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Nokia to announce Windows Phone 8 before Apple spruiks iPhone

Nokia may try and plant its smartphone seed in your mind before Apple has a chance to launch its latest iPhone.

Joseph Hanlon Special to CNET News
Joe capitalises on a life-long love of blinking lights and upbeat MIDI soundtracks covering the latest developments in smartphones and tablet computers. When not ruining his eyesight staring at small screens, Joe ruins his eyesight playing video games and watching movies.
Joseph Hanlon

Nokia may try and plant its smartphone seed in your mind before Apple has a chance to launch its latest iPhone.

(Screenshot by Joseph Hanlon/CBSi)

According to Bloomberg, Nokia will unveil its latest Lumia phones running on Windows Phone 8 at its Nokia World conference in Helsinki on 5-6 September, a week before Apple is rumoured to host its own event showcasing this year's iPhone. To be fair, it would be a waste of an excellent forum for a launch if Nokia were to wait until after its well-publicised annual expo.

Less is known about what Nokia intends to launch, in line with Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 release in the fourth quarter of this year. There is a terribly photoshopped image of what the creator is calling the Lumia X circulating on tech blogs this week, with a swivelling lower half housing a camera with optical zoom. The person sending the image to the blogs is claiming to be a friend of a designer working for Nokia, but seriously, if that is Nokia's latest creation, it should close its doors now and give up. It's that bad.

The optical zoom rumour is, itself, ridiculous, given the critical praise for Nokia's 41-megapixel camera in the PureView 808 handset. This image sensor uses clever software algorithms to produce a zoom effect with little to no perceivable loss in image quality. There have been strong suggestions, even from Nokia, that we should expect this imaging tech in its next round of Windows Phone handsets.