Nokia Licensing Its Brand To Foxconn To Manufacture N1 Tablet

Nokia’s trying new things in order to survive, and not be forgotten

The Finland-based company Nokia is looking to enter, nay, stay in the consumer electronics market with the launch of a new tablet — the Nokia N1, which they announced recently at the Slush conference in Finland.

After the acquisition of their devices and services business by Microsoft, Nokia is not authorized to manufacture mobile phones till after the end of 2015. So, to stay in people’s recall and to capitalize on their brand name, Nokia decided to take the licensing business model for a while, by initiating a partnership with Foxconn, to make and manage a tablet device.

This is a landmark arrangement on many counts.

Taiwan-based Foxconn builds hardware for a lot of companies, including Apple’s iPhone, however the Nokia deal seems a bit off-the-road travelled by them. With an Apple product, the sales, marketing and the customer care support is taken care of by the California-based tech giant itself. Hence the customers never interface with Foxconn at all.

In the business model for the Nokia N1, the sales, distribution and customer care support will all be handled by Foxconn! Nokia will simply set, implement and monitor strict quality protocols with respect to the manufacture of the tablet, and Foxconn will adhere to these designs and standard specifications provided by Nokia.

Another point of novelty is that this is the first time a handset brand is licensing their brand name for a fee. No, its not the same as what Google does with its Nexus brand name.

Third of course, is that the Nokia N1 is the first consumer device launched in the market after the Lumia and Asha series were acquired by Microsoft.

Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies, told Financial Times that the Nokia N1 tablet would be “as good as Apple’s iPad mini, but cost less” and added, “We will go beyond tablets for sure … We will be looking at going into the cell phone licensing business post-Microsoft rights”.
This clearly provides some light on the ambitious plans of Mr. Haidamus to rebuild Nokia as a leading producer of technology.

So what is the N1 going to be like? Has Nokia continued its trademark recipe?

Well, it all looks quite good actually.

Externally, Nokia’s thankfully given up on their staple polycarbonate container-like approach. The tablet comes in a premium­-looking unibody aluminium enclosure (which seems to be inspired from the iPad).

Internally, the Nokia N1 features a 7.9-­inch IPS LCD display with a 2048x1536 resolution — which is fairly good. It’s not retina but its still very respectable.
Power comes from a 2.3 GHz Intel Atom 64­-bit processor, 533MHz PowerVR G6430 graphics (which is largely the same as Apple’s A7 chip), mated with 2 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM. It comes with 32 gigabytes of storage.

The Nokia N1 tablet is stated to provide an splendid battery life of 9 hours.

Two things that make or break any smart device today — the OS and the App ecosystem. So, Nokia once again played with their toy box and came up with a new approach. The N1 has a built-in Nokia Z launcher (which rides on Android OS). And its not a passive framework. It supposedly passively learns the user’s habits and uses that information to display apps used most frequently and promotes them, making it easier and much faster for the user to get to the app they are looking for. Over the period of time, the launcher will have the ability to highlight applications used most frequently based on the location and by the time of day.

Nokia’s obviously spent a lot of time clearing their head post-Microsoft. They seem to have distilled a long-term strategy for its new (slimmed down) avtar, and it’s brand, and centred those around their customers! They seem to be emulating Apple in not only hardware design, but also its extremely tightly governed ecosystem driven solely by customer-experience while interacting with their devices and services.

Why do we at Chip-Monks say that?

Besides the Nokia brand and the industrial design, Nokia has created the Z launcher layer and licensed it to Foxconn by Nokia. This clearly signifies that Nokia has recognised the implicit concerns of Android-customers who wish to stay away from cheap products and crowded interfaces (that are the common casualties of the low-licence cost Android marketplace).

We see this as extremely astute business acumen. Nokia clearly don’t want to fade away into the shadowy backrooms of “enterprise services” or “telephony network providers”. Once their dominion is cemented in the market (via this tight brand licensing approach), we anticipate Nokia would aim to get back into the extremely lucrative smartphone OEM club once the prohibition elapses.

It’s going to be extremely interesting to see how the once most-successful handset manufacturer emerges from its cocoon, especially with this new customer-centric avatar.

Watch this space.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.