Nokia’s decision to sell its smartphone business to Microsoft and leave Windows Phone behind was an excellent choice, it seems. The Finnish firm today announced its first piece of hardware following the sale, and it’s a stunning iPad mini clone called the N1 that’s powered by Android 5.0 Lollipop.

The trademark Lumia look made up of brightly colored plastics that we’ve come to expect from Nokia has been ditched for the N1, which, like the iPad, is made out of a solid piece of anodized aluminum.

At first glance, it looks almost identical to Apple’s iconic device — particularly from the back and sides where its camera, buttons, headphone jack, and speaker placements are all exactly the same. The N1 is also the first device to use a reversible type-C USB connector, which is located in the same place as the reversible Lightning connector on an iPad mini.

The N1 also has a similarly-sized 7.9-inch display, with the same 2048 x 1536 resolution as the iPad mini. Its edges are more rounded, however, and like many modern Android devices, it has virtual navigation keys as opposed to physical buttons on its front.

In many ways, the N1 is what many were hoping the iPad mini 3 was going to be this year. It’s lighter at 318 grams, and thinner at just 6.9mm thick. It also offers a fully-laminated display, like the new iPad Air 2, which means its LCD panel is fused to the cover glass to reduce the gap between the two and provide better display quality.

The N1 is powered by a 64-bit, quad-core Intel Atom processor clocked at 2.4GHz, combined with 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage. It has an 8-megapixel camera on its rear, a 5-megapixel camera on its front, and it’s available in “Natural Aluminum” and “Lava Gray.”

The N1 ships with Android 5.0 Lollipop pre-installed, and it’s mostly stock, expect Nokia’s own Z Launcher replaces the Google Now launcher by default. That means users can scribble letters on the screen to find the apps and games they’re looking for, and see home screens that are automatically organized based on what they use most.

You can try the Z Launcher out for yourself by downloading the smartphone version from Google Play now, but the tablet version is exclusive to the N1 for now.

The Nokia N1 will launch first in China next February, before rolling out to other markets later on. The device will be priced at $249 before taxes, making it $150 cheaper than Apple’s 16GB iPad mini 3.

https://youtu.be/IwJmthxJV5Q

• SourceNokia