
Microsoft offloads Nokia feature phone business to Foxconn for $350M - yread
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/18/microsoft-offloads-nokia-feature-phone-business-to-foxconn-for-350m/
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mikegioia
I just want one manufacturer to care about and release a decent feature phone.
The current landscape right now is the LG Cosmos III, various shitty
Tracfones, and then the Nokia lines that have been ruined by Microsoft.

I think there's a serious market for _good_ feature phones that can make
calls, send/receive SMS/MMS/group chats, take high resolution pictures, and
send/receive emails all with a qwerty, tactile keyboard.

~~~
benbristow
I don't really think so. Who nowadays would want to buy a feature phone when
smartphones are so cheap.

An entry-level smartphone can do all the same things a feature phone can and
even more. Why would you want to limit yourself in this day and age?

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kyllo
Not only battery life but also durability, which lowers the lifetime cost of
ownership. Feature phones last a long time, they're harder to break since
they're usually not enclosed in edge-to-edge glass, and basically everything
about them both hardware and software-wise is simple and battle-tested.

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microcolonel
I honestly love my Nokia 106 in general. There are a couple of menus which are
inconsistent, color is unnecessary, and the background images are ???; but
despite all of that, it has been excellent and gives reliable calls.

Sadly GSM is going down in Canada for good next year. I'd love to have a
106-shaped LTE or HSPA phone with multilingual input and display. Essentially
no other device would make me happier.

I have learned to love T9, it is very comfortable once you are used to it; and
it maps very well to Japanese (though not available on this device). If I ever
need to get a smartphone again, I'm using a T9 keyboard on it.

I wonder if they'd hire me...

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cJ0th
I've gotten one as well after my beloved v3i passed away. In terms of value
for money it is alright. Yet I wonder why dumb phones aren't perfected by now.
Apart from the menu issues and the indeed horrible backgrounds (went with the
blueish one) I am annoyed that you can neither set the brightness of the
display nor the volume of the alarm clock. When it wakes you up in the morning
its brightness and loudness are incredibly painful. In fact, at night I cover
my phone with whatever textile product lies around to make the alarm clock
less harsh.

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fsloth
The headline is imprecise. The rights to the brand 'Nokia' as relating to
phones will be owned by another company 'HMD Global' who have licenced the
Nokia patent portfolio as well.

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ptaipale
Or, more precisely, HMD will lease those rights, but Nokia still owns them.
The lease is agreed for a decade from now on.

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fungi
> subsidiary of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn

Foxconn is Taiwanese

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jpatokal
Taiwan is Chinese -- just not necessarily People's-Republic-of-Chinese.

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kyllo
That really depends what you mean by Chinese. It's an issue in Taiwanese
identity politics and electoral politics. Taiwan is officially the Republic of
China, but that name is a legacy of World War II. Taiwan has many citizens who
speak Mandarin or various dialects of Chinese; many of them consider
themselves Chinese, but also many do not. There are Taiwanese whose ancestors
moved there from China as early as the 1600s. Besides, they also have a
sizeable population of aboriginal people with totally non-Chinese cultural
practices and who speak a language that isn't even loosely related to Chinese.

And meanwhile, the country has been in a sort of cold war with the PRC since
the late 1940s, and was a Japanese colony for the 50 years prior to that. The
last government to have military control over all of Mainland China and Taiwan
(plus Mongolia) was the Qing Dynasty.

Saying that "Taiwan is Chinese" is basically true in an imprecise way, but
once you drill down into the details a little, it gets complicated.

~~~
rangibaby
> Taiwan is officially the Republic of China, but that name is a legacy of
> World War II

ROC held the China UN seat until 1971, and the first multi-party elections
were held in 1986. KMT still considers ROC to include all Chinese territory.

> Taiwan has many citizens who speak Mandarin or various dialects of Chinese;
> many of them consider themselves Chinese, but also many do not. There are
> Taiwanese whose ancestors moved there from China as early as the 1600s.
> Besides, they also have a sizeable population of aboriginal people with
> totally non-Chinese cultural practices and who speak a language that isn't
> even loosely related to Chinese.

You're confusing nationality with ethnicity. PRC has many non-Han minorities
too, but their nationality is Chinese.

> And meanwhile, the country has been in a sort of cold war with the PRC since
> the late 1940s, and was a Japanese colony for the 50 years prior to that.
> The last government to have military control over all of Mainland China and
> Taiwan (plus Mongolia) was the Qing Dynasty.

PRC and ROC claim all of the territory as "China", whether they historically
controlled it or not.

~~~
kyllo
What definition of nationality are you working with? Wikipedia defines it as
"the legal relationship between a person and a state."

I'm not confusing anything, I know the difference between nationality and
ethnicity (and language). The non-Han people in the PRC are of Chinese
nationality because they are residents of territory that is under the PRC's
political and military control. That statement is not true for the people of
Taiwan. They have their own government, and many people including elected
officials in that government want to remove the word China from the country's
official name.

So are Taiwanese people of Chinese nationality? No. Chinese ethnicity? A
slight majority. Chinese speaking? A larger majority. So again it depends what
you mean by "Chinese."

The rest of the facts you're stating are true on paper only--they are
political fictions perpetuated by the cold war.

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rangibaby
Both PRC and ROC consider themselves the real China (hence Chinese), which was
my point.

~~~
ptaipale
And, somewhat surprisingly for many Westerners, in the PRC mindset it is very
bad if ROC ceases to claim all of China, because that would mean that it has
become secessionist, i.e. there would be more than one China. So far they have
agreed on one thing, "there is only one China and we're the legal government",
and just disagreed on who's "we".

PRC has naturally a much stronger claim to that since it controls a vast
majority of China. But in 1970's, PRC was deep in radical socialist
experiments and the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and the economy was
weak, while ROC had opened up to world trade (I remember all those Taiwanese
Apple and PC clones of early 1980's). It looked like ROC will actually be the
more significant economy, even if it has much smaller population.

Then PRC changed its course.

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windsurfer
The bigger deal for me is that they are licensing their brand to make new
phones and tablets. I'm still sad about the Maemo line of phones, but I'm
hoping they bring back a brand of linux phones after this new deal.

~~~
walterbell
What we need now is for HMD Global to acquire Jolla.

We also need an infographic of the migration of Nokia engineers between
different corporate entities and the dollar value destroyed/created during
each hop.

Let's hope this corporate re-engineering saga has a happy ending. I miss my
Nokia N8, N900 and N9.

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pkaye
Strange the way that article is written, it doesn't clarify which way the
money was transferred.

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hackaflocka
Foxconn has the ability to make iPhone quality hardware.

Why do they need the Nokia featurephone business?

They're not allowed to use the Nokia name are they?

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evo_9
Microsoft originally paid $7.2 Billion for Nokia in 2013.

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cwyers
Not to defend that acquisition, but Microsoft is keeping the Lumia business,
this is JUST the feature phone business. Also, $2 billion of that wasn't part
of the sale price, but a 10-year patent licensing agreement.[1] Microsoft is
keeping that patent license, as well as the patents that Microsoft acquired
outright in the deal. It's apples and oranges to compare the total purchase
price to the sales price of part of the acquisition.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-takes-control-of-
noki...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-takes-control-of-nokias-phone-
business-acquires-25000-new-employees/)

