Nokia - The Finnish Mobile Giant

Nokia - The Finnish Mobile Giant: Finland owes a lot to Nokia. This Finnish company has been an integral part of the country for over a century. Originally starting as a small milling company, the Nokia Company grew to provide a great variety of products and services; with a great emphasis on power generation and telecommunications. Eventually, the company grew into the Nokia Corporation and by 1960's, the Electronics division of the company started to venture into manufacturing various telecommunications equipment.

The brand name Nokia originated from the town of Nokia, which was in turn named after the river that flowed in the area, the Nokianvirta. Noki is the Finnish word for soot and nokia is the plural form.

Local and Global Influence

As the largest company in Finland, Nokia provides employment and salaries to thousands of Finnish nationals. The company has also helped other local business to grow through partnership and through sub-contracts which brought in large incomes. While there have been various rumors about bad employment experiences with the company, they are locally praised for being not only the best Finnish company but also for being the best Finnish employer. The brand name is recognized and respected not only within Finland but across the world over.

Across the world, Nokia employs over a hundred thousand personnel (approximately 128 thousand); of which, almost 40 thousand are in research and development offices all over the world. This means that over a third of Nokia's employees are working on creating better and more innovative products. The company's dedication to developing new and better technology has always been one of its greatest strengths. The Nokia name is considered to be one of the top five most valuable brands (with an estimated worth of 34.9 billion US dollars) and is the sixth largest supply chain in the whole world. According to the Forbes's global 500 of 2009, Nokia ranks as the 85th (even higher than last year's 88).

The Nokia N-Series

Of course, one cannot appreciate Nokia these days without seeing their flagship mobile devices, the Nokia N-Series. The N-series is to Nokia as XPERIA is to Sony Ericsson; these phones are the best of the best; combining the most useful elements of all other Nokia devices. Since the first N-series device was launched last 2005, the company has been making faster and more powerful mobile phones under this line. In a recent bold move, Nokia announced that they will be using the Maemo operating system on their N-series devices and that by 2012; all N-series phones will be using the new OS instead of Symbian.

This came as a large surprise since the company has been using Symbian since the first N90i. The announcement caused several rumors that Nokia will be completely dropping Symbian; Nokia firmly attested that this was a baseless rumor.

N97 Issue

Recently, one of Nokia's major devices, the Symbian based N97 got pulled out of shelves due to major problems in the firmware. The device was said to be prone to freezing, crashing, memory drains, slowdowns and other malfunctions. Instead of releasing a patch to fix the device, Nokia has opted to refer people to the N97 Mini instead, indirectly abandoning the N97. previous post Nokia 701, posted by News and Gadgets.