Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. Hungarian site Technet.hu knows this, and decided to shoot a spy-style video of Nokia CEO Stephen Elop showing off the first Nokia Windows Phone 7 smartphone at a secret event, despite the fact that the Nokia boss specifically asked attendants to put away cameras.
“This is something super confidential and we do not want to see it out in the blogosphere,” announced Elop to the crowd. This may be bad news for Nokia, but we’re more than happy to catch a glimpse of the long-awaited WP7-powered Nokia handset, codenamed Sea Ray.
The video didn’t zoom out wide enough for us to get a glimpse of the buttons. Usually, WP7 phones require three buttons for back, home, and search, but since Mango has Bing search baked in to every nook and cranny of the OS, this first-of-its-kind smartphone may scrap the buttons entirely. The handset has an almost identical form-factor to the freshly announced Nokia N9, with the same Gorilla glass up front and Carl Zeiss camera on the back. The phone also sports a dedicated camera button, a WP7 hardware requirement.
Luckily, Sea Ray wasn’t all that the Nokia boss was caught revealing. If he’d known he was being taped, Elop probably wouldn’t have gone on to announce that Nokia has “other devices completely different to [Sea Ray] already working.” Nokia has been struggling lately, losing its 15-year market reign to Samsung during the company’s shift from Symbian to WP7. The N9 announced last week has been pretty well-received, and it’s looking like the Finnish phone maker is staging a comeback.
“I want drool,” said Elop, clearly excited over the company’s new-found direction. “What you should be feeling is that the capabilities of the mighty Nokia are shifting around and people are saying, ‘look at that.’ And ultimately there are a few competitors of ours in California that we would very much like to notice as well.”
[via Pocket-Lint; via Engadget]