Marko Ahtisaari, the chief designer of Nokia, confirmed in an interview with a Finnish news-paper that he spends one third of his time on the company’s yet unreleased tablet, implying that the company is very serious about the device. The company clearly hopes to make a console that would be massively better than its rivals powered by Windows 8.

In an interview with Kauppalehti Optio news-paper, Marko Ahtisaari admitted that the company had begun to work on its own tablet. He did not provide any details, but noted that he spends third of his time on the new device, which means that the project is extremely important for Nokia, which is struggling on the rapidly growing market of smartphones.

According to recent market rumours, Nokia intends to unveil its first tablet based on Microsoft Windows 8 operating system late in 2012, sometimes in the fourth quarter at the earliest. The media tablet is projected to be made by Compal Electronics contract manufacturer and will be initially available in very limited 200 thousand quantities, which will barely intensify competition on the well-developed media-tablet markets.

Unfortunately for Nokia, specifications of its first media tablet in years do not look to be too impressive: 10” screen, dual-core Qualcomm system-on-chip and Windows 8. There are no signs of 4G/LTE, high-definition screen and other advanced technologies.

^{Microsoft Windows 8 reference tablet}

When the current chief executive officer of Nokia first started to talk about tablets in early 2011, he said that the company would like to deliver a “special” tablet that would be different from already available. Late last year an executive from Nokia France implied that the company would be ready with its own tablet in June ’12, which would be earlier than expected availability of Windows on ARM support.

Tags: Nokia, Windows 8, Qualcomm, Compal, ARM, Cortex, Microsoft