Nokia Announces New Smartphone Plans For 2016

Nokia's Android powered tablet, the Nokia N1 (image: Nokia.com)

Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri has announced the Finnish company's intention to return to the smartphone market in 2016. Speaking to Manager Magazin in Germany, the 47-year-old executive noted that Nokia could design the new handsets and then licence the designs and Nokia name to as yet un-named partners. Georgina Prodhan for Reuters:

"We will look for suitable partners," Rajeev Suri said in an interview published on Thursday. "Microsoft makes mobile phones. We would simply design them and then make the brand name available to license."

The timing and the nature of the return of the former number one mobile phone manufacturer (…in the world) should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to the details either the sale of Nokia's devices and services business to Microsoft or the release last year of the Nokia N1 tablet.

Nokia's Android-powered tablet was announced at the Slush conference in November 2014, and demonstrated Nokia's new retail model for hardware. The design was Nokia's own, and while it shipped with Android 5.0 Lollipop and support for Google Play, it was given a Finnish flavor through Nokia's 'Z Launcher' software.  Foxconn obtained the licence for the tablet's manufacturing, selling, shipping, and support.

A leaner Nokia had returned to the hardware market without the tricky issue of rebuilding a support network for the hardware, and Foxconn could make use of its own manufacturing knowledge and networks to ship the N1.

While there are no details on who would be the licence of the next Nokia smartphone (or acknowledgement that Nokia will in fact release such a handset), it makes sense for Suri and Nokia to adopt the same business model for any new handset.

The timing should not be a surprise either.

Microsoft's purchase of the division granted it a number of IP marks (including the Lumia name), and a licence to use the Nokia name on smartphones and features for a number of years. The naming licence included a shorter period of exclusivity use - Nokia smartphones would be exclusively under the Microsoft banner for eighteen months.

That period will be up during 2016, and it sounds like Nokia is not going to waste any time in returning the powerful brand name back to the consumer smartphone market.

Now comes the obvious question of which operating system any new Nokia hardware will use. The phone does need to be a smartphone, the naming rights take care of that, and that leaves very few choices for the handset.

I doubt that Nokia would seriously look at BlackBerry's BB10 OS (and BlackBerry look to be slowly moving away from its own platform) and iOS is not available. Returning with a Windows 10 handset would be akin to Orpheus looking back in haste.

There's an argument that Nokia could take on a long shot with Jolla's Sailfish OS, but I'm not sure the market conditions are right for what would be seen as an experiment. Nokia's return will focus on the consumer experience, and that means an OS that is understandable by the vast majority of the public, with strong support for apps, and the availability of modern online services and social networks.

Nokia's Chief Executive Rajeev Suri addresses a press conference at the Nokia head offices in Espoo, Finland (MARKKU ULANDER/AFP/Getty Images)

It's back to the obvious choice of Android. Nokia has previously worked on its own Android fork, but that code and the hardware that used it (the Nokia X family) was sold to Microsoft. In theory there could be another fork front he Android Open Source Project, but with the N1 using Google's flavor of Android and using the Google Play store, I'm expecting to see the Nokia smartphone using a Google Play compatible version of Android with the Z Launcher software making a prominent appearance.

In the week that saw Microsoft demote its mobile hardware team through an internal reorganisation, the news that Nokia is definitely coming back will be welcomed by many industry watchers. The game of 'what if' over an earlier adoption of Android in 2010 or 2011 will continue. Nevertheless Nokia has adapted itself to the current smartphone climate, has minimised the risk involved in the return, and is far more nimble and agile than it was when it worked alongside Redmond.

Hurry up, 2016, I want to see what the Finns have been working on.

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Source: Nokia Announces New Smartphone Plans For 2016