KIANEWS 
HMD Global today unveiled its latest smartphone, the HMD Fusion, an affordable device whose idea is to change functions and style with a shell. This is how the HMD Fusion will initially be distributed, but additional devices will be available later this year.
Aalto University launches Nokia Design Archive, chronicling the pioneering history of Finland’s legendary mobile phone maker
10. 12. 2024 Tuesday / By: Robert Denes / Generic / Exact time: BST / Print this page
We’ve reached a point in tech history where early mobile phones are little more than museum pieces, alien and foreign to today’s consumers due to their lack of functionality and unusual form. In the early stages of mobile phone history, the king of official inventions and bold new ideas was Finland’s Nokia.
Aalto University in Helsinki has launched the Nokia Design Archive, an online portal that explores the company’s two-decade history, including never-before-seen sketches, concepts and marketing materials, as well as some of its most iconic, enduring and memorable devices of all time.
The Nokia Design Archive will launch in January 2025, but we’re giving you a sneak peek at the more than 700 exhibits that date back from the early 1990s to 2017. Nokia's history can be traced back to pulp mills in 1865, before evolving into a multinational company that did everything from power to rubber boots.
The portable telecommunications boom of the 1990s was a pivotal period for Nokia, which acquired several key players in the nascent mobile technology sphere. After the Mobira Senator car phone in 1982, Nokia's first mobile phone was the Mobira Cityman 900 in 1987. This was followed by two decades of innovation, followed by ten years of decline, as Nokia shaped and reshaped the mobile form factor, and helped develop the networks, software, and protocols that are still used today.
Although Aalto University curated 700 exhibits, the actual repository consists of around 20,000 files, amounting to around 960GB of data. All of this was licensed to Microsoft Mobile after the American giant acquired Nokia in 2014, and following an ill-fated switch to the Windows Phone operating system, it took barely three years before the Nokia name moved on again – now in the safe hands of HMD.
"In Finland, we have a tradition of being open to big data," says Anna Valtonen, senior researcher at the Nokia Design Archive. "The focus is often on numerical, empirical things, but what about people? What about how people perceive things? How are ideas received in society? From a scientific perspective, this is the kind of qualitative empirical material that we need more of."
Via Link"Especially in these changing times, it's important to understand how we can capture the world around us and imagine what we could be," adds Valtonen. According to Kaisu Savola, a postdoctoral researcher at the university's Department of Design, "Nokia was in a similar situation in the 1990s to Samsung or Apple today. These big companies are shaping our lives with their products." The Nokia Design Archive presents this often-hidden side of tech history, revealing the utopian ideals of mobile connectivity before social media.