MNB RG: Is this the New Asha?

You may have seen the image above over a week or so so and concluded it might have just been a fake image of a new Symbian device (or some other fake Nokia). Janne however reckons it’s possibly a new Asha phone.

 

I think something got lost in all the excitement over the Lumia launch. This was briefly discussed over many blogs, but I think it is worth bringing it up again.

http://www.wpdang.com/archives/44011.html

WP Dang posted on the last day of August some leaked images of supposed Nokia handsets featuring a tile interface and four Android-like capacitive keys under the screen. They speculated it was a future Symbian device, but I doubt it has anything to do with Symbian. An Asha touch reboot would seem more likely.

One thing that I think lends some credence to this leak is the right-indented Nokia logo on the top – something we now see Nokia seems to be moving towards with their new Lumia models. The bottom keys could be stylized call on (left) and off (right) with search (Bing?) and home in the middle perhaps.

Another are the persistent rumors that Nokia is aiming to align its Asha family of products a visually with the Windows Phone ecosystem. Turning squircles (of which there is still some remnant in the sides of the photo, more proof maybe of Nokia association) into tiles could be just the thing.

The really interesting point here, though, is: Was this Meltemi? Or, more importantly, is this Smarterphone? Because we still don’t really know how and where Nokia intended to use Smarterphone it purchased some time ago. Some have speculated it was Meltemi related, others just a human resources buy, but we can’t completely rule out there is some Asha re-development going on there as well.

So, what do you guys think of this image?

Category: Asha