Despite selling its mobile business to Microsoft and facing public opinion that Nokia Oyj had abandoned the mobile market, the Finnish company reminds the world it’s still alive and kicking with news of the upcoming Nokia N1 tablet. But is Nokia losing its touch to innovate? The electronics maker’s newest device looks a lot like the popular iPad by Apple Inc.

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N1 tech specs

Design

The N1 comes in sleek black box that gives the appearance of a gift. Inside the N1 tablet measures 200.7mm in height, a width of 138.6mm, 6.9mm thick and weighs 318g. It sports a one-piece aluminum body that has been sandblasted to give it that satin finish, and comes in Natural Aluminum and Lava Gray color options.

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Display

The N1 tablet features a 7.9 inch fully laminated, zero air-gap display with a 2048 x 1536 resolution. The screen is fortified with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 to handle everyday stress.

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Chips

Nokia’s new tablet utilizes an Intel 64-bit Atom processor with a clock speed of 2.3GHz, 2GB RAM, PowerVR G6430 533 graphics card, and 32GB storage.

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Camera

The N1 features an 8MP rear-facing camera with autofocus, a 5 MP front-facing camera with fixed focus, and 1080p video recording.

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Connections, audio, speakers, mic

The N1 supports Micro-USB 2.0 with a Type-C reversible connector, 3.5 mm audio, and comes with High Quality Discrete Audio Codec, Wolfson, WM8958E and an independent audio codec. The tablet also features two 0.5 W stereo speakers, 90dB with less than 10 percent total harmonic distortion (THD), digital MIC Cavity resonance frequency more than 20 KHz.

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Battery

The N1 features an 18.5 Wh (5300 mAh) rechargeable lithium polymer battery (3.7 V).

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Sensors

Nokia’s newest tablet comes with a 6-axis Gyro+Accelerometer.

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Wireless

The N1 supports Wi-Fi, (802.11a/b/g/n/ac); dual channel (2.4GHz & 5GHz) with MIMO, Bluetooth, BT 4.0.

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Software

The N1 tablet comes with the Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system with the Nokia Z Launcher.

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Availability

No word on a specific launch date for the N1, but interested buyers can sign up for alerts on the N1 website here.

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Can the N1 stand out from the crowd?

The technical specifications of the Nokia N1 are not that impressive, as its features are standard with most tablets available in the market today. The design of the N1 is another matter — the sleek tablet will catch glances as it looks very similar to Apple’s iPad, especially with the button placement and speaker grills. The only thing missing on the N1 is the Home button of the iPad.

What will probably make this device stand out is the Z Launcher, Nokia’s custom interface for Android 5.0. It makes all your most used apps readily available to you and if you want to look for a specific app, you just have to scribble anywhere on the screen to pull up related apps. Say you want apps that has the letter “F” in its title — just scribble “F” on the screen and it delivers apps with names that contain the letter “F”. It’s pretty simple but it makes searching for apps, especially when you have many installed on your device, much easier.

Few other details are available for the N1’s Z Launcher, though Nokia does hint that the interface comes with learning technology to adapt to user behavior. That could mean a number of things, but given mobile operating systems’ desire today to predict user needs, Nokia could be looking to sync calendar, email and search functionality for a time- and location-specific alert system or recommendation service.

Images via Nokia