7 ms·

First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China

97 points by kenrick95 10y ago

lucaspiller 10y ago
What about the Nokia X? It didn't come with Google Play Services, but under the hood it was Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X
- digi_owl 10y ago
  That was passed on to Microsoft as part of the sale of the old handset division. As part of that deal, MS got to use the Nokia trademark for a couple of years. But since then it passed back to Nokia proper (they still exist, focusing on mobile network infrastructure), and is now licensed by HMD Global (a company based in Finland and formed by former Nokia handset people). Also i suspect that it, like Amazon's Fire platform, learned first hand how much of the app side of Android is actually housed in Google Play Services...
akjainaj 10y ago
Is this an actual Nokia phone, or a device made by another manufacturer but branded as "Nokia" like that tabled they made some time ago?
- dazc 10y ago
  Quote: Headquartered in Espoo, Finland, HMD Global Oy is the new home of Nokia phones and tablets. HMD designs and markets a range of smartphones and feature phones targeted at a range of consumers and price points. With a commitment to innovation and quality, HMD is the proud exclusive licensee of the Nokia brand for mobile phones and tablets. Nokia is a registered trademark of Nokia. For further information, see www.hmd.global.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    "Manufacturing and distribution is performed by Foxconn's FIH Mobile division." [1] aka, in China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global
    - akjainaj 10y ago
      Exactly! That tablet I was talking about was made by Foxconn
- Retr0spectrum 10y ago
  Define "actual Nokia".
  - currysausage 10y ago
    Have any former Nokia/Microsoft Mobile engineers transferred to HMD?
    - mcraiha 10y ago
      No one transferred directly. There might be some people from OLD Nokia working in HMD, but basically HMD started from scratch "All the best designers and engineers of the former Nokia mobile business either moved to Microsoft when the latter took over or quit to pursue independent projects and startups of their own. The name’s still the same, but the expertise is gone. HMD’s executives are talking a good game about "the best designers in the world ... lining up" to join the company’s ranks, but they’ll all be starting from scratch. HMD may retain the Nokia cachet, however it lacks the scale of the old company and so there’s no chance of securing early or exclusive access to hot new tech or materials." http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13852802/nokia-android-smartphone-return-2017 http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13852802/nokia-android-sma...
      - bostand 10y ago
        That is an odd thing to say. Almost everyone at HMD are former Nokia employees.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  As far as I know most employees with handset expertise left Nokia after the sale, so it is very hard to say if this is the revival of the old Nokia or effectively a new company that has the trademark and patent rights.
- Nokinside 10y ago
  Nokia owns the brand, provides it's patents and inventions that come from Nokia Research & Bell Labs. They also have member in the board and have some say on quality of the phones (protecting the brand). Foxconn Technology Group subsidiaries bought the manufacturing facilities and manufacture the phones. Including feature phones. HMD Global is the new Finnish company making Nokia-brand devices. It's mostly ex Nokia people. http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases/2016/05/18/nokia-signs-strategic-brand-and-intellectual-property-licensing-agreement-enabling-hmd-global-to-create-new-generation-of-nokia-branded-mobile-phones-and-tablets http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases/2016/05/18/nokia-s... >Nokia will provide HMD with branding rights and cellular standard essential patent licenses in return for royalty payments, but will not be making a financial investment or holding equity in HMD. Nokia Technologies will take a seat on the Board of Directors of HMD and set mandatory brand requirements and performance related provisions to ensure that all Nokia-branded products exemplify consumer expectations of Nokia devices, including quality, design and consumer focused innovation. >HMD would be led, once the Microsoft transaction closes, by Arto Nummela as CEO, who previously held senior positions at Nokia and is currently the head of Microsoft's Mobile Devices business for Greater Asia, Middle East and Africa, as well as Microsoft's global Feature Phones business. HMD's president on closing would be Florian Seiche, who is currently Senior Vice President for Europe Sales and Marketing at Microsoft Mobile, and previously held key roles at Nokia, HTC and other global brands.
godmodus 10y ago
Finally!
illuminati1911 10y ago
"to be released exclusively in China." Why?
- dazc 10y ago
  "The decision by HMD to launch its first Android smartphone into China is a reflection of the desire to meet the real world needs of consumers in different markets around the world." http://www.hmdglobal.com/press/2017-01-08-nokia-6/ http://www.hmdglobal.com/press/2017-01-08-nokia-6/
  - tatoalo 10y ago
    "[...]With over 552 million smartphone users in China in 2016, a figure that is predicted to grow to more than 593 million users by 2017, it is a strategically important market where premium design and quality is highly valued by consumers." I would honestly consider India also a strategically important market which is bound to grow quickly...
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      And so Samsung releases their Tizen-based phones in India. The market in the US is full of broken incentives due to the sales model there, and a lot of the rest of the world seems to be sold whatever works in the US, so inherits the results of the broken market. There's only a few countries which are large enough to have special effort put in.
- eva1984 10y ago
  Biggest market in the world, who didn't love iPhone that much.
bdz 10y ago
>The specifications are mid-range, and so is the price: 1,699 yuan ($245; £200). Nice it will be dirt cheap on Aliexpress then. I might order one
- kyriakos 10y ago
  It's quite expensive for the specs. In comparison xiaomi mi5s with 4gb ram/ sd821 costs just 20 usd more in online stores today.
ploggingdev 10y ago
It was sad to see the decline of Nokia from being the most ubiquitous brand of phones to literally nothing today (in the smartphone and feature phone market). If they had adopted Android instead of going with Windows Phone, things could have been a lot better. Even when they made Windows Phone devices, at least the high end devices where critically acclaimed with everyone's only gripe only being Windows Phone (mainly the lack of apps). IIRC Samsung started becoming incredibly popular at around the same time. In some ways Samsung become the new Nokia, especially in developing markets where low end Android devices became very popular. At the time Nokia also had what seemed like technical advantages one of which was the PureView camera technology. I think Nokia's decline was also largely because of very poor management decisions and also to some extent political. Microsoft aggressively pursued a deal with Nokia to adopt Windows Phone and they gave incredible incentives as well, billions of dollars in aid/credit/support (I don't remember the exact nature of the transfer of cash). This probably swayed their decision away from Android towards Windows Phone. I can't help but take a cheap shot: Stephen Elop was a Trojan Horse. As the title says, this is a Nokia branded device, so HMD uses the Nokia brand for it's phones. It's not a real Nokia device from the company itself. PS : Seeing Nokia and Android in the same sentence always triggers a nostalgic/angry rant.
- mdasen 10y ago
  It is sad, but I don't think it was the Microsoft deal that did Nokia in. Nokia had already been left behind when they finally realized that Symbian wasn't going to cut it against iOS and Android. I think they made a calculated decision: they could try and create an Android device to compete against the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG with basically no differentiation -OR- they could take Microsoft's money and put their hopes on Windows Phone. If they had gone the Android route, it doesn't seem like they would have gotten a better result. Samsung can make its own displays and chips and that advantage has ground a lot of the competition to dust. LG makes its own displays. Facing this, HTC (who had a nice Android business) has really struggled. Motorola struggled and then got bounced around and still doesn't really make money. Nokia would likely have struggled as well. Let's look at the Lumia 800 flagship launched in November 2011. The Galaxy S2 was launched in May 2011 with a dual-core processor (as opposed to the single-core Lumia), 1GB of RAM (rather than 512MB), a 4.3" display (rather than 3.7" - and people want larger screens), a 3-colors-per-pixel AMOLED Plus display (rather than the 2-color-per-pixel PenTile on the Lumia), a microSD card slot (while the Lumia had no expandable storage), a front camera the Lumia lacked entirely, and a larger battery. A Lumia 800 Android phone wouldn't have sold well. It was way worse (hardware wise) than a Samsung phone introduced 6 months prior. Not to go on too much of a tangent, but in a way it was like the Palm Pre. Palm introduced it, but it had a smaller display than the iPhone, underclocked processor, half the storage, 40% thicker, creaky build quality, and the same price tag. Sure, it had the niche feature of the keyboard, but in most ways the hardware was simply inferior. It was easy to write off the Palm Pre as a device that could have been great if not for an OS that wasn't popular enough. If it had run iOS, it would have tanked against an iPhone that was simply superior. It's very easy to critically acclaim something when one sees one specific flaw that's a dealbreaker. In that case, all other flaws tend to go unnoticed or just get attributed to the dealbreaker. If the Lumia 800 ran Android, it would have been crappy compared to Android phones of the day. Nokia did a couple cool things like the 41MP Lumia 1020 (or PureView 808). But a camera just isn't enough, especially when wedded to a bulky, underpowered phone with a crappy display. Nokia's hardware was simply poorly matched against what you could get from competitors. It's always sad to see a brand that once meant so much end up the way it did. But it wasn't Microsoft that did Nokia in. Like many others, they failed to notice how important the iPhone was going to be. Even those that saw the iPhone for what it was (like HTC) weren't spared. Nokia wouldn't have done much better if they'd released their devices as Android phones. They would have been underpowered and overpriced. Sure, some would have bought it for the Nokia name, but not enough. The market was flooded with better hardware. Nokia would have introduced Android phones that would have been mediocre with a premium price. A lot of us remember Nokia fondly and would have rooted for Nokia to introduce something without the dealbreaker of Windows Phone, but we would have been disappointed when we compared a Nokia Android against other options in the market. Maybe it's best that we can just write off Nokia's failure as due to Windows Phone rather than noting that most of their smartphone devices also just weren't great hardware.
coconutoperator 10y ago
It's a good sign but not that impressive, people are expecting a top-notch change-maker one from Nokia. At least it should be with flagship android specs. Not many people would pay the 'Nokia premium' for the specs of this phone nowadays. There are plenty of homogeneous ones are just doing fine with lower prices.
kenrick95 10y ago
If anyone could read Chinese, here is the product page on Nokia's website: http://www.nokia.com/zh_int/phones/nokia-6 http://www.nokia.com/zh_int/phones/nokia-6
- abrowne 10y ago
  The new Google Translate works pretty well on it.
aceperry 10y ago
The Nokia name and brand reminds me of what happened to Blackberry. Former giants in the pre-smartphone era (Apple iPhone) that couldn't pivot to making successful smartphones. I know Microsoft has always had computerized phones, but they sucked and didn't have the wow factor of the iPhone. The iPhone's open app ecosystem (relatively, for its time) also seemed to have contributed to it's success.
- samfisher83 10y ago
  Nokia made smart phones with browsers before iphone. It wasn't great, but they were on the smartphone thing from the start. Also I don't know how you can say iphone is more free than symbian. You could put what you wanted into your phone.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    One thing was that iPhone SDK surely felt like heaven when compared to the clunky Symbian C++ one, which after three reboots still felt bad.
  - neighborinooo 10y ago
    > Also I don't know how you can say iphone is more free than symbian. You could put what you wanted into your phone. It's been like a decade since I had a Symbian phone (the only one I ever used), so maybe my memory is fuzzy, but didn't all applications have to be signed at great expense? Sure, Apple does the same kind of thing with the App Store, but it's substantially cheaper and despite the known App Store woes probably a smoother process.
- mpg33 10y ago
  BlackBerry essentially killed itself in a few shorts years (basically 2007-2010) by not seriously reacting to iphone and android. I'm convinced if a blackberry 10 OS phone had come out in 2010 they might have held on to market share....but it wasn't released until early 2013...way to late.
MarkHub 10y ago
Great. Atleast they learnt something after being lost their competitors. Nokia once loved by everyone for its phones but they failed to understand that Android is going to lead in OS race.
Nokinside 10y ago
HMD Global is Finnish company behind these phones, Nokia provides the brand and huge patent portfolio in exchange of royalty payments. Nokia did not invest into this company. Third big player behind the scenes is Foxconn Technology Group. They bought all Microsoft/Nokia phone manufacturing plants, and they will build these phones. This provides them the opportunity to diversify their customer base.
- antoniuschan99 10y ago
  good time to buy shares? They also offer 5.68% div yield.
  - Nokinside 10y ago
    As a someone who has Nokia shares and follows the company, I would say Nokia is still 'hold', not necessarily buy. This phone/tablet deal is low risk reasonable reward deal for Nokia. If HMD Global reaches its goals, Nokia will get nice royalties and the brand value grows. Nokia's two main businesses are Nokia Networks (Mobile Networks, Fixed Networks, IP/Optical Networks and Applications & Analytics ) and Nokia Technologies (patent licensing, proprietary technology licensing, brand partnerships, incubation and research labs). Nokia Networks business model is clear and in good shape. Nokia Technologies is basically massive patent portfolio and large R&D arm without products (unless research goes to Networks). Profits come trough licensing deals. Whitings, VR efforts etc. might pay off or not.
hsivonen 10y ago
Still waiting for an Android vendor to differentiate by matching Apple in the length of time a given device gets security patches for the software.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  Closest I've seen is Sony. The problem is reliance on Qualcomm, who have always hated GPL software, and their driver support shows it.
  - hsivonen 10y ago
    For how long do Sony phones get security updates? Are they at least monthly as with Nexus/Pixel?
    - pdimitar 10y ago
      I can't tell you about each month but I bought my mother a Z3 Compact around 14 months ago. It got Marshmallow ~6 weeks after its official release, and will have Nougat pretty soon now (so I heard on the net). Even though I dislike Sony recently, they were awesome -- up to their Z3 phones and Z4 tablet releases. And they don't abandon their devices as quickly as everybody else.
      - craigcabrey 10y ago
        Err, my Z3 didn't get Marshmallow until more than half a year passed from the release date. Marshmallow was released in late October 2015 [1]. Meanwhile, the Z3 only just started rolling in early April 2016 [2]. That's pretty mediocre if you ask me. [1]: https://android.googleblog.com/2015/10/get-ready-for-sweet-taste-of-android-60.html https://android.googleblog.com/2015/10/get-ready-for-sweet-t... [2]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/04/09/marshmallow-update-rolling-out-to-the-xperia-z2-z3-and-z3-compact-at-least-in-some-countries/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/04/09/marshmallow-update-r...
        10y ago

97 points by kenrick95 10y ago

What about the Nokia X? It didn't come with Google Play Services, but under the hood it was Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X

digi_owl 10y ago
That was passed on to Microsoft as part of the sale of the old handset division. As part of that deal, MS got to use the Nokia trademark for a couple of years. But since then it passed back to Nokia proper (they still exist, focusing on mobile network infrastructure), and is now licensed by HMD Global (a company based in Finland and formed by former Nokia handset people). Also i suspect that it, like Amazon's Fire platform, learned first hand how much of the app side of Android is actually housed in Google Play Services...

akjainaj 10y ago

Is this an actual Nokia phone, or a device made by another manufacturer but branded as "Nokia" like that tabled they made some time ago?

dazc 10y ago
Quote: Headquartered in Espoo, Finland, HMD Global Oy is the new home of Nokia phones and tablets. HMD designs and markets a range of smartphones and feature phones targeted at a range of consumers and price points. With a commitment to innovation and quality, HMD is the proud exclusive licensee of the Nokia brand for mobile phones and tablets. Nokia is a registered trademark of Nokia. For further information, see www.hmd.global.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  "Manufacturing and distribution is performed by Foxconn's FIH Mobile division." [1] aka, in China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    Exactly! That tablet I was talking about was made by Foxconn
Retr0spectrum 10y ago
Define "actual Nokia".
- currysausage 10y ago
  Have any former Nokia/Microsoft Mobile engineers transferred to HMD?
  - mcraiha 10y ago
    No one transferred directly. There might be some people from OLD Nokia working in HMD, but basically HMD started from scratch "All the best designers and engineers of the former Nokia mobile business either moved to Microsoft when the latter took over or quit to pursue independent projects and startups of their own. The name’s still the same, but the expertise is gone. HMD’s executives are talking a good game about "the best designers in the world ... lining up" to join the company’s ranks, but they’ll all be starting from scratch. HMD may retain the Nokia cachet, however it lacks the scale of the old company and so there’s no chance of securing early or exclusive access to hot new tech or materials." http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13852802/nokia-android-smartphone-return-2017 http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13852802/nokia-android-sma...
    - bostand 10y ago
      That is an odd thing to say. Almost everyone at HMD are former Nokia employees.
wodenokoto 10y ago
As far as I know most employees with handset expertise left Nokia after the sale, so it is very hard to say if this is the revival of the old Nokia or effectively a new company that has the trademark and patent rights.
Nokinside 10y ago
Nokia owns the brand, provides it's patents and inventions that come from Nokia Research & Bell Labs. They also have member in the board and have some say on quality of the phones (protecting the brand). Foxconn Technology Group subsidiaries bought the manufacturing facilities and manufacture the phones. Including feature phones. HMD Global is the new Finnish company making Nokia-brand devices. It's mostly ex Nokia people. http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases/2016/05/18/nokia-signs-strategic-brand-and-intellectual-property-licensing-agreement-enabling-hmd-global-to-create-new-generation-of-nokia-branded-mobile-phones-and-tablets http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases/2016/05/18/nokia-s... >Nokia will provide HMD with branding rights and cellular standard essential patent licenses in return for royalty payments, but will not be making a financial investment or holding equity in HMD. Nokia Technologies will take a seat on the Board of Directors of HMD and set mandatory brand requirements and performance related provisions to ensure that all Nokia-branded products exemplify consumer expectations of Nokia devices, including quality, design and consumer focused innovation. >HMD would be led, once the Microsoft transaction closes, by Arto Nummela as CEO, who previously held senior positions at Nokia and is currently the head of Microsoft's Mobile Devices business for Greater Asia, Middle East and Africa, as well as Microsoft's global Feature Phones business. HMD's president on closing would be Florian Seiche, who is currently Senior Vice President for Europe Sales and Marketing at Microsoft Mobile, and previously held key roles at Nokia, HTC and other global brands.

godmodus 10y ago

Finally!

illuminati1911 10y ago

"to be released exclusively in China." Why?

dazc 10y ago
"The decision by HMD to launch its first Android smartphone into China is a reflection of the desire to meet the real world needs of consumers in different markets around the world." http://www.hmdglobal.com/press/2017-01-08-nokia-6/ http://www.hmdglobal.com/press/2017-01-08-nokia-6/
- tatoalo 10y ago
  "[...]With over 552 million smartphone users in China in 2016, a figure that is predicted to grow to more than 593 million users by 2017, it is a strategically important market where premium design and quality is highly valued by consumers." I would honestly consider India also a strategically important market which is bound to grow quickly...
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    And so Samsung releases their Tizen-based phones in India. The market in the US is full of broken incentives due to the sales model there, and a lot of the rest of the world seems to be sold whatever works in the US, so inherits the results of the broken market. There's only a few countries which are large enough to have special effort put in.
eva1984 10y ago
Biggest market in the world, who didn't love iPhone that much.

bdz 10y ago

>The specifications are mid-range, and so is the price: 1,699 yuan ($245; £200). Nice it will be dirt cheap on Aliexpress then. I might order one

kyriakos 10y ago
It's quite expensive for the specs. In comparison xiaomi mi5s with 4gb ram/ sd821 costs just 20 usd more in online stores today.

ploggingdev 10y ago

It was sad to see the decline of Nokia from being the most ubiquitous brand of phones to literally nothing today (in the smartphone and feature phone market). If they had adopted Android instead of going with Windows Phone, things could have been a lot better. Even when they made Windows Phone devices, at least the high end devices where critically acclaimed with everyone's only gripe only being Windows Phone (mainly the lack of apps). IIRC Samsung started becoming incredibly popular at around the same time. In some ways Samsung become the new Nokia, especially in developing markets where low end Android devices became very popular. At the time Nokia also had what seemed like technical advantages one of which was the PureView camera technology. I think Nokia's decline was also largely because of very poor management decisions and also to some extent political. Microsoft aggressively pursued a deal with Nokia to adopt Windows Phone and they gave incredible incentives as well, billions of dollars in aid/credit/support (I don't remember the exact nature of the transfer of cash). This probably swayed their decision away from Android towards Windows Phone. I can't help but take a cheap shot: Stephen Elop was a Trojan Horse. As the title says, this is a Nokia branded device, so HMD uses the Nokia brand for it's phones. It's not a real Nokia device from the company itself. PS : Seeing Nokia and Android in the same sentence always triggers a nostalgic/angry rant.

mdasen 10y ago
It is sad, but I don't think it was the Microsoft deal that did Nokia in. Nokia had already been left behind when they finally realized that Symbian wasn't going to cut it against iOS and Android. I think they made a calculated decision: they could try and create an Android device to compete against the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG with basically no differentiation -OR- they could take Microsoft's money and put their hopes on Windows Phone. If they had gone the Android route, it doesn't seem like they would have gotten a better result. Samsung can make its own displays and chips and that advantage has ground a lot of the competition to dust. LG makes its own displays. Facing this, HTC (who had a nice Android business) has really struggled. Motorola struggled and then got bounced around and still doesn't really make money. Nokia would likely have struggled as well. Let's look at the Lumia 800 flagship launched in November 2011. The Galaxy S2 was launched in May 2011 with a dual-core processor (as opposed to the single-core Lumia), 1GB of RAM (rather than 512MB), a 4.3" display (rather than 3.7" - and people want larger screens), a 3-colors-per-pixel AMOLED Plus display (rather than the 2-color-per-pixel PenTile on the Lumia), a microSD card slot (while the Lumia had no expandable storage), a front camera the Lumia lacked entirely, and a larger battery. A Lumia 800 Android phone wouldn't have sold well. It was way worse (hardware wise) than a Samsung phone introduced 6 months prior. Not to go on too much of a tangent, but in a way it was like the Palm Pre. Palm introduced it, but it had a smaller display than the iPhone, underclocked processor, half the storage, 40% thicker, creaky build quality, and the same price tag. Sure, it had the niche feature of the keyboard, but in most ways the hardware was simply inferior. It was easy to write off the Palm Pre as a device that could have been great if not for an OS that wasn't popular enough. If it had run iOS, it would have tanked against an iPhone that was simply superior. It's very easy to critically acclaim something when one sees one specific flaw that's a dealbreaker. In that case, all other flaws tend to go unnoticed or just get attributed to the dealbreaker. If the Lumia 800 ran Android, it would have been crappy compared to Android phones of the day. Nokia did a couple cool things like the 41MP Lumia 1020 (or PureView 808). But a camera just isn't enough, especially when wedded to a bulky, underpowered phone with a crappy display. Nokia's hardware was simply poorly matched against what you could get from competitors. It's always sad to see a brand that once meant so much end up the way it did. But it wasn't Microsoft that did Nokia in. Like many others, they failed to notice how important the iPhone was going to be. Even those that saw the iPhone for what it was (like HTC) weren't spared. Nokia wouldn't have done much better if they'd released their devices as Android phones. They would have been underpowered and overpriced. Sure, some would have bought it for the Nokia name, but not enough. The market was flooded with better hardware. Nokia would have introduced Android phones that would have been mediocre with a premium price. A lot of us remember Nokia fondly and would have rooted for Nokia to introduce something without the dealbreaker of Windows Phone, but we would have been disappointed when we compared a Nokia Android against other options in the market. Maybe it's best that we can just write off Nokia's failure as due to Windows Phone rather than noting that most of their smartphone devices also just weren't great hardware.

coconutoperator 10y ago

It's a good sign but not that impressive, people are expecting a top-notch change-maker one from Nokia. At least it should be with flagship android specs. Not many people would pay the 'Nokia premium' for the specs of this phone nowadays. There are plenty of homogeneous ones are just doing fine with lower prices.

kenrick95 10y ago

If anyone could read Chinese, here is the product page on Nokia's website: http://www.nokia.com/zh_int/phones/nokia-6 http://www.nokia.com/zh_int/phones/nokia-6

abrowne 10y ago
The new Google Translate works pretty well on it.

aceperry 10y ago

The Nokia name and brand reminds me of what happened to Blackberry. Former giants in the pre-smartphone era (Apple iPhone) that couldn't pivot to making successful smartphones. I know Microsoft has always had computerized phones, but they sucked and didn't have the wow factor of the iPhone. The iPhone's open app ecosystem (relatively, for its time) also seemed to have contributed to it's success.

samfisher83 10y ago
Nokia made smart phones with browsers before iphone. It wasn't great, but they were on the smartphone thing from the start. Also I don't know how you can say iphone is more free than symbian. You could put what you wanted into your phone.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  One thing was that iPhone SDK surely felt like heaven when compared to the clunky Symbian C++ one, which after three reboots still felt bad.
- neighborinooo 10y ago
  > Also I don't know how you can say iphone is more free than symbian. You could put what you wanted into your phone. It's been like a decade since I had a Symbian phone (the only one I ever used), so maybe my memory is fuzzy, but didn't all applications have to be signed at great expense? Sure, Apple does the same kind of thing with the App Store, but it's substantially cheaper and despite the known App Store woes probably a smoother process.
mpg33 10y ago
BlackBerry essentially killed itself in a few shorts years (basically 2007-2010) by not seriously reacting to iphone and android. I'm convinced if a blackberry 10 OS phone had come out in 2010 they might have held on to market share....but it wasn't released until early 2013...way to late.

MarkHub 10y ago

Great. Atleast they learnt something after being lost their competitors. Nokia once loved by everyone for its phones but they failed to understand that Android is going to lead in OS race.

Nokinside 10y ago

HMD Global is Finnish company behind these phones, Nokia provides the brand and huge patent portfolio in exchange of royalty payments. Nokia did not invest into this company. Third big player behind the scenes is Foxconn Technology Group. They bought all Microsoft/Nokia phone manufacturing plants, and they will build these phones. This provides them the opportunity to diversify their customer base.

antoniuschan99 10y ago
good time to buy shares? They also offer 5.68% div yield.
- Nokinside 10y ago
  As a someone who has Nokia shares and follows the company, I would say Nokia is still 'hold', not necessarily buy. This phone/tablet deal is low risk reasonable reward deal for Nokia. If HMD Global reaches its goals, Nokia will get nice royalties and the brand value grows. Nokia's two main businesses are Nokia Networks (Mobile Networks, Fixed Networks, IP/Optical Networks and Applications & Analytics ) and Nokia Technologies (patent licensing, proprietary technology licensing, brand partnerships, incubation and research labs). Nokia Networks business model is clear and in good shape. Nokia Technologies is basically massive patent portfolio and large R&D arm without products (unless research goes to Networks). Profits come trough licensing deals. Whitings, VR efforts etc. might pay off or not.

hsivonen 10y ago

Still waiting for an Android vendor to differentiate by matching Apple in the length of time a given device gets security patches for the software.

rodgerd 10y ago
Closest I've seen is Sony. The problem is reliance on Qualcomm, who have always hated GPL software, and their driver support shows it.
- hsivonen 10y ago
  For how long do Sony phones get security updates? Are they at least monthly as with Nexus/Pixel?
  - pdimitar 10y ago
    I can't tell you about each month but I bought my mother a Z3 Compact around 14 months ago. It got Marshmallow ~6 weeks after its official release, and will have Nougat pretty soon now (so I heard on the net). Even though I dislike Sony recently, they were awesome -- up to their Z3 phones and Z4 tablet releases. And they don't abandon their devices as quickly as everybody else.
    - craigcabrey 10y ago
      Err, my Z3 didn't get Marshmallow until more than half a year passed from the release date. Marshmallow was released in late October 2015 [1]. Meanwhile, the Z3 only just started rolling in early April 2016 [2]. That's pretty mediocre if you ask me. [1]: https://android.googleblog.com/2015/10/get-ready-for-sweet-taste-of-android-60.html https://android.googleblog.com/2015/10/get-ready-for-sweet-t... [2]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/04/09/marshmallow-update-rolling-out-to-the-xperia-z2-z3-and-z3-compact-at-least-in-some-countries/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/04/09/marshmallow-update-r...
      - 10y ago