Talk of a Windows Phone 7-powered Nokia device have been going on for a while, ever since the phone maker’s $2 billion agreement with Microsoft was announced, and it would appear that now the first handset is finally here. Codenamed Sea Ray, the N9-based device was previewed to employees by CEO Stephen Elop. Elop asked the attendees to turn off their recording devices, but Hungarian blog Technet management to get some info (and pics) of the  phone.

InformationWeek lays out the specs:

“The smartphone includes a 1-GHz Cortex A8 processor, an 8-MP autofocus camera, 16 GB or 64 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM, anti-glare glass, and plenty of other high-end features. The version Nokia showed off at an event in Singapore was based on Mee Go, a mobile OS jointly developed by Intel and Nokia.”

Sea Ray may be running the already dying Mee Go at present, but that probably won’t be the case when it hits general availability. Nokia’s Symbian has lost a lot of market share to iOS, Android and other mobile platforms, and the company put its hopes in a massive partnership with Microsoft to put some life back into its lagging product line-up.

If it turns out that Sea Ray will be running WP7, it will be among the first phones to come with Mango. The update comes with several key improvements, such as IE9 and multi-tasking.

Nokia’s new strategy will definitely bite away a chunk of its competitors market share, but the question is how much. Rumor has it that Apple is gearing up to launch the iPhone 5 before the end of August. The upcoming handset is almost guaranteed to stir serious buzz and drive millions of purchases on the first day just like its predecessors, whether earlier than expected or not.

From the Android point of view, Nokia will have to gain a whole lot of market share to overshadow the dominate OS, even as it faces the new Verizon iPhone in terms of competition.