Category: Gadgets

The brand will be releasing its first Android powered smartphones and tablets at the beginning of 2017.

The very first Nokia mobile devices that have seen store shelves in two years will start being sold in 2017. They will include both smartphones and tablets. Those gadgets will run on Android, said the company.

The Finnish company is now completing the last stages of a licensing agreement with HMD Global.

Through this new agreement, HMD Global holds exclusive rights to use the brand for Nokia mobile devices for the next 10 years. That company is also based in Finland. It will manufacture phones under the Nokia brand and will also continue the production of the company’s existing feature phone lineup.

Both HMD Global and Foxconn, a Chinese company, acquired Nokia from Microsoft. Foxconn was contracted for the mobile device manufacturing. The next devices released under the brand’s name will run on Android and will be available for purchase before mid-2017.

The Nokia mobile devices will be marketed on the brand’s reputation for simple, quality products.

According to Arto Nummela, HMD Global CEO, “We will be extremely true to the Nokia brand. The brand is known for simplicity, ease of use, reliability, and quality. These are the elements that we will deliver together with amazing industrial design.” That company will be making an investment of more than $500 million into marketing smartphones and tablets under the Nokia name.

Two years ago, Nokia sold its mobile hardware division to Microsoft. The acquisition was for $7.2 billion and required Nokia to stop branding its handsets until the close of this year. The company had been struggling and had already slashed its workforce from 24,000 at its highest to less than 1,000.

Microsoft didn’t do much better with the hardware division. It proceeded to sell the Nokia mobile devices brand to Foxconn and HMD Global for $350 million. This was in response to a massive 46 percent phone revenue nosedive it experienced last quarter. The companies are going ahead with new smartphones and tablets boasting the Nokia brand’s name as well as the Android operating system.

Even though the DTEK50 experienced lower sales than predicted, the struggling handset maker isn’t stopping.

The floundering Canadian handset maker has decided it’s time for yet another BlackBerry keyboard phone. This announcement follows closely on the heels of an announcement from the company that misled much of the world into believing there would be no more BlackBerry smartphones. After that announcement brought the brand into the spotlight, it took care to point out that third party manufacturing would continue to make the branded devices.

Handset makers willing to pay to license the company’s brand will soon put out a keyboarded smartphone.

This new BlackBerry keyboard phone will be coming into the market even though the DTEK50’s results were not at all impressive. The DTEK60 was just released through a collaboration between the company and Alcatel, but figures about the success of that device have yet to be produced at the time of the writing of this article.

That said, when interviewed by Bloomberg, the company’s CEO, John Chen, gave the official confirmation that another BlackBerry smartphone was on the way. “We have one keyboard phone I promised people. It’s coming,” he said.

The official release date of the upcoming BlackBerry keyboard phone was not announced.

Chen said only that it was coming “soon.” Therefore, that could mean that BlackBerry will have a new mobile device on the market during the holiday shopping season.

Another announcement made by Chen during the interview pointed out that there are more companies interested in producing branded smartphones. In fact, he said BlackBerry is currently talking to two different companies about launching smartphones carrying their logo. That said, he did not identify the two companies at the time of their initial mention.

What he did say was that the two companies are based in India and China. He also suggested that the two companies were neck and neck in terms of what they have to offer.

Fans of BlackBerry keyboard phones appear to have some new offerings on the way in the next few months. Despite the fact that the company isn’t making its own mobile devices anymore, other companies seem to be interested in taking over.