Nokia will be back to smartphones only in 2017, the company confirms
Finally, all the rumours were put to rest by the Finnish based company, Nokia, who has officially confirmed its return to the smartphone market in 2017. The first new smartphones from Nokia are expected to be showcased at the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona next year.
The company’s presentation shown during a meeting it held for investors at the Capital Markets Day event held on Tuesday, November 15 in Barcelona, Spain provided a brief once-over to the company’s plans for 2016 to 2018.
While Nokia will not actually build smartphones any time soon, but it will supervise/oversee the manufacturing of Nokia branded devices by 3rd parties, just like Apple is doing in China with Foxconn, Pegatron and others. The Finnish company sold its mobile business to Microsoft a few years ago, including its factories and what not and currently it will just act as the owner of the patents/brand.
HMD Global, a Finnish company started by former Nokia employees will be designing, marketing and selling all the new smartphones and tablets. HMD has signed a 10 years exclusive agreement, which allows the company to use the Nokia brand on its smartphones and it also agreed to spend half a billion dollars in marketing in the first three years in which it’s going to sell those handsets. On the other hand, the new smartphones and tablets will be manufactured by Foxconn, the same company that made the N1 tablet for Nokia.
It’s possible that one of the first Nokia-branded handsets of 2017 could be Nokia D1C that will spearhead Nokia re-entry next year. The D1C is expected to sport a Full HD 1080p display, an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor, 3GB of RAM 13-megapixel and 8-megapixel rear and front-facing cameras, and will allegedly run Android 7 Nougat out of the box.
