Is Nokia Working on the Next ‘Zune’ or Lumia Player?

At the T-Mobile USA press event unveiling the U.S. arrival of the Windows Phone-powered Lumia 710 on the carrier’s network, Nokia was showing off a 3-inch device sans any buttons. The device is described as a ‘pocket tablet’ that lacks any wireless mobile broadband connectivity, meaning that it will either connect to the Internet via WiFi or Bluetooth tethering, and the source says that it is running on Windows Phone 7.

As the device comes with a small screen–the Lumia 710 has a 3.7-inch LCD display with Nokia’s Clear Black Display technology–this un-named, un-announced Nokia device may be the company’s answer to the iPod Touch and may represent Nokia’s entry into the portable media player market.

Could this be the next evolution of the Zune? Microsoft has not updated the Zune in a while, and there had been floating speculations of Zune’s death earlier in the year. So far, every device running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system has a cellular radio in it and only the Zune devices are built sans cellular reception. Omitting the cellular radio requirement and merging the smartphone and PMP devices under one OS would help to save development cost, attract developers, grow the apps ecosystem, and help avoid consumer frustration. Apple’s done it with iOS on the iPhone and iPod Touch and Google’s done it with Android–we suspect a Microsoft-Nokia partnership may be exploring this possibility.

Another possibility would be this may be among the first device to run the Tango build of Windows Phone 7. Tango is supposed to add some features to high-end devices, but also reduce the overall specs requirement to bring Windows Phone 7 to low-end devices to compete more effectively with Android. Positioning a phone-less touchscreen device with Tango will help, and will also be beneficial to Nokia as it could bring yet another device to market without having to go through carrier channels.

In terms of industrial design, this touchscreen-only device is said to resemble the Lumia 800‘s design, with curved edges and tapered ends.

Via: My Nokia Blog