Nokia has confirmed that it will be launching Android smartphones in 2017 and it's expected to do so as soon as February. 

There may be a little more meat on the bones of Nokia's plans thanks to a leak coming out of China, claiming to be the flagship handset, the Nokia P.

Before we progress, just remember to take this with a pinch of salt: although we've seen the vast majority of phone leaks surface from origins in China recently, it's also difficult to decipher the authenticity of such leaks.

The phone in question appears to sport a metal body with an anodised finish, which has previously been rumoured for Nokia's new phone. There's typical branding on the rear, but the handset otherwise looks like something you might get from HTC.

There's little else to judge from it, although it doesn't appear to have any buttons on the front, so it's difficult to tell if it has a fingerprint scanner. A volume rocker and power button look like they're sitting on the side. 

The accompanying details don't say much, expect namedropping the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset and suggesting 6GB of RAM. We expect to see a number of devices rocking the SD835 is 2017, so that could easily be guesswork. 

The other point of interest is the 23-megapixel rear camera, said to offer a Carl Zeiss lens. We've heard rumour of a high-resolution camera before and Nokia had a long-term working relationship with Zeiss back when it was producing phones previously, so neither suggestion is too far fetched. 

As we said, there's little to verify this information at the moment, but with MWC 2017 the likely Launchpad for Nokia's new Android phones, we expect to see a lot more speculation in the coming weeks.