No Swipe UI, No Care

They should be. Do you remember the glory days of Comecon? Bulgaria was nominated the leader in electronics and computing (or so we were told).

And yet it was 2 years early before European Coal and Steel Community. I wonder if that is behind the bulgarian hacker stereotype, thanks Stalin(steel-guy accidentally)

Are you sure that's not just a translation of an old interview from mid-June which also stated "rather than build any new phones itself, Nokia plans to license its name out to other manufacturers"?

At the time Bulgaria was indeed ahead (at least between the SIV (Comecon) countries. They had successfully cloned the Apple II (and later x86) architectures and managed to create stable and thriving programming communities and education. These times are long gone though

Another country from that bunch Poland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202
Created 16-bit machine a decade before IBM Only dreams now

IBM had a 16-bit machine in 1965, the 1130 ...

Forgot to add 'mini' (if a suitcase sized can be still considered mini, 1130 was half a room sized)

This is the first time I heard this outside my own mind. Considering all the creepy NSA surveillance crap and how easily American companies fall victim to this, combined with how a Microsoft executive took down Nokia, sold the scraps and went back to Microsoft, this scenario is entirely possible.

Before Elop crashed a weak Nokia they still had lots of options and they were developing modern phones. They even could have made a phone for the simple minded people if they wanted, with no big effort.

Its obvious that Nokia should have just added Android to their options of OS'es and continued living of Symbian, while continuing their very promising high end (and low end) GNU/Linux devices. I heard the continued development of Symbian even turned out quite well (Belle etc). But I think all of the companies must have feared GNU/Linux on phones and giving people full freedom. This ofcourse brings me back to the original point you made, that Nokia had to be stopped. The industry must have been happy to help in this considering the threat freedom would bring, rather than the creepy Stasi style phones on the market today. This stuff would pose an even bigger threat to Microsoft, who was happy to become the trojan horse. Microsoft was desperate to expand from PC to phones.

We could have had a NSA free company (Nokia) selling products which empowers the user. That itself in an existential threats to all the others..

Ok.. I know the N9, I have it and never liked it, so I did not use it much. The device is severely restricted/locked. But if development had continued a GNU powered phone would have been inevitable as mobile specifications improved.

Add boring Android alternatives for the more simple minded, and cheap *** low end Linux/something phones along with phasing out Symbian SLOWLY and Nokia would have posed a threat to the whole market for all devices, including laptops etc. Nokia even produced a laptop and could have threatened the whole Microsoft chokehold on the computer market by being a somewhat independent producer of laptops. This as oppos to the decade long anti-competitive Microsoft cooperation with a handful of computer manufacturers.

Just some funny historical afterthoughts written on a device where the keyboard does not take up half the screen space.

Anyone in here who speculates what Nokia may or may not do in the future is doing just that, speculating.

The fact seems clear, once Nokia deal with Microsoft expires they can do anything they want.

Does that give reason for optimism? Perhaps, but not really. A broken company with no ambitions is unlikely to revisit the past and a theoretical "what could have been", 5 years later on.

At best Nokia will use their patents and redesign the whole mobile arena and make a whole new range of products which might or might not have mobile phone features.

But most likely it wount hire among the tens of thousands of highly skilled and educated Finnish people to do something like that. They seem more likely to throd along and licence boring mobile products to other companies (as indicated) and maybe even as a Microsoft partner. Their VR cam is a good indication of what they might do, and the Android tablet, two boring products.

Nokia used to be a tyre producer, then they started making phones. Now they stopped making phones and is likely to survive doing something entirely different. The phone market is ruled by stupidity and poor products anyways and its almost impossible to break into it, so its in my opinion unlikely that Nokia is even interested in that.

On the bright side, Nokia might also become a Jolla partner and try to make money on Jolla growing, using old (and new) Nokia technology. Which means we could hope for exciting Jolla products in the future and hope that Jolla could become a semi-important player in the mobile market.

Time is running out though. Some people predict that mobile products as we know today might not exist in 10 years at all.