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Former CEO of Angry Birds-Maker Rovio Hired To Revive Nokia's Phone Business (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the bring-back-from-the-dead dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Nokia really started to go downhill after it agreed to sell itself to Microsoft at the end of 2013, going all in with Windows Mobile. When that faltered, "Microsoft folded Nokia into its mobile business, maintaining the Finnish company's brand on feature phones, while offering up smartphones under the newly integrated Microsoft Lumia line," reports TechCrunch. In May of this year, Microsoft sold its feature phone business to Foxconn for $350 million. At around the same time, Nokia essentially licensed its brand to Finnish company HMD global Oy to create phones under the Nokia name, "which would be manufactured and distributed by Foxconn." Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Nokia has hired Pikka Rantala, the once CEO of Angry Birds creator Rovio, who stepped down in 2015 after a rough year with the mobile gaming company. He will be joining the company as Chief Marketing Officer.

3 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Nokia doesn't(didn't) just make phones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    When did everyone decide that Nokia=Phone. It's a massive company with tens of thousands of employees, making LTE, optical networks, etc.. etc...
    The company didn't sell itself to Microsoft, it sold it's handset business.

  2. They had one by jgfenix · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was to standardize the development in Qt and use Symbian foor feature phones and Maemo (then Meego) for smartphones. Yes, there was infighting (the Symbian section wasn't thrilled) but I thought it was a good plan.

  3. Re:BRING BACK SYMBIAN!!! by LostMyBeaver · · Score: 1, Informative

    Oh hell no!!!

    Symbian may actually be the worst code base humanity had ever seen.

    Symbian = What happens when you try to implement all the features of an operating system without actually writing a kernel or develop development tools... or even have a debugger.

    Then there was the infamous clean-up stack which was Symbian's famous "revolutionary" method of implementing crash handling without actually implementing exceptions.

    I have to agree that Series 60 UI wasn't too awful, and Nokia did implement some of the most amazing features ever in telephones, but let's be honest, Symbian was what killed Nokia. People claim it was Windows, but Apple simple just took their entire market because they developed an operating system that could attract developers. Developers tries Symbian and just left... it was the worse thing ever made.