and open-source, after blocking Qt on Windows Phone. Years have been lost. Meanwhile Java chews up memory and courtroom time on Android.

There's still nothing on the market to compare with Nokia offline maps -- uses no data when travelling, does not send location history to OTT provider like Google or Apple.

The entire industry lost when Nokia imploded, especially Google and Apple, whose UI has stagnated, unless hard to read "thin fonts" count as innovation. Competition from Nokia Linux nee Meego (not to mention WebOS) would have been good for all parties.

I 100% agree with everything you say. I'm even one of those strange freaks that has a Nokia Lumia as my private phone and love Nokia Here maps. From a personal point of view I really wish Nokia had stuck with MeeGo until the bitter end, but Nokia had to look out for Nokia and I still can't blame Nokia for the choices they made.

Have you looked at sailfishOS? I think that's the modern descendant of maemo.

Yes and it's being produced with my ex-bosses and there is a working phone over at Jolla[0] I've not tried it though. :( I'd like to.

[0]http://jolla.com/

I have a nexus 5 and am replying to you from sailfish. The porters have done a great job.

Are there any problems with it? The port is still an alpha build, isn't it?

I have a Jolla, and it is simply amazing. Sailfish is a true touchscreen OS. I definitely recommend you try one if you can (at least in Finland, DNA stores might have them).

The box it comes in has a fingerprint pattern made out of the source code as decoration. It's a pretty cool design decision.

Looked at as in read about it? Sure. Looked at as in actually seen it on real hardware? Nope.

How certain are you that it would have shipped? Maemo had missed deadlines for years and never been in a mainstream product.

there was an ongoing joke in the company that they had "the most expensive clock application ever made" because they kept reinventing it.

but they would have shipped, the deadline was a _dead_line and the product was very close to completion.

the build-systems were finalised and we had started package version locks for builds of the software we were going to use on the distro.. it was very much final stages and polishing.

I had the exact same thing and also, after Microsoft buys Nokia, Elop became Microsoft's Vice President of Microsoft's Devices & Services... It's like it was meant to be :)

He also received quite a bonus after selling Nokia

> He also received quite a bonus after selling Nokia

He achieved what he was hired for. Sadly

Why has there not been any criminal investigation at all, into the infiltration and acquisiton of Nokia?

Who would you investigate and what crimes would you accuse them of?

The closest thing I'm coming up with is blaming the directors that hired the CEO for tanking shareholder value, but that's a civil matter. Being incompetent is not a crime unless you can prove fraud.

Tomi Ahonen has made a few lists..

edit for downvoters who don't know now to run a web search:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/elop-25...

I upvoted you. Very detailed back story but I'm not clear where criminal charges against anyone would arise. What am I missing? Has evidence of purposeful fraud by the board members been uncovered since Sept 2013?

If there is evidence, it won't be on HN :) The point of the GP post was that there was no publicly visible investigation that even looked for evidence, not even from ambulance chasing lawyers.

With a large number of affected parties, naive and affected observers start asking questions. When the affected people are still griping years later, it may be wise for someone to at least pretend to investigate. Wouldn't want people to lose confidence in erstwhile institutions.

Alternatively, given how common "shareholder value" civil lawsuits from ambulance-chasing lawyers are, and how large the company and its fall were, if there was something to be uncovered, it would have been uncovered by now. The fact that it hasn't and the only things remaining are some butthurt and Something Should Be Done opinions suggests per Occam's razor that there's nothing there.

Yeah, that's been the official line for a few years - nothing to see here, move along.

The issue is not whether or not there was fraud. The issue is that some affected people still have not regained trust in the words and assurances of the leaders, and still cannot make sense of the outcome.

Into cracks of distrust fall the seeds of unpredictable change.

I've been wondering this for a long time myself. Even the fact that the company was steered away from Meego for (at the time) a less functional OS like Windows Phone (damned thing didn't have a twitter app and Meego came with one...) by an ex exec who could potentially benefit from the migration of Nokia's devices to Microsoft OS(if he had options).

Such a shame. Meego was revolutionary and is still imo the most intuitive OS ever made. If only someone reputable picked it up, as it still is revolutionary.

Android took the double tap to turn on and HTC Sense took the app cards but beyond that it still has an edge if it was around today.

Do you recall when Nokia corporate email was migrated to Exchange, and what was the prior system?

In a Hollywood movie script, after failure of internal reorgs, a company could be tanked with deniablity, speculators make $ shorting/bouncing the stock, sell shell to BigCo, retain brand, rebuild new company and new corporate culture. Only in the movies.

I miss Meego too. N9 is the best phone I've owned (even despite poor app selections).

Tried looking into Sailfish but it is a poor replica.

Why do you say it is a poor replica out of curiosity?

To be fair it (Windows Phone) didn't need a Twitter app. It is (and was, from launch) built into the OS.

Here is a good article written around 2 years ago on how Nokia went from MeeGo to Windows Phone: http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego

He got payed by Nokia board to drive it into the ground as part of his bonus.

So the board is to blame, he was just going after his bonus.

"Elop was entitled to immediate share price performance bonus in case of a “change of control” situation…"

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/24/nokia-payo...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-a...

Have you read this article on Business Week?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...

Talks about Nokia's strategy and it does look like there was buy-in on the decision from management and the board.

Also, they had hired a Strategy House - can't remember which (either BCG or Bain) to bolster their conclusions. Am sure there were agreements and Elop wasn't a one-man army.

Small Chinese/Indian companies come out with multiple Android models every year. Was it so hard for Nokia to do the same under Elop, and put eggs in more than one basket?

I really don't understand why Microsoft paid so much for Nokia's phone division.

I was thinking about buying the Nokia Android phone back in June, but then I read reports they abandoned the platform. I don't trust them. Being stuck with unsupported software is really bad if the software sucks. And Android often does. I wouldn't consider 2.1 or lower release ready.. beta at best.. yet they sold it to consumers.

That was Microsoft, this is Nokia. Two different companies using the Nokia brand.

If Nokia, now owned by Microsoft, distributes a Linux variant, wouldn't that void all patent royalty claims they have used against other manufacturers? Any N1 owner can redistribute their source (which they have to make available) and grant the same usage rights the N1 owner got from Microsoft, effectively granting each and every Android manufacturer the same rights of N1 owners.

This tablet is from the Nokia that was not acquire by Microsoft as mentioned in this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8623311

Microsoft only bought Nokia's devices division, this is a product by the actual Nokia.

Nokia sold off its phone division along with limited rights to the Nokia brand name to Microsoft. Nokia is still a large company with several different divisions not owned by Microsoft.

This tablet seems to be from the old, independent Nokia, not Microsoft.

The GPLv2 is only a copyright license, not a patent license. Some open-source licenses do require you not to enforce any of your patents that might be used in the product, but the GPLv2 does not.

As others have pointed out, this tablet isn't from Microsoft, but even if it were from Microsoft it wouldn't matter because no patent rights are conferred by the GPLv2.

If I grant you the unrestricted use of my software and grant you the right to further grant all the rights I granted you to others, how can I enforce a patent license without breaking the terms under which I licensed the software in the first place?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com