We’re all pulling for Windows Phone. Have been for a while. Thing is, it’s just not there yet. There’s no single drop-dead-amazing god-phone on the platform. Yet. Hopefully, Nokia’s going to be pulling back the curtain on just that next week at Nokia World. Here’s what we (think we) know so far.
The cornerstone of Nokia’s lineup for this year is expected to be the Sea Ray, or the Nokia 800, depending on which rumour you’re listening to (they’re the same phone). It’s reportedly got a 3.7-inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1.4GHz processor, and could be released a few weeks after its expected announcement next week. Early rumours say November 15th.
On top of the Sea Ray, a new handset called the “Saber” just popped onto the Finnish radar, and apparently it’s got a 1.4 GHz processor, 3.5-inch WVGA screen and 1GB of RAM. And that’s about all we know for now.
There are also rumours about a more giant-sized beast phone coming next year codenamed the Nokia Ace. It’ll be the first LTE phone on Windows Phone, according to the rumours, and also support HSPA+. Ummm. Well, theoretically, that’s possible, I guess, but between two 4ishG radios and battery-unfriendly Mango, I’m pretty sure the battery would be dead before it finished powering on. It’s probably just some confusion about what manner of 4G the phone really is, since Four Gees doesn’t really mean much these days.
Whatever’s announced, though, it almost definitely won’t have LTE or a dual-core processor. Windows Phone division boss Andy Lees told All Things D that Microsoft is going to wait until LTE isn’t such a battery hog to adopt it into WP phones, and that they’re “not against” dual-core chips. That was rolled into “LTE and Dual Core chips coming to Windows Phone in the Future!” but the more realistic interpretation is probably “definitely not this year”.
Though for what it’s worth, even though the leaked specs for these phones come in well below the top-of-the-line Android handsets that have already been announced, Andy Lees told AsiaD that Nokia will announce a phone with “differentiating hardware and software” next week, whatever that means.