this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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HMD Global is a smartphone and tablet company that surged from Nokia and now has smartphones and tablets. They outsource the manufacture mainly to China and India, but they are now starting to maufacture its 5G models in Europe: https://www.hmd.com/en_ae/press/hmd-begins-manufacturing-5g-smartphones-in-europe

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Only 2 OS updates and 3 years of security updates is too little for a phone marketed as repairable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fuck repairable. My Nokia 6 had a broken USB-Port but because it had a small tear in the display glass it couldn't be repaired. Anyone glueing on the display and leaving that as the only possible way to open the phone does not have a repairable product.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Ex had the Nokia 5. Had the USB port fixed under warranty, it went bad again in a month or two. Told her to recite the consumer protection law when she went back again, as here in Estonia you can demand your money back if you get the same issue again after a warranty repair (the Telia customer service agent of course had been taught to tell her that this is only true after 3 failed repairs, but that's not true).

I really wanted to like the new Nokia lineup. For sure it had a nice clean version of Android. They're not made in Finland, but at least the profit goes just over the bay rather than to some far-away corporation. But I'm not sure if I could trust them at this point.

I went from a OnePlus 7 Pro to iPhones, and if Apple pisses me off enough, it's Pixel and GrapheneOS for me because everyone seems to want to fuck up their OS experience instead of offering something closer to AOSP. Unless someone is going to tell me that Sony phones are good again or something.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I thought HMD Global was a Chinese company, that had “rented” the brand “Nokia” from the actual Nokia company?

Edit: I am remembering completely wrong

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They indeed got the license from Nokia, but are Finnish themselves too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That’s quite interesting, I also assumed they were Chinese. Them being EU based should be a bigger deal

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

A subsidiary of Foxconn has a pretty big stake in HMD and are also the manufacturer. They're Taiwanese, but that may explain it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

HMD are Finnish. I think their phones are assembled in China but that's the case for many smartphones (e.g. iPhones).

However I noticed that some HMD phones use Unisoc CPUs, and Unisoc are Chinese. I don't know how much that matters. Other HMD phones use Qualcomm CPUs - Qualcomm are American.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I I recall well, while Finnish, most of the R&D, and of course the whole manufacturing process, was done in China. That how they got their "Chinese" reputation.

I think it is undeserved, but it is also true that their smartphone got some annoying problems, like a very fragile usb-c port on my now defunct Nokia 8.1.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

They were one of the few left that included headphone jacks. Unfortunately, they've stopped with that, which is a dealbreaker for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So, it's Nokia. Sensible to rebrand I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

It's not.

It's a Chinese corporation wearing the dead skin of the former Nokia.

They've lost the engineers and definitely with the change in ownership they've lost the values once may have had.

Nokia used to manufacture in Salo, a city some 100km from Helsinki. I was working at a taxi dispatch center back then. Literally almost every 10 calls would have a taxi ordered to Nokia Visitor Centre. Sometimes like a third of the calls during busy hours.

Fast forward three years the manufacture has largely moved and the city is in trouble. Fast forward another ten to now and the city is dead. No work, no housing market nothing sells, stores dead. Unemployment was 20% in 2015.

I don't believe it's in any ways equivalent to the former Nokia.