Revealed: Nokia's 'Sea Ray' Windows Phone

Microsoft's Windows 7 Phone Revealed

Pictures and specifications of what's believed will be Nokia's debut entry into the Windows Phone 7 market have leaked to the Internet.

The device, code-named Sea Ray, is based on Nokia's new N9 chassis, which debuted Tuesday running the soon-to-be retired MeeGo operating system. The information was posted on the Hungarian blog Technet, which claimed the images came from Nokia employees who were shown a preview of the device by CEO Stephen Elop--before he told them to turn off their cameras.

Nokia unveiled the N9 on Tuesday. 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.

But that won't last long.

Nokia is porting all of its smartphones to Windows Phone 7 under a bet-the-company deal with Microsoft. The N9's powerful specs should enable it to run business apps like Office on the Windows Phone 7 platform, and its good looks should appeal to consumers. Microsoft officials have said that the latter is key, even from the standpoint of enterprise sales.

"The overwhelming trend we're seeing is more of the phones coming into the enterprise through a consumer purchase, and then wanting access to business resources," said Terry Myerson, Microsoft's corporate VP for Windows Phone Engineering, in an interview earlier this month with InformationWeek editors at the company's Redmond, Wash., campus.

If the N9 does show up in the marketplace running Windows Phone 7, it will be among the first to come with the Mango update pre-installed, as Myerson said Nokia's Windows phones won't ship until Mango is ready.

Mango, expected to be available later this year, adds a number of features, including multi-tasking and Internet Explorer 9, to Windows Phone 7.

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