Nokia announced their trio of X series handsets earlier this morning, targeting the lower-end of the smartphone market with their own fork of the Android platform. During the keynote, Stephen Elop made sure to emphasize that the X phones were running AOSP along with Nokia’s and Microsoft’s suite of services — no Google allowed. That left everyone curious to see how Nokia pulled that off and thankfully, we have a few videos and photos to give us a clearer idea.

The first video is an official hands-on released by Nokia, and goes over the Glance Screen (Nokia’s signature screensaver with clock and notifications), the homescreen with the tiles UI, as well as the Fastlane page that acts as both a notifications screen and a multitasking hub with a list of the recent apps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUCEN-XvC7g

FoneArena has covered the Nokia X+ with a photo gallery that takes us for a tour around the device, and shows in details the About screen. Disappointingly, there’s no mention of the version of AOSP running beneath, but that was revealed by PocketNow — more on that in a bit.

Nokia X+ About Screen

Android Central decided to be daredevils and tested the veracity of Nokia’s claim to support sideloading of apks. They sent their own application’s apk to a Nokia phone and installed it, and lo-and-behold it works.

Sideloading an apk and running an app on the Nokia X series

PhoneArena took a longer look at the Nokia X and X+, and their video reminds us that there are no separate homescreen and app drawer, just the tiles page that acts as both. The video also includes a demo of Fastlane, shows the toggles, the Camera app’s interface and the Settings screen that is one of the rare things reminiscent of Android as we know it. There’s a short demo of EA’s Tetris as well, for fun.

GSM Arena took the XL for a spin with a Nokia representative, who points out that you can create folders on that tiled homescreen and resize the icons to put emphasis on your favorite apps, and answers a question we were all wondering about: no, you can not use wallpapers behind the tiles. The video also includes a short demo of the notifications on the lockscreen, and the swiping gesture to unlock the device.

Phone Arena’s Nokia XL hands-on is quite similar to the ones cited above, but shows two new things on the phone. First is the universal search function that is included on the homescreen, and second is the removable battery cover.

PocketNow’s hands-on with the Nokia X series also shows us the completely removable and replaceable battery cover, and gives us a little bit more information that other videos failed to mention. Apparently, the devices are based on Jelly Bean and not KitKat, and the Fastlane UI can be tinkered with to show and remove certain elements like social feeds.

PocketNow also took a video that we all wanted to see, putting the Nokia XL next to the Lumia 1020, just to show us how Nokia modified the Android interface to make it look as close as possible to Microsoft’s Windows Phone UI.

What do you think of Nokia’s new X series? Is it something you would consider buying, either for yourself or for a relative as a first entry-point into the world of smartphones?