Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Nokia is a Finnish communications and information
technology multinational
corporation that is headquartered
in Espoo, Finland. Its Nokia
Solutions and Networks company
provides telecommunications
network equipment and services, while Internet services, including applications, games, music, media andmessaging, and free-of-charge
digital map information and navigation services, are delivered through its
wholly owned subsidiary Navteq.
As of
2012, Nokia employs 101,982 people across 120 countries, conducts sales in more
than 150 countries, and reports annual revenues of around €30 billion. By the fourth quarter of 2012, it was
the world's second-largest mobile
phone maker in terms of unit
sales (after Samsung), with a global market
share of 18.0%. Now, Nokia only has a 3.2% market
share in smartphones. They lost 40% of their revenue in
mobile phones in Q2 2013. Nokia is a public
limited-liability company listed
on the Helsinki Stock Exchange and New
York Stock Exchange. It is the world's 274th-largest
company measured by 2013 revenues according to the Fortune Global 500.
Nokia was
the world's largest vendor of mobile phones from 1998 to 2012. However, the company's market share
has declined since 2007 as a result of the growing use of touchscreen
smartphones from other vendors—principally the iPhone, by Apple, and devices running onAndroid,
an operating system created by Google. The corporation's share price
fell from a high of US$40 in late 2007 to under US$2 in mid-2012. In a bid to recover, Nokia announced a
strategic partnership with Microsoft in February 2011, leading to the
replacement of Symbian with
Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system in all Nokia
smartphones. Following the replacement of the
Symbian system, Nokia's smartphone sales figures, which had previously
increased, collapsed dramatically. From the beginning of 2011 until 2013,
Nokia fell from its position as the world's largest smartphone vendor to assume
the status of tenth largest.
On 2
September 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to purchase
Nokia's mobile phone business unit as part of an overall deal totaling €5.44
billion (US$7.17 billion). Stephen
Elop, Nokia's former CEO, and several other executives will join Microsoft as
part of the deal.
Nokia
unveiled its' third range on 24 February 2014, the Nokia X family, which run a modified
version of the Android operating
system. The range includes three mid-tier devices; Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia
XL.
The technologies that preceded
modern cellular mobile telephony systems were the various "0G"
pre-cellular mobile radio
telephony standards. Nokia had
been producing commercial and some military mobile radio communications
technology since the 1960s, although this part of the company was sold some
time before the later company rationalization. Since 1964, Nokia had developed VHF radio
simultaneously with Salora Oy. In
1966, Nokia and Salora started developing the ARP standard (which stands for
Autoradiopuhelin, or car radio
phone in English), a
car-based mobile radio telephony system and the first commercially operated
public mobile phone network in Finland. It went online in 1971 and offered 100%
coverage in 1978.
In 1979,
the merger of Nokia and Salora resulted in the establishment of Mobira Oy.
Mobira began developing mobile phones for the NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephony) network
standard, the first-generation,
first fully automatic cellular phone system that went online in 1981. In 1982, Mobira introduced its first car phone, the Mobira Senator for
NMT-450 networks.
Nokia
bought Salora Oy in 1984 and now owning 100% of the company, changed the
company's telecommunications branch name to Nokia-Mobira Oy. The Mobira
Talkman, launched in 1984, was one of the world's first transportable phones.
In 1987, Nokia introduced one of the world's first handheld phones, the Mobira Cityman 900 for NMT-900 networks (which, compared
to NMT-450, offered a better signal, yet a shorter roam). While the Mobira
Senator of 1982 had weighed 9.8 kg (22 lb) and the Talkman just under
5 kg (11 lb), the Mobira Cityman weighed only 800 g (28 oz)
with the battery and had a price tag of 24,000 Finnish marks (approximately €4,560). Despite the high price, the first
phones were almost snatched from the sales assistants' hands. Initially, the
mobile phone was a "yuppie" product and a status symbol.
Nokia's
mobile phones got a big publicity boost in 1987, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was pictured using a Mobira Cityman to
make a call fromHelsinki to his
communications minister in Moscow. This led to the phone's nickname of the
"Gorba".
In 1988,
Jorma Nieminen, resigning from the post of CEO of the mobile phone unit, along
with two other employees from the unit, started a notable mobile phone company
of their own, Benefon Oy (since renamed to GeoSentric). One year later, Nokia-Mobira Oy became
Nokia Mobile Phones.
Symbian was the main operating system of Nokia
smartphones by 2012, Nokia 808 PureView, launched in February 2012 was the last
Symbian smartphone.
In Q4
2004, Nokia released its first touch screen phone, the Nokia 7710.
In
September 2006, Nokia announced the Nokia
N95, a Symbian-powered slider smartphone. It was released in February 2007 as
the first phone with a 5-megapixel camera. It became hugely popular. An
8 GB variant was released in October 2007.
In
November 2007, Nokia announced and released the Nokia N82, its first Nseries phone
with Xenon flash. At the Nokia
World conference in December 2007, Nokia announced their "Comes With
Music" program: Nokia device buyers are to receive a year of complimentary
access to music downloads. The service became commercially
available in the second half of 2008.
The first
Nseries device, the N90, utilised the older Symbian
OS 8.1 mobile operating system, as did the
N70. Subsequently Nokia switched to using SymbianOS 9 for all later Nseries
devices (except the N72, which was based on the N70). Newer Nseries devices
incorporate newer revisions of SymbianOS 9 that include Feature Packs. The N800, N810, N900, N9 andN950 are as of April 2012 the only Nseries
devices (therefore excluding Lumia devices) to not use Symbian OS. They
use the Linux-based Maemo, except the N9(50), which uses MeeGo.
In 2008,
Nokia released the Nokia E71 which was marketed to directly compete
with the other BlackBerry-type
devices offering a full "qwerty" keyboard and cheaper prices.
The Nokia N8, from September 2010, is the
first device to function on the Symbian^3 mobile operating system. Nokia
revealed that the N8 will be the last device in its flagship N-series devices
to ship with Symbian OS.
The Nokia 808 PureView has a 41-megapixel camera, more than
any other smartphone on the market. It was released in February 2012 and
contains a 1.3 GHz processor. On 25 January 2013, Nokia announced this was
the last Symbian smartphone the company would make.
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