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Nokia-branded mobile phones are on sale, once again, on the Finnish company's website.
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For now, the range is limited to some pretty basic models, but that
should change when Android-powered smartphones and tablets are added
soon.
It's thanks to a deal with a small team based at a business
park on the fringes of Helsinki, who are engaged in what will seem to
many a foolhardy mission.
They call themselves HMD Global - and they believe they can make Nokia a big name in mobile phones once again.
I met Arto Nummela, Pekka Rantala and Florian Seiche in a cafe on what is still the Nokia campus.
That
very day Arto and Pekka had stopped working for the Nokia Windows
mobile phone business owned by Microsoft - because they had acquired
both it and the Nokia brand to start their new business.
Yes, it is complicated, but so is the recent history
of what was just a few years back Europe's technology superpower and
the biggest force in mobile phones.
After the launch of the
iPhone in 2007, Nokia faltered and by 2011 was on what its first
American chief executive, Stephen Elop, called a burning platform.
Then,
the phone business was sold to Microsoft, which soon found it had made a
disastrous purchase as the Nokia Windows combination failed to claim a
significant slice of a market dominated by Apple's iOS and Android.
Now,
the Finnish business - which remained a big force in telecoms
infrastructure after the sale of the mobile unit - has licensed the
Nokia brand to HMD Global, which aims to take it back to the future.
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