Microsoft made hogwash of Nokia’s phone business, and is now selling the feature phone division (as well as 4500 employees) to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it is – Foxconn that handles some manufacturing for Apple.
Microsoft has been gradually closing the mobile device chapter in its book, and this serves as just another pointer to what things are like in Lumia town. Nobody bought Nokia/Windows Phones because there were no apps for them, and nobody made apps because nobody was buying the phones. Tsk.
I also just read in a really confusing press release from Nokia, that it’s extending “an exclusive global license to create a full range of Nokia-branded smartphones, tablets and feature phones for the next decade” to a new Finnish company called HMD Global. It’s titled Nokia signs strategic brand and intellectual property licensing agreement enabling HMD global to create new generation of Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets and I’ll buy you a Red Bull if you can make any sense of it.
Bottomline is: Nokia is not quite done with the mobile market, and we’ll see Android-based, Nokia-branded phones and tablets as soon as they sort themselves out.
Bar Apple, I think Nokia made (makes?) the best hardware on the market, and it’s interesting to see what will come of the marriage to the Android platform. Blackberry already gave up on its own OS, and embraced the human-esque robot, so it was only a matter of time, before its fellow dinosaur did the same.
Whatever happens, this gon’ be good.
