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This article confused me on the reality of today's 'Nokia' phones. The recently released and 'back to basics' phones are not legitimate Nokia in my estimation,

This article confused me on the reality of today's 'Nokia' phones. The recently released and 'back to basics' phones are not legitimate Nokia in my estimation, they are some generic OEM phones with a Nokia label slapped on them. I am not sure why this badge engineering bugs me, to make me think they are not real Nokia. More generally, why is it that badge engineering sometimes is seen as okay and sometimes not? To take an automotive analogy, in the VW group there are various high end brands, e.g. Bentley and Bugatti. Both these marques are seen as having heritage even if the engines are 'glorified Golf engines' to a certain extent, even if built in heritage locations (e.g. Crewe, UK) rather than straight out of Wolfsburg. Same with the BMW brands - the Mini and Rolls Royce cars aren't seen as badly styled BMWs, but with heritage intact. Perhaps the reason that these auto brands are okay is that there really has been innovation, the product line has evolved and the reputation survives. Getting back to the Nokia 'phones', there is no innovation in bringing out a ten-year-old product, OEM made by some randoms. This product makes 'Nokia' one of those fake brands in my estimation and obfuscates the real Nokia that is innovating with the backend hardware. Imagine if IBM, when they sold their PC hardware, decided to let Lenovo use not just 'ThinkPad' but 'IBM' on the products. You would have no idea as a casual observer that 'IBM were still going'. Nokia just had numbers for their product line, no household name for that, as per 'ThinkPad'. I am most amazed that Microsoft could not make this work and I think it was the death of the evil Microsoft that cowards used to love and the rest of us used to hate. The once fearsome Microsoft were humbled by it. Even today there is definite scope for being able to carry your office PC around in mini-form in a phone in some seamless way, as hinted at with 'Continuum' and so forth. But whatever happens on the Microsoft Phone platform is negated by things like 'not being able to play YouTube' on it.

cakedoggie 9y ago
Has there been innovation in car brands? Apart from electric batteries, a lot of minor unimportant stuff. Compare that to computers which have changed dramatically in a short amount of time.
- acdha 9y ago
  That seems like a very limited view: a lot of that “unimportant stuff “ has been massive improvements in safety, durability, fuel economy and emissions, ride quality and comfort, etc. The other thing to remember is that you're comparing technologies at different parts of their life-cycle: automotive technology matured half a century earlier so it's unsurprising that there's less room for dramatic change, just as the computing market has had periodic plateaus where the annual changes were far less significant to users – how many normal people even know what CPU/GPU they're using? (and, of course, for awhile they've been moving together as we're seeing manufacturers shipping cars which have things like the ability to stop when a kid jumps in front of the vehicle. That's not just a car thing or just a computer thing but it'll save tens of thousands of lives, which seems a lot more significant than most of what's in an app store)
rjsw 9y ago
I have one of the new feature phones, it feels just like a gentle update on a 'real' Nokia phone from 10 years ago and is exactly what I wanted.
vurpo 9y ago
The new Nokia phones are engineered and designed by a company called HMD. HMD was founded for the specific purpose of making "Nokia" phones under the license after Microsoft sold it off. HMD is based in Espoo, with their office right across the street from Nokia HQ, and the company consists mostly of ex-Nokia phone engineers and other employees. So basically the phones are designed by the same engineers, and the office where they are designed is right next-door to Nokia. The reason it's a separate company is just that Nokia is not that interested in making phones right now.

cakedoggie 9y ago

Has there been innovation in car brands? Apart from electric batteries, a lot of minor unimportant stuff. Compare that to computers which have changed dramatically in a short amount of time.

acdha 9y ago
That seems like a very limited view: a lot of that “unimportant stuff “ has been massive improvements in safety, durability, fuel economy and emissions, ride quality and comfort, etc. The other thing to remember is that you're comparing technologies at different parts of their life-cycle: automotive technology matured half a century earlier so it's unsurprising that there's less room for dramatic change, just as the computing market has had periodic plateaus where the annual changes were far less significant to users – how many normal people even know what CPU/GPU they're using? (and, of course, for awhile they've been moving together as we're seeing manufacturers shipping cars which have things like the ability to stop when a kid jumps in front of the vehicle. That's not just a car thing or just a computer thing but it'll save tens of thousands of lives, which seems a lot more significant than most of what's in an app store)

rjsw 9y ago

I have one of the new feature phones, it feels just like a gentle update on a 'real' Nokia phone from 10 years ago and is exactly what I wanted.

vurpo 9y ago

The new Nokia phones are engineered and designed by a company called HMD. HMD was founded for the specific purpose of making "Nokia" phones under the license after Microsoft sold it off. HMD is based in Espoo, with their office right across the street from Nokia HQ, and the company consists mostly of ex-Nokia phone engineers and other employees. So basically the phones are designed by the same engineers, and the office where they are designed is right next-door to Nokia. The reason it's a separate company is just that Nokia is not that interested in making phones right now.