Yesterday, the first piece of hardware to come from Nokia after they sold its Lumia business to Microsoft was announced and surprised quite a few people.

The Finnish company teased everyone on Twitter a couple of days earlier by showing a simple black box with just the word Nokia embossed on the top.

This tweet was  followed by all kinds of speculation that it was any number of things including a streaming TV box and even a Windows 10 computer.

Then yesterday during day one of SLUSH 2014, a two day show that lets Eurasian startups and tech talent meet with investors and the media, Nokia revealed the N1 which is their entry back into the devices world – sort of.

The Nokia branding will be on the device however it is not being built by them. The new Android based tablet is being built by Foxconn, yes the same one that builds Apple iDevices, and more than one observer has compared the lines and looks of this new tablet to the iPad mini.

Here are the official pages relating to the Nokia N1:

Tech coverage of the Nokia N1:

As part of this announcement they also released a beta of their Nokia Z Launcher for Android that dynamically presents a list of your installed apps on an Android device based on your usage. It also can help you find apps by letting you write letters on the screen and then it will begin to match programs on your device that include that letter/search term. I installed this on the test Galaxy S4 I have and it works quite well.

I know this is not a Windows based device and not typically something I write about on this site but it is interesting to see where Nokia is going in the post Lumia era.  Does this mean that they will also make a move into Android phones as well since Microsoft has decided to discontinue the feature phone lines they purchased as part of the Nokia device acquisition?

Plenty to keep an eye on for sure.