Blast from the past - Nokia Windows Phone with front-facing keyboard leaks (pictures)

Way back in 2012 there was a rumour that Nokia was shopping around a Nokia E6-type Windows Phone to carriers at Mobile World Congress.

The handset was meant to address the same business market as that device and would have featured a front-facing keyboard paired with a touch screen.

Today the device, the Nokia RX-100, has made a unique appearance on Chinese site Tieba, courtesy of Nokibar, confirming that some rumours are real, even when there is no evidence for many years.

The handset ran an early version of Windows Phone 8 (which was only released much later in October 2012) and had 2 GB of storage and an AMOLED screen.  They keyboard had a compact 39 keys without a dedicated number row.

See what could have been in the gallery below.

In some ways Windows Mobile 6 was more suited to one-handed keyboard use, featuring a number of keyboard shortcuts for example, so I suspect this device would not have changed anything, but it does make us wonder what other devices are still waiting to be uncovered by techno-archeologists.