Tag: HMD Global

To be honest, if you have been paying attention to the smartphone market over the past year, you know that HMD Global’s Nokia brand has been making a serious comeback.  Now we have a more substantial report that reflect what everyone suspected:  Nokia has had a killer year.

Counterpoint Research has published their report on the Smartphone market and they, like IDC earlier in the week, confirm that Huawei has passed Apple as the number two smartphone company in the world.  But the Counterpoint report goes into more details than the IDC report on the “other” brands, of which Nokia is lumped into.  That’s where you find that the brand has gained some 782% in market share since Q2 2017.

Nokia today made a somewhat of a surprise announcement with the new Nokia 5.1, 3.1 and 2.1 phones coming to their lineup later this summer.  Running Android One on the 5.1 and 3.1 while running on the 2.1 will be Android Go, HMD Global has more-or-less given incremental upgrades to the .0 versions of these current phones in their lineup.

By far the biggest upgrade came to the Nokia 5.1.  Sporting a 5.5″ Full HD display, it has an 18:9 aspect ratio and is powered by the MediaTek Helio P18 octa-core SoC.  It comes with either 2GB of RAM with 16GB of storage or 3GB of RAM with 32GB of storage.  IN either case, the storage can be expanded an additional 128GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.  Camera wise, you have a 16MP main shooter with auto-focus while the selfie camera is an 8MP shooter.  All of this, along with the phone running Android One (Oreo) will cost a comfortable $218 when it is released.

By any measure, Mobile World Congress was a good show for Nokia.  The company announced several new phones including the revamped Nokia 6, the Nokia 7 Plus and the Nokia 8 Sirocco.  But it appears that the HMD Global owned brand is far from done for 2018.  According to an exclusive at Nokia Power User, the company plans to launch two more devices this year:  The Nokia 8 Pro and Nokia 9.

First is the Nokia 8 Pro.  It will be powered by the Snapdragon 845, have a rotating zoom lens, and will feature a double-glass (front and back) design.  It will also be an 18:9 ratio device with a 5.5″ display.  Looking at the design concepts, this device harkens back to Nokia devices when they were making Windows Phone based phones.

Nokia deserves a lot of credit for their efforts to keep their devices on the most current version of Android.  The company has already indicated that their current line up of the phones will get the Android Oreo update and yesterday, even the budget friendly Nokia 2 was confirmed to be on the list.

HMD Global’s Juho Sarvikas, the company’s Chief Product Officer, took to Twitter to answer a Nokia 2 owners question of if the phone would be upgraded to Android Oreo.

Hi! It will receive Android Oreo. 1GB RAM devices will be supported on 8.1 release where many of the Android Go memory management improvements will be integrated. Nokia 2 performance will only get better over time!

— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) December 28, 2017

While we don’t have any sort of time frame on when this update will actually roll out, the fact that a $99 phone is going to be updated to the latest build of Android is, well, almost unheard of.

Nokia has opened up a beta program for Nokia 8 owners to give the upcoming Android Oreo build a test drive.  The news came via Twitter from HMD Global’s Juho Sarvikas.  Mr. Sarvikas is the company’s Chief Product Officer.

Announcing Nokia phones beta labs! Be the first to test #AndroidOreo on #Nokia8 (physical Oreos not included!) https://t.co/91uhqstnnm pic.twitter.com/GNiNrK31B0

— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) October 25, 2017

As a general rule, once these types of major updates hit the public beta realm, they are pretty well baked. But, the keyword here is “beta”.  There are likely still bugs to be found and other issues so if you are not comfortable with that, don’t download the update.  For those that do and find it unstable to the point of needing to revert back to Nougat 7.1.1, Nokia has confirmed that you will be able to do it.

Full details on how to join the beta can be found on the Nokia Beta Labs site.

Good news! HMD Global has confirmed that all of the Android running Nokia devices – the Nokia 3, Nokia 5, Nokia 6 and Nokia 8 – will be receiving the Android Oreo update.

The new came from Chief Product Officer Juho Sarvikas via Twitter over the weekend.

All of our smartphones will upgrade to Oreo, Nokia 3 included. No comments yet on timing so that I don’t get into trouble 😊.

— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) September 2, 2017

This announcement is great new for every Nokia owner, especially those who have the lower priced Nokia 3.  Often, manufactures will not update their entry level devices to the next major version of Android in favor of focusing in on their midrange and flagship devices.