Nokia just announced their own Android smartphone, the Nokia X, last week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. The Nokia X is the first-ever Android OS based smartphone from Nokia, which comes as something of a novelty, considering Nokia is now owned by Microsoft, and has been lately dishing out Windows Phone based devices for the most part lately.

As for the Nokia X, it is an entry-level Android smartphone, which is expected to come with Nokia’s own custom version of Android, pretty much like what Amazon is doing with the Kindle line up. The phone itself doesn’t exactly sport the most impressive of specs, considering it is being out out as a budget offering. 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage. 3.15 Mp camera,  1500 mAh battery and Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean on board are not the most exciting specs in a smartphone these days, considering there are several cheap devices available which run more recent versions of Android and sport better specs. But to each his own.

It turns out that Nokia had handed over developer versions of the smartphone to attendees at their MWC event earlier this week, so that the devs could get to work on porting apps to the Nokia Play Store which the phone will ship with. XDA Forum member, Kashamalaga happened to be one of these lucky folks who managed to score one, and thankfully so. For those who came in late, the Nokia X is not expected to come with Google Play Services, or the Google Play Store that we are accustomed to on most Android devices. Instead it will come with Nokia’s own proprietary store. Plus all the standard Google Apps that come pre-installed with Android devices would be replaced by Microsoft Cloud services.

During the course of trying to install Google Play Services, the developer also found a working root method, which is so easy that it doesn’t even require the use of a PC, except perhaps to transfer an APK file to the phone. The root method used is Framaroot, which many of you may know as a root tool that can be run right off the device to achieve root, and works with several Android devices. Once rooted, Kashamalaga has also posted the entire set of Google Apps that can be installed on the Nokia X, along with instruction on how to install them as system apps. You can check out the details on his XDA thread.

If you’re planning on getting a Nokia X as soon as it is available, you may want to bookmark this page and keep it handy, should you want to root the device.