Officially for 2017: Nokia’s schedule to return to smartphones

According to the original deal with Microsoft, Nokia couldn’t technically return to smartphones until 2016 but whether they would was initially a very will they/won’t they drama.

This week, my phone read out a hopeful notification about Nokia coming back to smartphones. However, I couldn’t find the official info at the time so just accepted it as another hopeful Nokia fan.

Officially from Nokia, Nokia have a schedule to return to smartphones via the same branding model that released (albeit to an extremely narrow market) the Nokia N1.

It will be interesting to see Foxxconn’s branded Nokia smartphone. Nokia will have an ‘oversight’ over this branded device but unlike the golden years, the R&D and manufacturing will be Foxconn.

Marketing investment is via HMD. What is that? I had to google it. Wiki Says:

HMD global Oy is a Finnish company that develops mobile devices under the “Nokia” brand name. It was formed in May 2016 by purchasing part of the feature phone business of Microsoft Mobile, the company founded after Microsoft‘s acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business in 2014. It is headquartered in Helsinki and made up of veteran Nokia staff.

I’ve been out of the Nokia loop for such a long time but it seems I might fire up the little embers again. I totally missed this bit happening. Nokia sold the phone business, and bought back the mobile phone business? Microsoft still pushed out a series 30 powered Nokia phone this summer – the Nokia 216.

This new Nokia smartphone could pull something interesting like the N1 tablet. A good mix of value but decent specs (though it was pretty much a Xiaomi MiPad – itself an iPad Mini clone). I would have wanted to buy one and recently tried to find one as it still would have been a decent tablet today. (Amazon had some for >500GBP. Nope).

Musings over another Nokia Android

I’m currently sporting a S6 edge + (overdue a change but waiting again since the Note 7 fire-filled debacle) and recently of last week, I got a Huawei Media Pad X2.

I almost went for an iPhone back in October but that was constantly out of stock at the time and I eventually lost the desire to upgrade my contract. I couldn’t see myself with any other Android as I was blinded by the opinion that all the others seemed sub-par in comparison to the Note 7.

The X2 is a mammoth 7 inch 2015 ‘phone’ which is an interesting device to have.

What it’s teaching me is that although it’s not up to par even with the S6 edge in specs, it does have a lot of interesting additions to Android.

It’ll unlikely get an official Marshmallow upgrade (let alone Nougat) but Huawei’s own tweaks actually brings some decent useful changes over Samsung’s Touch Wiz, e.g. a grid of windows for multitasking that I loved since the Nokia N900 then N9 (it’s also in some of the newer WPs but I’m not gonna talk much about that and the failing Lumia sales).

The battery on the X2 is an epic 5000 mAh which means I can install gesture based N9 like swipes and an always on clock and not worry about battery that would make the S6 E+ burn out in a couple of hours.

So what am I mumbling about? Well a Nokia smartphone doesn’t have to try and out-do Samsung in terms of specs. It can go and give great specs for fantastic value, and add something extra USEFUL via software. Nougat’s getting great reviews. Chris Pirillo – long time iPhone/iOS user recently made a video about how he thinks Nougat’s actually better now than iOS 10.

Rumours

There are already 2 rumoured Nokia devices since August.

• 5.2 AND 5.5 inch pair
• 22.6MP
• QHD OLED
• Snapdragon 820 under the hood,
• made of metal
• dust and water proof
• Android N on Nokia N

More recent news in October showed an Octacore Qualcomm (430) 1.4GHz + 3GB RAM Nokia D1C with nougat. Ewan Spence on Forbes quoted a Nokia China exec who apparently claimed 3-4 Nokia devices coming out this quarter. Maybe a late reveal 2016 and 2017 availability? The only Nokia thing I won’t miss will be the vague ‘coming soon’ :p. And make it available to more places please :D.

Source: Nokia

Cheers Alvester for the tip!

Tags: Android, featured, Nokia

Category: Android, Nokia