The past few days have been quite eventful for Nokia, one of the oldest and most popular phone manufacturers. There’s a new CEO, and the company’s device business has now been fully acquired by Microsoft. While the two companies had been collaborating on the Lumia range for a long time, Microsoft now owns the entire range of devices that Nokia makes, including the latest family of Android devices.

Sure, we can harp on about how Nokia missed the smartphone bus and all that, but the fact remains that it has been one of the most loved handset brands and a huge monopoly initially in India. The Finnish brand that once produced paper products, rubber and tires, churned out certain devices that had, for all purposes, achieved cult status. In gadget nirvana, if you’ve owned (or still own) one or more of the following devices, you’re probably one of the coolest people around.

Nokia N-Gage QD

For many teenagers of that time, dreams were made of phones like the N-Gage QD. It was the ultimate hipster phone – instead of owning just a phone to play games on, you could own a gaming console of sorts that was also your phone! It might be hard to believe now, but the 2.1-inch TFT screen, flanked by a keypad on one side and an array of D-pad and gaming-dedicated buttons was the ultimate phone to show off. The N-Gage QD was a phone with an unbeatable awesomeness quotient!

Nokia 6600

The N6600 can be held responsible for being one of the forerunners of the mobile multimedia revolution. At the time of its launch, it was a premium gadget. You had the ‘luxury’ of a VGA camera, a 5-way navigational joystick, a 2.1-inch screen which supported video (believe us, it was the biggest of all big deals back then) and a robust construction. Plus the fact that you could actually store videos and watch them later, made the 6600 even more droolworthy. If you pulled this phone out of your pocket, you were also probably getting out of the back of a chauffeur-driven SUV.

Nokia E71

BlackBerry might be the only business phone manufacturer now to produce devices with full QWERTY keypads, but it wasn’t always like this. Back in the day, owning a Nokia E-series meant you were extremely serious about your work. Apart from the QWERTY keyboard, it had a 3.1MP rear camera, and a front camera too! For its time it had a blazing performance and superb build quality too (the body was finished in metal). The device could support all Microsoft Office files apart from being one of the first phones to be WiFi and USB compatible. And the pinstriped texture on the back of the phone matched the pinstripes on business suits.

Nokia N8

The N8 was probably Nokia’s last hurrah. It was a Symbian smartphone in the era of the iPhone 4. It was all-touchscreen. It had apps. It looked funky. It was awesome. The N8 had a great design, and combined with all its features, it was definitely an object of desire. The device had a great camera too – 12-megapixels with a mechanical shutter and Carl Zeiss optics. It supported USB devices on the go, had HDMI out and every single feature that many Android smartphones adopted much later. This was Nokia’s own smartphone.

Nokia 3310

If there was any gadget that could redefine the term “old-faithful”, it was this! It’s been called a lot of things (we aren’t going to say what all because that would be a bit ungainly) but it’s the kind of thing that you could just trust blindly. Drop it on the road, smash it against the wall, or use it as a melee weapon, afterwards it would still work. And we really think sometimes that this handset ran on nuclear fuel, because the charge just went on forever. If Voldemort had chosen the Nokia 3310 as one of his Horcruxes, Potter wouldn’t have stood a chance!

Betting on branding

Microsoft’s acquision of Nokia’s Devices and Services business is finally complete. And that gives Microsoft control over Lumia, Asha and even the Android-powered X series. And all of Nokia’s employees, including design teams, manufacturing teams, developers etc., will soon be reprinting their business cards with Microsoft’s branding on them.

Since the two companies – correction: Microsoft and its new device division – will work under the same roof, the development process will become easier, and less time-consuming. That might translate into better devices and faster (read more up-to-date) production of devices, but then there’s a lot of confusion about the continuance of the Nokia brand on the new devices.

Microsoft will supposedly continue selling the devices under the Nokia brand, even the Android based X-series, but that may not be for long. The planned disbanding of the Nokia brand may not be the best of decisions, because a lot of customer loyalty rides on the Finnish brand. Using Microsoft’s brand too may not be very successful because Windows Phone devices haven’t exactly been phenomenally successful as opposed to Apple or Android devices. A completely new brand might be the best bet.

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