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.
Nokia celebrates pop culture status with the opening of its design archive
09. 12. 2024 Monday / By: Robert Denes / Generic / Exact time: BST / Print this page
For those who remember the pre-smartphone era, classic Nokia phones still hold a lot of emotional weight - and a new online Nokia museum promises to take us all down a nostalgic wormhole to the Finnish company's heyday.
The Nokia Design Archive, which launches on January 15, 2025, promises to be much more than a gallery showcasing the best phones of all time. According to Aalto University, which curates the museum, the online portal will feature "never-before-seen materials" and "unseen prototypes."
The Design Archive sounds like the kind of epic distraction we need in January. It features more than 700 stories of the weird and wonderful phones Nokia made from the mid-'90s to 2017, when Microsoft sold Nokia to HMD Global.
That’s not as hyperbolic as it sounds – in 1998, the Finnish consumer electronics company was the world’s best-selling phone brand, with 40% of the global market and 70% of the UK market.
Nokia’s cultural impact will be recognised for the first time on 15 January, when the company’s design archive goes on display. Finland’s Aalto University has acquired the archive and is making it available through an online curatorial portal and by appointment.
While Nokia’s impact on Finland is undeniable – ...the Finnish Economic Research Institute (Etla) reports that it contributed a quarter of Finland’s economic growth between 1998 and 2007 – the brand’s international pop cultural value is also undeniable. "Nokia was one of the first phone companies to really focus on design and differentiation, from very affordable phones to the latest high-tech devices," says Jonathan Bell, tech editor at Wallpaper* magazine. "In the pre-Apple, pre-Google and pre-Samsung world, they were above everyone else." Nokia's factory ringtone - Francisco Tárrega's 1902 painting Gran Vals - was so ubiquitous in the 1990s and 2000s that birds learned to sing it. In 2009, it was reported that the tune was heard an estimated 1.8 billion times a day around the world, or 20,000 times a second. Style writer Murray Healy worked at The Face magazine in the 1990s during Nokia's heyday and is now editorial director of fashion magazine Perfect. "In the late 90s, when mobiles were these boring, serious, precious and expensive mini-monoliths associated with yuppies, this cheap, curvy, happy-looking device that looked a bit like a toy came along," he says. "It's pocket-sized, the battery lasts forever, and it looks indestructible." The Nokia 3210, released in 1999, was pivotal, Healy says, because it helped usher in a culture of total customization with its colorful, interchangeable covers. "You could even have your favorite band's name printed on it." Nokia was the first mobile phone maker to support texting, and its keypads were perfectly designed for that. "All of these factors made it instantly appealing to the youth market, who had already cleverly circumvented the prohibitive cost of phone calls by texting," Healy says. Mason, who worked at Nokia for 20 years and is now a design expert at the UK Design Council, says it was a fantastic time for creativity. "We created a design language early on that put people at the centre. Our mantra was 'human technology' and Nokia's slogan was 'Connecting people'. Everything we did was around that. Even the keyboard was curved like a Mona Lisa smile. When you looked at it, it smiled back at you." The Aalto University archive contains marketing images, sketches, market profiles and presentations that provide new insights into one of the world's most innovative companies. Anna Valtonen is a senior researcher at Nokia's design archive and a former designer at the company. Her favourite artefacts are the designers' audio tapes on discs, describing what they were working on. "Combined with the visuals, it creates a more human story. It not only brings color to the documents, but also outlines what the designers were trying to achieve."