Nokia celebrates its 150th anniversary

The Finnish company Nokia, best known in the past as a manufacturer of popular mobile phones worldwide, celebrates its 150th anniversary. It was founded on May 12, 1865 and for almost fifty years was engaged in various fields of activity, ranging from the production of paper and rubber to the construction of power plants. Only in 1963, under the direction of Nokia’s head of electronics, Kurt Wickstedt, did the company's engineers create the first radiotelephone, and two years later a radio modem used for data transmission.

It was this moment that determined the fact that the telecommunications business became the main direction of the company's development. In the mid-1980s, Nokia, together with other European companies, began work on the development of a single standard for digital mobile communications. Thanks to the efforts of the Finnish companies Tampere Telephone Company and Helsinki Telephone, the GSM standard was developed. Around the same time - in 1987 - Nokia released the “compact” mobile phone Mobira Cityman , which cost something like a used car (about 4,500 euros in the current equivalent) and weighed 760 grams.


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It is interesting to note that this phone in Finland was unofficially called “Gorba”, thanks to the fact that in 1989 the then chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Gorbachev, unwittingly advertised Mobira Cityman. Journalists photographed Gorbachev for a call from Helsinki to Moscow:


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In 1992, Nokia marked the next milestone in its history by releasing the first digital mobile phone, the Nokia 1011, whose battery held 90 minutes of conversation, and it was possible to store 90 numbers in the phone book. Pretty soon, by the standards of the then industry, the Finns offered the market a new product - the Nokia 9000 Communicator, which looked like a device from science fiction films about the future. It was possible to open web pages, view e-mail, besides, he had a QWERTY-keyboard. The communicator cost about $ 800, but then failed to become a “cult” device: according to the New York Times journalists, the unusual phone just came out too early, when talking about the total spread of the Internet was still premature, and the owners of mobile phones simply did not understand why it could be need


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In 2003, Nokia released a peculiar hybrid of a mobile phone and the N-Gage console, which was sold in the amount of only three million pieces. It was believed that playing and talking on the N-Gage was not very convenient, but in 2007, Nokia decided to repeat the experiment and released a batch of such devices in the amount of 47 million such hybrids. In the same year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the MacWorld Expo conference showed the iPhone, which went on sale June 29, 2007. In the fall of 2008, Google together with HTC showed the first smartphone on the Android operating system, which could be bought after one month.

Nokia tried to jump into the outgoing train, firing Xpress Music in 2008, but it was too late. After trying to press new competitors with the help of a Symbian update and developing the original MeeGo several times, in 2011, the Finnish company began working closely with Microsoft until the former head of Microsoft Business Division Stephen Elop became Nokia CEO.

In the fall of 2013, Nokia’s mobile business was sold to Microsoft for 5.44 billion euros. The transaction was closed on April 25, 2014.