As the new year gets underway, Nokia is busy completing its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, though that may not be the company’s only big news. The new year also marks the end of restrictions that have kept the company from selling Nokia-branded smartphones. Those rules were a condition of the sale of Nokia’s device business to Microsoft almost two years ago.
Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri has said his company will eventually re-enter the smartphone market, and now a leaked image suggests a new smartphone may be imminent. The image comes from Chinese website weibo.com without additional information, so validity of the image is not certain. The phone appears to be made of some form of metal.
Even before this image leaked, the rumor mill had christened Nokia’s next smartphone the C1. GSMA expects the C1 to be a 5-inch, Android device that will feature geotagging and touch focus. Alcatel-Lucent also marketed a phone called the C1 at one time.
Launching a new smartphone now will be more complicated than it was when the company owned a full-fledged device design and manufacturing operation. Last summer, the company issued the following statement to address rumors it was readying new smartphones for 2016.
“The right path back to mobile phones for Nokia is through a brand-licensing model,” Nokia explained. “That means identifying a partner that can be responsible for all of the manufacturing, sales, marketing and customer support for a product. If and when we find a world-class partner who can take on those responsibilities, we would work closely with them to guide the design and technology differentiation, as we did with the Nokia N1 Android tablet.”
The N1 was manufactured and distributed by China’s Foxconn, which also handled sales, customer care and warranty costs.
Microsoft uses the Lumia brand name for the smartphones made and sold by Nokia’s former mobile device unit. Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of that business included manufacturing operations and channel distribution, leaving Nokia without the resources needed to support its brand. The company may end up licensing its brand to a former competitor that can handle manufacturing, marketing and distribution.
Nokia once dominated the mobile phone market, and there are still millions of Nokia phones in use. The company continued to sell millions of feature phones even as the smartphone market took off without it. Smartphones did not outsell feature phones until 2013, and as recently as 2014 Nokia was still selling more mobile phones than Apple.
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Image source: pricepony.com
