the return of nokia

finla nd’s mobile ph one ph oenix rises from the ashe s… once again

What’s going on, T3?

There’s a brand new Nokia phone, the Nokia 6, doing the rounds. It’s a fairly standard black rectangle affair, toting Android Nougat, a sharp-looking 5.5-inch display, 4GB RAM, 64GB of expandable storage, and it’s available for the equivalent of around £ 205.

Equivalent?

Well, yes: at the time of writing you’ll only be able to pick one up if you have a pocket full of Yuan and a ticket to Beijing, since it’s a collaborative effort between Nokia and China’s HMD Global and is exclusive to the Chinese market.

So that’s it?

Not by a long shot. The Nokia 6 is unlikely to be the only handset to come out of Nokia’s revamped mobile division. Expect a slew of announcements at Mobile World Congress – including, possibly, the rumoured super-budget E1 Android handset – and the Nokia 6 may not be tied to China for long, either. Nokia has filed for FCC testing on a very similar device with only a mildly different model number…

What about Microsoft?

Nokia did indeed sell up its mobile phone division to the boys in Redmond in 2013, and initially licensed its name for Microsoft’s phones, but the Finnish giant’s non-compete contract expired in 2016 and it has regained use of its name, leaving it free to re-enter the phone market while Microsoft forges its own path with the upcoming Surface phone. You can expect good things from a well-established company looking to recapture a little lost magic.