Monday, July 11, 2016

Nokia’s Scrapped “Moonraker” Smartwatch Leaked Online

New images of Nokia's cancelled Moonraker smartwatch have surfaced on Twitter earlier this month, courtesy of Evan Blass, better known under his user handle @evleaks. More specifically, Blass has tweeted a short GIF of the device which shows it rotating. For the uninitiated, the Microsoft Moonraker was a smartwatch designed by Nokia who also made several prototypes of the said wearable. This all happened around the time the Redmond-based tech giant was in the process of acquiring the Finnish company, i.e. circa 2014. The device was even allegedly shown off to Nokia's potential business partners during Mobile World Congress shows of 2014 and 2015. The wearable was allegedly designed for seamless integration with Lumia smartphones and was supposed to launch simultaneously with the Lumia 930, but due to unknown reasons, the entire project was scrapped by Microsoft after the acquisition of Nokia.

Judging from the GIF which you can see below, the Moonraker was designed for sports and outdoors activity in general as it features a silicon or rubber band and a seemingly robust case. The smartwatch is also rather bright and colorful, but that's no surprise given how that's how Nokia tends to design its products in general. Furthermore, the Moonraker depicted below apparently doesn't have a heart rate monitor which reminds us this is a gadget designed years ago when that feature wasn't automatically included in pretty much every smartwatch. As for the information we were already aware of, Moonraker was supposed to give its users the option of creating their own custom watch faces and was running a proprietary operating system (OS) that seems rather similar to Android Wear. All of this was revealed in another leak from last month.

Nokia has recently announced its plans to acquire the wearables company Withings so it seems like the Finnish communications and information technologies company is looking to give the smartwatch business another go. On the other hand, it remains to be seen how much financial backing can it expect from its parent firm as latest reports suggest Microsoft has potentially wasted at least $8 billion dollars on its Nokia experiment as of May of this year.

Bonus: Microsoft Moonraker (dead) [first reported: https://t.co/ligsXkFocK] pic.twitter.com/epT8T3uDyL

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) July 8, 2016


Source: Nokia's Scrapped "Moonraker" Smartwatch Leaked Online

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