The real question around the X family is simple: why? Nokia says its X Android phone is just the first of many, a whole line of X phones that are designed to combine the flexibility of Android apps and services from Microsoft and Nokia. Additional members of the X line are supposed to be coming this year, assuming Microsoft doesn’t kill the project once the company fully acquires Nokia in the coming weeks. Some of the answers for why such devices are coming to market at this stage are clearly present in the apps that Nokia is bundling with the X. MixRadio, Here Maps, OneDrive, Outlook, and Skype will all be preinstalled, and Bing is the default search engine on the X. While it might seem obvious that Microsoft wouldn’t want its closest mobile partner to go Android, Nokia appears to be positioning the X as a method to draw people to Microsoft’s cloud services. The bundling of key apps instead of the usual Google equivalents is a clear method to push the masses towards Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Microsoft will control the future of Nokia X

Nokia’s announcement comes less than a day after Microsoft unveiled hardware improvements for its upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 update that are specifically designed for low-cost devices like the X. Microsoft is chasing after Android and it will soon have its own flavor to either push ahead with or kill. The Nokia X just feels like an experimental project created by a team of determined engineers who wanted to see this phone on shelves. It has all the hallmarks of Nokia’s approach with the N9: a phone that felt like it was released merely because of the amount of effort that went into developing it. It’s going to face the same problems Amazon experiences with out-of-date Android apps in its own store, and the delay between new apps arriving and filtering down to these non-Google stores. For Microsoft, who will acquire Nokia’s phone business in a matter of weeks, the use of Android is questionable.

At a press event yesterday, Joe Belfiore — who runs a team focused on PCs, phones, and tablets at Microsoft — said the software maker has a "terrific" relationship with Nokia when questioned about the X announcement. "What they do as a company is what they do," said Belfiore. "Certainly they'll do some things that we're excited about, and some things that we may be less excited about." Microsoft’s reaction in the coming weeks and months will reveal exactly how excited the company is about Nokia’s X project, but until then these Android phones are still a puzzling result of what Nokia has always done best: experiment.

Dan Seifert contributed to this report.