Well, we can’t say that we didn’t expect this to happen; Nokia is no longer in the smartphone space. After a multi-year-long fight to maintain its presence in the market, all of Nokia’s smartphones have been discontinued on the HMD website. This marks the end of an era for the smartphone market, but it might not be as bad as it seems.
Nokia smartphones were discontinued by the very company that tried to save it
Back in 2017, HMD (formerly HMD Global) obtained the rights to make phones with the Nokia branding. At that point, we all wondered if that was enough to push the struggling Finnish company back to its position of prominence.
Over the past seven years, the company…. tried. However, it just wasn’t able to make Nokia a match for Apple and Samsung. We haven’t seen any major announcements for Nokia phones for several years. It’s not like how it was back in the day when the company would announce interesting phones with nine cameras!
So, the road wasn’t an easy one for Nokia. However, things didn’t really hit the fan until HMD announced that it was going to develop its own brand of devices. We’ve had some pretty interesting HMD-branded phones over the past year, but we all wondered what would happen with Nokia. Well, it looks like we got our answer.
According to a new report, HMD discontinued all of Nokia’s smartphones and tablets on its website. The site had 16 Nokia phones and 3 tablets. Even the company’s most recent phone, the ultra-durable Nokia XR21, got the axe. That was probably the most capable of the most recent Nokia phones. So, it looks like the Nokia branding will quietly dissolve from the public conscience as time goes on.
Nokia smartphones are gone, not Nokia phones
There’s one important thing to note here. You can’t buy any Nokia smartphones from the site, but you can still buy Nokia-branded feature phones (or “Dumb phones”). None of the feature phones on the HMD website are marked as discontinued. So, you will still be able to get them for the time being.
We’re pretty curious about why this is. Maybe the company is waiting for another licensing agreement to expire before pulling the cord on those. Either that or Nokia’s feature phones are actually turning a profit, so it’s worth it to continue selling those phones.
Gone the way of the LG
Don’t think of Nokia as a sinking ship; think of it as a sinking hot air balloon. LG announced that it was exiting the smartphone business, and the company moved on to bigger and better things. It cut loose its smartphone division, which was weighing it down, and it was able to rise.
Well, don’t think of this as a sign that Nokia is failing or anything. In fact, Nokia is a big tech company with its fingers in several pies. Currently, it’s working on adding a cellular network on the moon. Also, its tech exists in many other parts of the tech industry that people just don’t know about.
Nokia’s phones were weighing both Nokia and HMD down. What can we say? The smartphone industry belongs to the Apples, Samsungs, Googles, and OnePlus’ of the world. Maybe it’s time for the Nokia smartphone to hang its hat and retire.
All we can do is remember how Nokia influenced our smartphone experiences over the years. To paraphrase the ABBA song title, “Thank You For The Smartphones“, Nokia. Your phones will live on in that section of our minds occupied by LG’s phones and Blackberry’s phones.
