Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It can evoke emotions, a feeling of trust, and even empathy.
Few brands ever manage to ascend above cold consumerism, but if there’s one example of a company that didn’t just manage it but excelled at it, it has to be Nokia. The phone division of the Finnish behemoth, through its hits and many misses, rode a wave of consumer support right until it got sold off to Microsoft back in 2013. Microsoft, on its part, didn’t take long to shutter the business and by early 2016, it had all but exited the smartphone market altogether.
Read more: The best Nokia phones available
Enter HMD Global, a scrappy upstart of ex-Nokia employees, hoping to tap into the collective nostalgia for what was practically everyone’s first cellphone. Five years ago, on December 1, 2016, HMD announced plans to relaunch the Nokia brand and become a significant player in the global smartphone landscape. The company made bold claims about building the next chapter of Nokia with “reliable, beautifully crafted and fun Nokia phones.”
On a cold rainy morning at MWC 2017 in Barcelona, HMD Global showed off the first four phones to spark off the new Nokia. With the Nokia 3310, Nokia 3, Nokia 5, and Nokia 6, the company hoped to straddle the line of feature phones and the upper mid-range segment. The phones displayed a classic Finnish sense of minimalism paired with stock Android and the promise of fast updates. Expectedly, fans lapped it up.
Keep in mind that even as recently as 2017, the smartphone industry was still struggling with bloated software and the inability to deliver timely updates. HMD’s promise of rapid updates and a clean user experience got a warm welcome from fans and industry watchers alike.
Fast forward five years and the new Nokia turned out to be a major disappointment. HMD Global has become yet another example of promising too much and delivering too little. The steady spate of derivative hardware, dwindling software support, and utter lack of competitiveness paints a grim outlook for what could have been a return to glory.
Pure, secure, and not so up to date
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
A key factor behind the initial excitement for HMD Global’s resurrected Nokia was the company’s choice to join the Android One program. The program essentially guaranteed a bloat-free, clean operating system as well as quick software updates. To be fair to HMD, it did manage to keep pace with monthly security patches and version upgrades for a while. However, it hasn’t taken long for that promise to fall flat.
HMD ranked first on our Android 9 Pie update tracker. But it quickly slipped to the fourth position on our Android 10 tracker. By the time Android 11 rolled out, the company was right down to tenth place on the Android Authority Android 11 update tracker. In fact, HMD is still pushing out the update to phones as of this writing. Meanwhile, it is yet to issue an official timeline for Android 12 updates.
Slow software updates can be excused, broken updates cannot.
It’s not as if HMD has the most generous update promise in the industry. We’re talking about a perfectly average two years of version updates and three years of security patches. Interestingly, HMD’s problems with software updates started right around the time the number of models started ramping up. …….
Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/hmd-global-five-years-3066568/