For a long time, Nokia was the cheap place to go if you wanted to buy a smartphone. They weren't the best phones out there, but they were far from terrible: for the most part, Nokia's lineup was a low-cost way to access the features of a smartphone, even if it didn't come with nearly as many features as its competitors.
Then, the company was bought out by Microsoft. Nokia's Lumia line became the poster child for Windows Phone, and it looked like Nokia would quietly fade away into obscurity as a result. As it turns out, that just wasn't the case: despite everything, Nokia's still around today — and it looks like the company will be returning to the smartphone industry. Well ... kind of.
While speaking with the German magazine Manager Magazin (via The Verge), Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri made it clear that Nokia is currently looking to reenter the market, if only for licensing purposes:
"We will look for suitable partners ... Microsoft makes mobile phones. We would simply design them and then make the brand name available to license."
As it stands, Nokia is still prohibited from actually using its brand: the company is restricted from putting the Nokia label on a device until Q4 2015. However, it doesn't sound like Suri is interested in manufacturing anything; instead, Nokia will simply license out its brand name. The company used a similar strategy when releasing the N1 tablet, which actually runs on Android — apparently, Nokia plans to do the same with most (if not all) of its products from here on out.
The timing is either suspicious or incredibly coincidental, depending on how you look at it: former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is leaving Microsoft. Whether or not that had any effect on Nokia's new business plan has yet to be confirmed ... but the timing does send up a few red flags.
One way or another, it looks like Nokia phones are coming back ... even if Nokia isn't the one putting the phones together.
