Is Nokia getting back into the phone market with Android?

Ever since Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices and services business, we’ve been waiting to see how the future of Nokia’s hardware strategy will play out. The Nokia X line of heavily modified Android devices looked like it might be the end of the line for Nokia as a phone maker, but an abundance of recent job listings on LinkedIn seem to indicate otherwise.

Originally noticed by Russian mobile news site mobiltelefon.ru, Nokia has posted dozens of openings on LinkedIn over the past several weeks, including some as recently as this Thursday for designers, engineers, researchers and more. Many appear to pertain to an effort to reenter the smartphone market in the coming months, possibly as an Android phone maker.

Although the Nokia X devices ran Android when they launched, future Nokia X releases will be transitioning to Windows Phone and will join the Lumia product line.

Now it looks like the team that recently released the Z Launcher for Android devices is leading the charge on the recent hires, and one opening in particular for a mobile photography engineer noted that the candidate should have experience writing camera drivers for Android devices. It would be a fresh start for Nokia, having handed over countless patents and technologies over to Microsoft, but after more than 12,000 layoffs last month to cap off a miserable few years, a fresh start might be exactly what Nokia needs.

BGR.com