Nokia is coming back with Android smartphones and tablets!

After years of staying away from the mobile market, Nokia appears to be gearing up to re-enter it, with both smartphones and tablets. As a reminder – the company was to be barred from selling smartphones up until the end of this year, carrying the Nokia name, due to the acquisition deal with Microsoft, which went down in late 2014. Microsoft got exclusive rights to the Lumia brand, and also had rights to brand its feature phones as “Nokia”. The Finnish company did bend the rules a bit and launched a tablet — the Nokia N1 — which it was licensing other manufacturers to build and distribute, but it didn't really become a mindblowing success. One because the tablet market isn't in great shape currently, and secondly – the whole "I license it, you build and sell it" certainly places a lot of constraints in pushing a product reliably to multiple markets.

Well, a complex alliance has been formed between Nokia Technologies and a few partners in order to get the Nokia name, even for feature phones, back in the hands of its Finnish originators. Earlier, we reported about an announced deal between Microsoft and FIH Mobile Ltd. (a subsidiary of Hon Hai/Foxconn Technology) and HMD Global (a new Finnish company, “led by some of the world’s top mobile specialists"). From this agreement, FIH will get the manufacturing facility and 4,500-man staff that was producing the Nokia-branded feature phones. HMD will get the actual brand.


Nokia has just announced that, yes, this does mean that its name is coming back to smartphones and tablets worldwide. See, apparently, Nokia and HMD are in close partnership, and the former will license its name to the latter for the purpose of distributing Nokia-branded, Android-powered tablets and smartphones around the world. It's an exclusive deal, which bonds the two companies together. Or, in a way, you could say that HMD intends to treat the Nokia name as its mobile division. The fact that they bought the brand for feature phones is a nice bonus that would help them keep the Nokia name throughout possible product lines in the future.