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Nokia Finally Returns To The Smartphone Market (In China) (mashable.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the established-brands dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Mashable: To little fanfare, the Finnish technology company HMD Global Sunday unveiled the Nokia 6, a mid-range Android smartphone for the Chinese market. HMD owns the rights to use Nokia's brand on mobile phones. The Nokia 6, which runs the newest version of Google's mobile operating system, Android Nougat, sports a 5.5-inch full HD (1920x1080 pixels) display. With metal on the sides and a rounded rectangular fingerprint scanner housed on the front, the Nokia 6 seems reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy S7.

The new Nokia smartphone is powered by a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor and will compete with the likes of Samsung's Galaxy A series models and other mid-end smartphones... The smartphone is priced at 1,699 Chinese Yuan (roughly $250).

23 comments

  1. Round, rectanglar w/ scanner on the front... by SeaFox · · Score: 2

    With metal on the sides and a rounded rectangular fingerprint scanner housed on the front, the Nokia 6 seems reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy S7.

    Sounds like half the smartphones that have ever been made.

    1. Re:Round, rectanglar w/ scanner on the front... by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      But says "Nokia" on it. I bet it has a headphone jack.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  2. Nokia by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've always liked Nokia phones and I'm looking forward to see what they come up with over the next few months. I'd bet the new Nokias will be pretty attractive in terms of price and features/performance.

    And needless to say, they'll probably be rugged as hell *AND* come with a headphone jack. I'm hoping to see a waterproof model.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    1. Re: Nokia by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      Hopefully although it's not Nokia making them this time so it might just be another flimsy disposable phone like the rest.

    2. Re:Nokia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Nice try Nokia CEO. We all know this is your alt account.

    3. Re:Nokia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No no... HMD Global licensed the Nokia name for their cell phones. The logo (and some royalty payments) are the only tie this phone has to the vaunted Nokia handsets of yore. It's a similar concept to how Alcatel-Lucent cell phones are actually made by TCL (the same company that makes the cheap-shit TV's you see at warehouse clubs). I'd expect these new phones to be just as much cheap-shit garbage as all the other crap wearing Western brand-names that have been licensed to Chinese manufacturers (cough, Polaroid, Emerson, Westinghouse, Sharp, Sanyo, Magnavox, etc)

    4. Re:Nokia by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Took Nokia up until the mid four millions to get an account?

    5. Re:Nokia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In France there seems to be a revival of the Thomson brand, which I thought didn't exist anymore after the days of the 4:3 TV and VCR had ended.
      Buying a Thomson smartphone would be weird : computer-wise, they were known for the 8 bit micros (1MHz 6809, eight colors, no floppy drives, a few slightly different models) bought at the tune of at least one million by the government to give to classrooms. Fine, but they hardly ever got used and I don't think they had sprites, so along the crappy colors (1 bit per component RGB) they didn't have a parallel career as game machines either.

  3. $250 is mid-range now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's a fortune! For a bloody phone... I'm kind of surprised this is expected to sell anywhere, let alone in China.

    1. Re:$250 is mid-range now? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Is that the price of an unlocked phone, or a locked phone? For an unlocked phone, mid-range is correct. A high end would be $500 and above - assuming no carrier owns it.

    2. Re:$250 is mid-range now? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      It sounds decent if and only if the OS isn't abandonware on day one, like rebranded phones tend to be. Especially bad are e.g. carrier branded Huawei : seems like you can find some sort of information on the web for a real Huawei phone but nothing at all for a carrier rebrand.
      I sort of wished someone made an abandonware smartphone the way they deserve to be : 2G calls/text only, no wifi, not even data on 2G, no web browser out of the box. An abandonware smartphone deserves about the same level of network access a Windows XP machine does, i.e. none at all.

    3. Re:$250 is mid-range now? by johanw · · Score: 1

      Unlocked of course.

    4. Re:$250 is mid-range now? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      They said that the OS is Nougat, which is the latest & greatest version of Android. That's different from those phones that still come w/ Gingerbread or Icecream sandwich or Honeycomb. If it came w/ the latter, I'd call it abandonware.

      The sort of phone you are describing wouldn't be a smart phone

    5. Re:$250 is mid-range now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Locked phones died a decade ago.

  4. Nope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At $250 it doesn't have a prayer. Non-chinese brand competing at the midrange in China? Gtfo. Huawei honor beats this anyday.

  5. Mid-end? How can the middle by an end? by kevmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I hate really stupid terms and mid-end is really stupid.

    You have an array of products and the most expensive and least expensive are hi-end and low end. All the rest are not "end"s. Mid-class or mid-line would work, but let's not start using such an oxymoronic term as "mid-end".

    --
    Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
    1. Re:Mid-end? How can the middle by an end? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      I hate really stupid terms and mid-end is really stupid.

      How true. "Non-end" would be more logical.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  6. Specifications by Darkling-MHCN · · Score: 1

    The specifications look pretty good...

    http://gadgets.ndtv.com/nokia-...

    However, not really anything that will differentiate it substantially to make it the next big thing. I think the primary cause of the failure of Windows Phone was the fact that Nokia simply didn't produce hardware as sexy as Apple's or Samsung's, in fact I would describe the first Nokia Windows phones in comparison to the iPhone or Samsung offerings at the time as bricks.

    1. Re:Specifications by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Nice. It has a SD slot. I wonder about unlockable boot and root?

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  7. Not Nokia phones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    These are not really Nokia phones. They are designed, manufactured and sold by Foxconn. The only Nokia part is the name, which Nokia rents our to Foxconn. No Nokia engineers are involved in making these phones. You'll be buying just another Asian phone, and paying a bit extra for the Nokia name sticker.

  8. Dumbphones by Zemran · · Score: 1

    As long as this keeps them in the market of making great dumbphones, I am happy. I prefer to have a good phone with fantastic battery life in my pocket and a tablet in my bag. I used to use a smartphone but if kept letting me down when I really needed it. One time, after a long trip, I arrived in Pakse, in southern Laos, no one spoke English, my phone battery was flat, I could not remember the name of my hotel (it was on my phone) and I could not phone anyone to find out where to go... I decided to give up on smartphones. Nokia make the best phones, maybe they should stick to what they are best at.

    --
    I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
  9. Another moronic headline, what's going on at /. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So let me get this straight. Nokia licenses its brand name to another phone maker and that means Nokia is "finally back in the smartphone market"? What a crock of steaming BS.

    No, it means someone is trying to leverage the brand Nokia instead of build their own brand. Whatever they are paying it is probably too much as the Nokia brand is pretty much dead in the smartphone space.

    Please /. stop it with the misleading headlines.

  10. FlagShip Device OR Pilot Device by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor

    Are you kidding NOKIA? are you trying to test your Brand's penetration in market? by releasing some old Processor headset...