"to be released exclusively in China." Why?
Biggest market in the world, who didn't love iPhone that much.
First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#32Is this an actual Nokia phone, or a device made by another manufacturer but branded as "Nokia" like that tabled they made some time 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-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.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#33The 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.
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.
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.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#34The 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.
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.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#35It 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…
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 an…
The Lumia 800's hardware requirements were largely shaped by rigid requirements that Microsoft set for Windows Phone that were an attempt to avoid the fragmentation issues that have come to define Android hardware development. So the fact that Lumia 800 hardware was underpowered compared to Galaxy hardware of the time is much more Microsoft's fault than Nokia's fault (except for that PenTile display).
Nokia fell because in the beginning,
a) Symbian accrued massive technical debt that Nokia management refused to pay down because they could keep cranking out dumbphones for the foreseeable future and so paying down technical debt didn't seem like a good investment decision to management. Why should you have an OS architecture that allows dual-core processors in a cell phone? Nobody will ever need more than a single core processor in their cell phone, any more processing power will obviously use up way too much battery. This leads to:
b) The rise of the first smartphones - Palm and Blackberry. Nokia management paid down a minimum of technical debt to get out some Symbian smartphones to compete and stayed ahead of the market because early smartphones were targeted to heavy business users and not consumers. Nokia's continued advantageous market positioning leads to:
c) The rise of consumer smartphones - iOS and Android. Nokia management starts to try to adapt and go to engineering and tell them they need a decent competitor yesterday. Nokia engineers tell them the technical debt makes that impossible within any reasonable time frame. They are buoyed by hierarchy figures who predict that Symbian will carve out a niche alongside all the other players and that the sky isn't falling because the sky is never falling. Cell phones are a totally different product from music players, don't you know, and Apple products don't always run away with the market, look how few computers Apple sells! And Android is this unproven, insecure, ugly, rudderless mess with no real enterprise support and too many players pulling it in too many directions. Still, revenue is falling and so Nokia management starts to freak out. This leads to:
d) Hiring Stephen Elop from Microsoft, who calls up his old contacts at Microsoft and gets Nokia management the deal of a lifetime: huge amounts of aid to hold off the wolves until they get a flagship out for the immortal IT company throwing everything it has into catching up on mobile with unbeatable integration with products like Office that everyone uses and is deeply dependent on. And the rest is history.
Two things killed Nokia: they rested on their laurels when the going was good, and when the going got tough they hitched their cart to a horse which abandoned them along the way.
If Symbian was inevitably going to go the way of the dodo, Nokia management should've swallowed their pride and pursued an acquisition by Microsoft. But Nokia was a Finnish national symbol that accounted for far too much of Finnish GDP to ever allow the company to be acquired outright, upper management would've been signing their social death warrants. So in truth, Nokia's death was inevitable.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
Fun fact. When Samsung adopted Android, Nokia still had twice the market share in phones that Samsung did. Adopting Android early would've absolutely helped. Instead they wasted time first with Maemo, which the executive team never took seriously enough to expand across the product lines, then with "touch Symbian", which they should've known it would have never worked, and then with Windows Phone, when it was already…
"Wasted time first with Maemo"...
Damn that hurts my brain to read, and in hindsight, I have to agree. The n900's open platform built on debian, functional resistive touch and a hardware keyboard should have gained traction. Of course, without the monetized ecosystems of app stores and specialized accessories it is no wonder the policymakers didn't want it.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#37Great. 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.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
I don't think you have ever used a Lumia 800. While inferior to SII on paper, it was significantly better in actual use. It sold okay, but was abandoned by Microsoft and never updated past 8.3
I really like my Lumia 925 and the lack of apps was not of problem for me. The apps that mattered were all there. What bothered me was that vendors didn't bother updating those apps or giving it feature parity.
When I dropped it for nth time and the display went dead, I bought a Moto G and have been happy with it (gave the G3 away and bought a G4 recently).
I miss Windows Phone, it was a really nice and fast OS and it looked great to me... but I guess it went the Betamax way maybe.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#39HMD 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.
Re: First Nokia-branded Android smartphone to be released exclusively in China
#40The 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.
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.
> 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.