By most accounts, 2017 is going to be an incredibly exciting year for smartphone enthusiasts. Among other things, we have the reportedly incredible Galaxy S8 to look forward to, as well as the 10-nanometer process which all major chipset manufacturers are getting ready to commercialize. In addition to that, 2017 will also be the year when the Nokia brand will reenter the smartphone market. Following Microsoft’s sale of Nokia’s phone business to Foxconn who paid $350 million for this division back in May, the Chinese tech giant opted to resurrect the Nokia brand through HMD Global, its recently established subsidiary based in Espoo, Finland.
While we’ve already seen some leaks of Nokia’s upcoming smartphones, all of them were related to either midrange or low-end devices. However, earlier today, a new leak originating from the Chinese social website Weibo seemingly revealed the Nokia P, a rumored flagship device slated for release at some point next year. The Weibo post included only two images of an alleged Nokia P prototype, both of which you can see in the picture above. Apart from that, the same source reported that this mysterious device will be powered by the Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip and 6GB of RAM, in addition to boasting a 23-megapixel camera with a sensor made by Carl Zeiss, the well-known German manufacturer of optical systems. A couple of months ago, this same smartphone was rumored to sport a QHD display, i.e. a display featuring a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels.
Now, while HMD Global already confirmed it will announce some Nokia devices at the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2017 trade show scheduled to start on February 27th, it’s unlikely that this device will be showcased in Barcelona. Namely, Foxconn’s subsidiary already confirmed that it’s planning to gradually reintroduce the Nokia brand to the market in 2017, meaning that it’s planning to attack the low-end and midrange markets first before trying to compete with the latest and greatest devices Android OEMs will have to offer come next year. Of course, it’s also possible that this leak isn’t legit and that HMD Global has no plans to launch a Nokia flagship next year, so there’s not much to do but wait and see what Foxconn has in store for us in 2017.