14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia’s Devices and Services division might have been bought by Microsoft, which has already announced plans to kill the Android-based Nokia X series of devices, but it seems that the Finnish company will continue working with Google’s mobile OS.
A job listing on LinkedIn shows that the company is currently looking for an imaging software engineer who has experience with Android, which suggests that the company is actively working on new products for the platform.
The company is looking to hire a mobile photography engineer with experience writing camera drivers for Android, and the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the fact that we might see Nokia releasing smartphones running under the Google’s mobile platform in the not-too-distant future.
As part of the agreement signed with Microsoft when it sold its Devices and Services division, Nokia is prevented from launching smartphones for the next few years.
However, that does not mean that it won’t release such a device as soon as it can, and an Android handset might be among the first new phones that it will announce.
This is only a supposition for the time being, and the aforementioned job listing alone is not enough proof to bet on an Android-based Nokia handset coming soon.
According to Phone Arena, other similar job listings on LinkedIn actually revealed that the company was also looking to hire designers and other software engineers to help it build an Android handset.
Even so, there is also the possibility that Nokia is actually planning the release of a camera application on Google’s platform, and that it is currently looking to hire engineers that will help it achieve that.
Such an application would take full advantage of Nokia’s imaging expertise, which has already made the company’s Lumia handsets some of the most popular camera phones out there.
The company has already released an Android application in the Google Play Store, in the form of Nokia Z Launcher, which is currently available only in a beta flavor.
We should note forget that Nokia has built a great deal of mobile applications over the years, and that they proved highly popular on Symbian and Windows Phone devices.
Thus, chances are that the company is only working towards bringing some of these apps to Android phones, and that the aforementioned job listing is pointing exactly in this direction.
No official confirmation on the matter has been provided as of now, and it remains to be seen what Nokia’s plans for Android will actually be. One thing that is certain at the moment, however, is the fact that a new Nokia smartphone won’t be announced in the very near future.