Ex-Nokia employee here - I used to work directly for the CTO of Nokia. It's amazing, but unsurprising, to me the strength of Nokia's phone brand after all these years. There's a lot longer of a story to Nokia's decision not to use Android than most people realize. For example, Intel figured prominently, the Symbian vs. Maemo debate raged internally, discussions with Google were marred by massive cultural differences and arrogance on both sides. I'm surprised no one has written a book.

For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystsm. The most dominant hardware maker (at the time) and software/os maker teamed up with a really great product, but couldn't break the established smartphone duopoly, even though it was only a few years old by that point. I wasn't a Microsoft fan by any stretch (the opposite actually), but even I agreed with the decision at the time, especially after using Windows Phone. First mover advantage is huge, and developers only have so much bandwidth.

Edit: Heh. Apparently someone did write a book. See comments below. Wow.

For what it's worth, my phone now is a Nokia 6.

I was choosing between that and a Moto G5 Plus in the price bracket. Perhaps the Moto has better features, but the Nokia has a solid steel plate running through its entire body[1].

So, I could have had a better camera and battery on a Moto, or I could get the assurance that if I end up in a Star Wars garbage compactor scenario, I'd have something I could wedge into the damn doors to avoid being crushed completely flat.

I went with the Nokia.

[1] https://youtu.be/0M3Budnl3aI?t=186

Every single time there is an article about Nokia I cannot believe how little people actually know about Nokia, the company.

* The cellphone division was entirely sold to Microsoft ages ago.

* The cellphones coming out today is just a branding agreement with HMD.

* The Nokia of today is a huge company (more than 100.000 people) that focuses on backbone networks and telecom services. Almost every single ISP and provider in the world is using Nokia tecnology. Every other core router or service router on Internet is a Nokia router (or Alcatel-Lucent router that was bought by Nokia couple years ago).

I know the Name Nokia is not Hype like an Apple or Google, but there is very cool stuff happening in the Backbone telecom business.

My next phone will be a Nokia, having exclusively bought Nexus devices since the Galaxy Nexus.

Google's last few phones have been plagued with problems, and them withholding software from their niche hardcore fans was the last straw.

If only Nokia had got in on the Android action earlier and realised that Symbian/Ovi wasn't up to it.

For perspective. Apple shipped 77.3 million smartphones in Q4 2017. Samsung shipped 74.1 million. Huawei shipped 41.0 million. Xiaomi shipped 28.1 million. OPPO shipped 27.4 million. And everyone outside the top 5 shipped 151.3 million. So these figures mean that Nokia shipped roughly 3% of the not-top-five-brands in Q4.

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43548018

Nice to see people choose phones that get security updates.

I've had an opportunity to try Nokia 8 and Nokia 3. Basically go for the highest model number that you can afford.

Nokia 8 is very good. No complaints that wouldn't apply to Pixel, too.

Nokia 3 is remarkably good _for its €150 price_ (camera underwhelming, screen blue-tinted and unreliable wifi [at least with November software] compared to flagships, but in Europe unreliable wifi doesn't matter since you can stay on mobile data all the time, so better choose the security updates than a competitor with better wifi).

Nokia used to be where apple is today. They had a majority of the smartphone market share. It was a smaller market. They also dominated the feature phone market. It just shows you how fast things can change.

This graph is pretty awesome in showing how big Nokia was:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8GCu9SVwAE_n4N.png:large

Who would have guessed that pairing the most popular mobile phone brand, with the most popular smartphone OS in the world would have led to success. Especially if they maintained the hardware quality the brand was renowned for?

Clearly what they should have done is paired with a new OS with basically no base from a company that had failed in almost every consumer venture it embarked upon.

The shocking thing here is that Google sold less than 4.4 million smartphones in a quarter. Why is that? I thought with Google's brand name, they should be selling a good number of them. Don't they have affiliations with carriers? Can people only buy them on their site?

If Nokia could come up with a flagship competitor to Samsung s9 I would switch over in a heartbeat.

I bought myself a new Nokia phone on the weekend, wanted a second handset so got myself a Nokia 3310 (the new model). Maybe some of that decision was based on nostalgia (my first phone was the original model), but I haven't regretted it. The funny thing is I found a new use for it after I bought it... it allows you to use a 32GB SD card in it, and has an MP3 player app. No big deal there. However, the battery life when just playing back MP3s is allegedly 51 hours! I'm pretty lazy when it comes to charging my devices so I was pretty happy to find that out. :-)

Former Nokian here... If there are any HMD/Nokia folks reading this: Dedicated two-stage camera button. Bring it back. Please.

They took "Never quit trying" to heart

Any thoughts on Nokia stock? I do own it as a small part of my portfolio and thinking about expanding my position.

I have an ailing 1020 that I'm dreading replacing.

Are there any new user-serviceable phones on the market? or should I just keep doing the Ship of Theseus thing with Amazon greymarket parts until the phone market shakes out into less of a nightmare for users?

I'm glad to hear they're doing well in the featurephone market. It's nice to have a phone that has great call quality, long battery life, and can actually play FM radio. I hope they keep selling in the US market.

I bought a Nokia 3 a few months ago as a backup phone when my OnePlus-3T had to go in for repairs.

Really nice little phone I thought, perfectly servicable for light usage and felt nice to hold. A bargain for the £100 or so that I paid for it.

So will these phones ever support CDMA or is that just going to be ignored? I wonder how they're doing in the US specifically considering their phones can't be used on two of the larger carriers in the country.

Didn't knew that Nokia still sells smartphones :O

EDIT: added the still

Is there a good brand of non-smart phones available in North America? Nokia had some models, but only in India and select other countries.

The 'Nokia' in this article is a brand, licensed and stuck on some phones made by some other people.

So this is not 'real Nokia' in my opinion. However, an Apple product or a Google product that is actually made by an OEM (Foxconn/HTC/LG etc.) is 'real Apple' or 'real Google'.

The problem with badge engineering is the badge.

Wonder how much is brand recognition, and how much is the promise of firmware updates...

That's quite a surprise giving that Nokia 8 was quite disappointing in my opinion. I think they would've sold more without the 'bothie' gimmick, and just marketed their quality and security.

Not bad for a dead company. Uplifting :)