[confirmed] Nokia going to produce/licence mobiles again next year [not relevant]

Not happening, sorry.

Well I don't wanna tell that Jolla is in desperate need of this partnership but I think it could be a good push in visibility. Most casual users have barely heard of Jolla. Of course this is only possible to happen if the ex-Nokia employees who are now in Jolla are not (still) with bad fellings towards Nokia.

Nokia has no mobile design capacity left, none for HW nil for SW.

It was all sold out to MS and what was not has been dissolved and dismantled. There is no infrastructure to do implement anything like that any longer.

You might as well ask any random international company not currently making mobiles to start manufacturing them... first you need to build design capacity, then manufacturing capacity... etc...

It would take years and huge pile of money... not worth it... no business there...

UNLESS! They buy a small company which has been taking care of design, distribution chain, hw / sw manufactoring in mobile sector...but this of course is just a speculation..

Here's the original article:

http://recode.net/2015/04/20/nokia-plots-2016-return-to-phone-market/

They did release the N1 tablet, so it's not like they have no design capacity left at all... I know they didn't make it the way they used to make phones, but I don't see why they couldn't release (Android?) phones in the same manner. Maybe they won't, but they could.

What part of the there's no money in it you find difficult to grok?

See, currently there's 2 top dogs in the industry, one is da Fruit Company and one is the Korean Gorilla. There's just one company that is making profit with the boxes, and that's the first one. (yep, sammy takes a losing hit with every box they sell)

Now the reality is that there's still profit to be done in the small business end, you can make few thousand devices and live with it, but a comapany sized like Nokia cannot go the small-business-route, it is just not possible with the size. And there's no sense in competing on a stagnating market with the top dogs, literally, there's just no profit in it!

Now why does MS then go for it? Their intrest is something else; they want a share of the services and the cloud business and they want to bind users to their own garden, serviced on different platforms. They don't care that they make even larger loss with every box they sell, their product is not the mobile device but the services behind it.

There's just 2 companies that make large-scale piles of money in mobile business, and those are Apple and Google... nobody using android profits from it, and neither does nobody using WP...

@ssahla, there's just the 4-letters-worth of "NOKIA" in the N1 tablet, nothing else: it is Foxconn-designed, Foxconn-built, Foxconn-marketed tablet device.

All Nokia did was license their brand name to it :)

You are right. And I didn't say they should do it or that there's any money in it for them. But, again, they did do the N1, for some reason. (Yes, Foxconn did that really but there's some Nokia in it (looks, Z Launcher).) Of course a Nokia phone made in the same manner wouldn't be very much Nokia.

It has been speculated that nokia might buy the handset unit of sony. Personally I don't believe in it.

A related news snippet (from Times of India) is that the Chennai factory seems to be starting again.

@vattuvarg The chennai factory I believe now belongs to microsoft as it was under handset division and actually was the major roadblock in the MS takeover due to a court case ! They lobbied and paid some fine guess they are now producing more "dumb" phones ?

The Chennai factory still belongs to Nokia.

@vattuvarg Apparently MS didn't want the factory as it was riddled with troubles ! Its sad to learn http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Nokias-Chennai-plant-becomes-an-orphaned-factory/articleshow/34149693.cms . The latest news as on 18th april says there is an undisclosed buyer for the plant http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-04-18/news/61278891_1_tax-case-chennai-plant-nokia-india . It still needs clearance from Income Tax authorities to sell it.

Note : Nokia is/was stuck in a huge tax case as it promised employment and got the land and tax benefits from the govt.

@juiceme : so its a nokia, right? ;)

@tortoisedoc I am not sure what you are referring to, the N1 tablet?

That one is not "a nokia" in any sense of the word.

@pavi - Nokia made quite a lot of strange decisions under the influence of microsoft.

John Kneeland (Nokia): "The N1 really is a Nokia product. We designed its hardware. We wrote its software. Nokia's legacy is ours, not Microsoft's."

@kt, marketoids talk, that should be no surprise to you. what you hear is not always the whole truth... :)