Nokia
Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia; Finnish: [ˈnokiɑ], UK: /ˈnɒkiə/, US: /ˈnoʊkiə/) (stylized as NOKIA) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics company, founded in 1865. Nokia's headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, in the greater Helsinki metropolitan area. In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion. Nokia is a public limited company listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. It is the world's 415th-largest company measured by 2016 revenues according to the Fortune Global 500, having peaked at 85th place in 2009. It is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
The company has operated in various industries over the past 150 years. It was founded as a pulp mill and had long been associated with rubber and cables, but since the 1990s has focused on large-scale telecommunications infrastructure, technology development, and licensing. Nokia is a major contributor to the mobile telephony industry, having assisted in the development of the GSM, 3G, and LTE standards (and currently in 5G), and was once the largest worldwide vendor of mobile phones and smartphones. After a partnership with Microsoft and Nokia's subsequent market struggles, Microsoft bought its mobile phone business, creating Microsoft Mobile as its successor in 2014. After the sale, Nokia began to focus more on its telecommunications infrastructure business and on Internet of things technologies, marked by the divestiture of its Here mapping division and the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, including its Bell Labs research organization. The company then also experimented with virtual reality and digital health, the latter through the purchase of Withings. The Nokia brand returned to the mobile and smartphone market in 2016 through a licensing arrangement with HMD Global. Nokia continues to be a major patent licensor for most large mobile phone vendors. As of 2018, Nokia is the world's third-largest network equipment manufacturer.
The company was viewed with national pride by Finns, as its mobile phone business made it by far the largest worldwide company and brand from Finland. At its peak in 2000, during the telecoms bubble, Nokia accounted for 4% of the country's GDP, 21% of total exports, and 70% of the Helsinki Stock Exchange market capital.
Tracing its heritage to paper production, Nokia entered the telecommunications industry first as a supplier of telecommunications equipment to the military and entered the mobile market in the late ‘80s.
Released in 1987, the Mobira Cityman brickphone was Nokia’s answer to the Motorola Dynatac and was an early hit for the nascent company.
But as Nokia’s first GSM phone, 1011 in 1992, and 1994’s 2100 model precipitated the Finnish giant’s rise to the top.
Marketed to the business market, 2110 featured the design that came to be known as the “candybar” format.
It was the lightest and smallest GSM phone available at the time and featured the easy to use Nokia menu system.
It was also the first phone to offer a choice of ringtones and marked the debut of the melody that came to be known as “the Nokia ringtone”, based on the Grand Valse composition for classical guitar.
In the ‘90s, Nokia released more handsets than any of its rivals and in 1998 overtook Motorola to become the best-selling mobile phone brand in the world.
By the middle of 1999, Nokia’s Expression series comes to dominate the market with the release of the 3210.
The 3210 was the first to popularise the unmistakable small-candybar shape which was the work of British designer Alastair Curtis.
Its relatively low cost, under £200 on release in the UK, but a lot less by the end of 2000, meant this 3210 was affordable for young people and folk who’d been shut out of the mobile phone market until now. The result was 160 million sales worldwide.
Within a year, the smaller 3310 was released. It was not a revolutionary update from its predecessor, but its compact design, four built-in games (Pairs II, Space Impact, Bantumi, and Snake II) and the fact it could support long SMS messages of up to 459 characters made it a success.
But it was the phone’s sturdy construction and legendary reliability that turned it into an enduring cult. And the best part of 20 years later, still inspires memes and favourable comparisons to fragile, modern-day smartphones.
Capitalising on a wave of nostalgia, in 2017 Nokia announced the release of an all-new 3310.
Featuring an updated design based on the original candy bar shape, the 3310 version 2.0 added a large 2.4-inch LCD screen, rear camera and an astonishing 25-day standby battery life.
Marketed both as a tribute to the original as well as an alternative to ever-more complex, more advanced smartphones, the new 3310 was priced at around £50 SIM-free and was a moderate commercial success.
The spread of 2G technology and the early success of Blackberry phones inspired Nokia to experiment with physical QWERTY keyboards.
The 6800 was notable with its unusual fold-out keyboard, with built-in email and support for Blackberry emails.
The early 2000s were also a time of wild experimentation and Nokia seemed to aim to release a phone to suit every taste.
It was also the era when mobile phones became fashion accessories and the company certainly wasn’t afraid to bring to market phones with an accent on style. Arguably over substance.
Take the roughly square 7600, for instance. Its shape meant it was difficult to hold in one hand. And because you had to hold it at an angle, it was hard to make calls too.
Then came the 5510 that was essentially a keyboard-shaped phone. Nokia was aware that the shape was seen as unconventional, to say the least.
So much that in their flagship advertisement for the 5510, the phone is barely shown and the ad closes with the slogan “Looks weird, sounds right”.
The 3650 was one of the early experiments with the keyboard layout. It was marketed as a high-end phone, but the rotary-styled keypad design made it hard to use for texting.
Next was an even stranger layout in the shape of 2300, which was a basic phone with key shapes that didn’t seem to follow any logic.
A relatively ordinary variant on the 3100 series, the 3220 had a system of LEDs on the sides that could be set up to flash in different colours.
On first impressions, 2007’s Xpress Music featured a fairly standard form factor. But the twist was that the camera could only be enabled by swivelling the bottom half.
Probably the oddest of the lot, the 7280 had neither a touchscreen nor a keypad. And if you wanted to send a text message, you had to scroll through each letter with a physical spin dial.
It wasn’t until the N95 in 2006 that Nokia released what could truly be termed a smartphone. It came with the longest list of features you could imagine at the time: wifi, web browsing, a five-megapixel camera and even built-in GPS.
It sold well, registering over 1 million sales in the UK alone. And for a few months, it seemed Nokia had managed to keep Blackberry’s challenge at bay while establishing a new benchmark of what a mobile phone could and should offer.
But the good times weren’t to last. 2007 saw the release of the iPhone that ushered in the touchscreen era and made Nokia’s Symbian operating system and its reliance on drill-down menus seem cumbersome.
