Guest post by Nokia’s CEO Rajeev Suri told Germany’s Manager Magazin (in German, Reuters report in English) that they plan to start designing and licensing (but not manufacturing) phones again once their agreement with Microsoft expires in 2016. The license would include the use of the Nokia brand name. Does this open the door for Jolla goodness to eventually return to its roots?
I don’t think this will be of any help to Jolla.
I guess Nokia will build and sell whatever brings in money, which at the moment is Android, isn’t it?
Can’t wait to own a Nokia once again. 🙂
Jolla should better stay away from Nokia. Dealing with patent trolls can only end badly.
Edited 2015-06-21 19:55 UTC
This is just sad. It’s like watching Blackberry twitching in the throes of death, trying to fight off the inevitable. Sorry to say it, but it’s over, guys.
What is exactly sad?
If you’re comparing what Nokia once was to what it is today, sure, it’s worse than sad. But IMHO the BB analogy is skewed.
Today’s Nokia is in good financial condition and completely abandoned the smartphone market, whilst BB is striving to keep its platform alive. But QNX appears to be going strong. I wish them success. Or survival, at the very least.
I just watched Focus, a Will Smith flick.
Couldn’t help how dominant Nokia was on the shirts of the race team.
I was thinking: why the hell do they advertise the brand Nokia to consumers when they don’t have consumer products anymore and then I came to the same conclusion as what the article confirms. They want to get back.
Edited 2015-06-21 21:01 UTC
I’d like to believe so, but it was filmed from September to December 2013. So the product placement was promoted by the old Nokia before selling its Devices & Services division to MS.
🙁
ok that is indeed a big possibility if they shot it that early
Edited 2015-06-21 21:49 UTC
I am pretty sure that Nokia’s designs will use Android, like they already did with the N1. Why should Foxconn or anybody other potential licensee want to sell phones that don’t run Android? There is virtually no market for those.
There is no reason for Jolla to license the Nokia brand just to slap a Nokia logo on their phones. Jolla can design hardware fine and they need to establish their own brand. Ok, maybe someone from Nokia can teach Jolla about USB Type-C.
?
Nokia any-phone-division was sold to MS. And only after they restructured it down a bit…
Nokia have no company resources currently from old Nokia phone empire.
Maybe those guys responsible for Nokia X still are there but most probably they where transfered to MS too!
So its team responsible for N1, who start from scratch.
Think of it this way, why wouldn’t they? Jolla’s OS runs on Android compatible devices…. why couldn’t they work with Jolla to port it to their hardware using the same techniques as use to support Nexus devices? Moreover – they then have 2 options… they can support both Android and Jolla. To be honest, the difference between supporting both platforms could be as simple as config and an installer image, so they could actually decide to ditch Jolla (or Android) at any point in the process and still end up with a working device. For a fledgling Nu-Nokia, options are a great thing to have.
I mean, if they were old Nokia, they’d take the underlying OS that the Sailfish UI is draped over and do their own Nokia thing over that. But, we can all hope they learnt their lesson and will just make smart moves. And the smart position to be in is to maximise your potential future sales. Android is saturated, Jolla is different… If I were Nokia, I’d at least consider it as an option.
I believe the Nokia brand as it relates to phones is orders of magnitude more valuable than the Jolla brand, while Jolla has the phone expertise that Nokia mostly transferred to Microsoft. A lot of potential synergy exists if they decided to work together.
Android is the obvious platform to target, but that needn’t be exclusive. Android runs on an open Linux platform, as does Sailfish. Use identical kernels, port and support Sailfish to the same phones as a premium option for those who want more than stock Android, and you have a differentiator with an affordable investment that could markedly enhance the value of your brand.
The thing is that now branding moves almost at the same speed as technology. So a name that may have had some recognition years ago, becomes a nonentity if they manage to screw up execution, marketing wise specially, for enough quarters.
By now the name Nokia has become more of a liability than an asset in the consumer space. Witness Microsoft not wanting to use it on their new devices, even though they paid a pretty penny to be able to use it for a few years.
I understood the reason for the temporary licensing of the Nokia brand was simply to execute an orderly transition to the Microsoft brand, which Microsoft handled very well in my opinion.
I doubt most people paid the same rapt attention to the Microsoft-Nokia drama as we did, so I doubt the Nokia brand was significantly damaged in the mainstream.
i would agree i don’t think the Nokia (phone) brand was signficantly damaged per se by the debacle.
But the point really – as alluded earlier – is they’ve all but dropped from public consciousness as a State of the Art phone / smart phone manufacturer.
Off point:
Phone’s are going for too much Smart and not enough Utility for me. I finally bought into smart phones a year or two back and being a nerd- now I could leave altogether. But I need a separate work and personal phone (currently use a dual sim) but separate phones at least some of the time makes sense for me in the future.
If Nokia (or Jolla/ firefox) can offer me a secondary utility phone. maybe still smart. but focus on 3+ day battery life. and dual wifi capability (with hard toggle switch) and ideally dual sim, simultaneous (dual LFE mobile too, also hard switchable, on-1, on-2, both, off.). with even a network port too!! – i’d buy tomorrow!!! case anyone’s reading. :-p
I was not talking about the “drama” but the value of the brand. It’s not that most people did not follow the MS-Nokia debacle, but rather that most people do not have the same emotional attachment to the name “nokia” as some of you do in this website.
Which is why I mentioned that Microsoft sees little value in this brand, even though they paid a lot of money for the possibility of using it.
I don’t disagree with you, but I do find that to be a sad state of affairs. Android is absolutely terrible on low end phones, even today, and I can see a place for an old school, stripped down phone OS like the old Nokia Series 30 instead. Even running something more advanced like the Asha platform, low end devices would be more stable and responsive than Android.
But it’s moot since Microsoft now owns all of that IP. Oh well, there’s always Firefox OS…
Company ABC: Hello Nokia? We have a run-of-the-mill phone that wouldn’t sell with our company ABC logo on it. If we pay you 10 bucks, can we put Nokia on it?
Nokia: Only if your phone doesn’t suck. We don’t want our valuable brand to lose value too quickly.
Company ABC: No, the phone is fine, we just need a Nokia logo on it to make it look better than fine
Nokia: You have a deal, send us the money and we will send you the link to our logo
And why can’t “abc” company be Jolla? 🙂
Who says it couldn’t be?
But I think Jolla would like to promote their own brand, doesn’t think of themselves as run-of-the-mill and doesn’t sell a big enough number of phones to be interesting to Nokia while requiring some more complicated support scenario’s than other phones.
So could Jolla be company ABC? Only in theory
Sadly, having spoken to a Finnish friend last night – his perspective is that Jolla is failing hard even in Finland. He was a Meego developer and worked for one of Nokia’s biggest contractors, so he isn’t just talking out of turn. He told me he still has his N950 fram back then, which made me suitably impressed.
…. didn’t Nokia release a tablet recently (or sometime in the last 12 months). I remember a lot of people accusing it of aping the iPad in the looks department.
Has anyone here owned/used that Nokia tablet? Might give us a rough idea on what to expect.
I think I played with one in a store. It wasn’t anything special from what I remember.
Nokia’s phones are of high quality than any of the players in the market today. I will not hesitate to get a new Nokia Smartphone, be it on Android or Sailfish.
deleted. Duplicate.
Edited 2015-06-22 23:35 UTC
Hey! I heard there’s a CEO out there in the market just recenly, in case they need one. Stephen Elop, I think?
Edited 2015-06-23 19:15 UTC