By David Meyer
Tuesday, July 07 2009 10:35 AM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/communications/0,39044192,62055783,00.htm

Nokia has strongly denied working on an Android-based handset, following a report early on Monday that it was planning to do so.

The report, carried in The Guardian, took a cue from "industry insiders" to predict the launch of a touchscreen Android device at Nokia World in September.

When contacted by ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK on Monday morning, a Nokia spokesman issued what he called an "outright denial" of the piece.

"There is no truth to this story whatsoever," a statement from the company read. "It is a well known fact that Symbian is our platform of choice for smartphones."

Going for Android would certainly have been a surprising move for Nokia, given the time and money it has put into opening up Symbian. Nokia's operating system (since it bought out Symbian's other stakeholders last year) is likely to reappear in its new, open source guise next year.

Nokia also has another open source mobile platform in Maemo, which it is actively promoting as part of its Intel partnership.

Meanwhile, fairly realistic-looking images have been leaked of Sony Ericsson's Android phone, currently codenamed 'Rachael'. The device appears to be part of SE's high-end Xperia line, and is said to run on Qualcomm's 1GHz Snapdragon processor.

This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.