Nokia’s N1 Android tablet is an iPad Mini beater

Nokia has launched an own-brand Android tablet called the Nokia N1, which looks like the iPad Mini and packs solid specs but will sell for just $249.

Nokia might have announced that it’s out of the phone game just recently, with Microsoft Devices taking responsibility for the Lumia smartphone range, but it looks like the Finns aren’t done with mobile tech entirely. Check out the Nokia N1, an affordable Android tablet that gives lots of bang for little buck.

Nokia N1: Specs and features

Packing a 64-bit Intel Atom quad-core processor and full Android Lollipop 5.0, a departure from Nokia’s favoured Windows platform, the Nokia N1 looks like it’ll boast solid enough specs to take on more premium tablets. That’s backed up by a sleek one-piece aluminium design that’s rather reminiscent of Apple’s iPad Mini 3, complete with a square-ish 7.9-inch 4:3 screen that’s suitably sharp (329 pixels-per-inch, basically matching the iPad Mini 3). The Nokia N1 is just 6.9mm thick and It’ll weigh just 318g too, keeping it similarly light.

Also like Apple, Nokia apparently is a little colour blind. While Apple put out a ‘space gray’ version of the iPad, Nokia has gone for ‘lava gray’, another well-known gray thing. Perhaps we’ll see the Nokia N1 in tomato blue or kitten purple at some point.

An 8-megapixel rear camera packs autofocus, capable of 1080p video recording, and you get a 5-megapixel fixed-focus camera at the front. As for the other specs, expect 32GB of storage space (a microSD slot looks unlikely), 5,300mAh battery and stereo speakers. No 3G/4G support sadly.

Nokia N1: UK price and release date

Now for the really great news. Unlike the iPad, Nokia’s N1 tablet will cost you just $249 US, or roughly £150 here in the UK. That’s a stunning price that immediately puts it in competition with the Nexus 7, Tesco’s Hudl 2 and other cheap tablets. Of course, it will likely cost a little over that when it does hit the UK; we’d expect a £179 price tag.

So far we know little about when the Nokia N1 is hitting stores, other than it’ll be hitting China first, likely in February. Nokia will then expand it to further markets, which hopefully will include good ol’ Blighty.

The Nokia N1 is an unexpected little launch from the company, now owned by Microsoft. All Nokia phones will now be released under the Microsoft brand, and we expected not to see any new mobile tech from the Finns any time soon, so this is an interesting turn of strategy in many regards. What Microsoft makes of it, we can only guess, but we expect it’ll be watching the N1’s performance closely and hoping that it dies an early death, to avoid causing too much consumer confusion.