HMD Global recently took to Weibo to hint at a possible revival of the Nokia N series of handsets from the pre-smartphone era, noting how this Friday will mark the thirteenth anniversary of the iconic lineup. The firm also suggested it’s preparing for a related product launch that will be teased from tomorrow until next Wednesday, May 2. The upcoming event will be held in Sanlitun, Chaoyang District, Beijing, and is being interpreted as the firm’s attempt to bring back the once-popular family of phones. The image that can be seen above was shared along with the teaser and appears to depict the Nokia N9, a device introduced in mid-2011 running MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.
Only the Chinese arm of HMD mentioned the possibility of the Nokia N lineup returning to the market, though the majority of the offerings from the company introduced in the Far Eastern country since early 2017 were eventually released in other parts of the world as well. Besides hinting at something in the vein of the Nokia N9 (2018), HMD recently also started teasing the revival of the Nokia X series, with recent reports indicating the Nokia X6 will be officially announced in China tomorrow. The product family should consist of two devices, the more premium one of which is expected to compete in the upper mid-range segment of the market, boasting 6GB of RAM and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 636 silicon, thus effectively filling the processing power gap between the Nokia 6 (2018) and the Nokia 7 Plus. The other model is expected to be a more affordable mid-ranger featuring MediaTek’s Helio P60 chip and 4GB of RAM.
Since reviving the Nokia brand some 17 months back following its unsuccessful stint with Microsoft, HMD brought back a number of the Finnish company’s iconic models, having launched contemporary revisions of the Nokia 3310 and the Nokia 8110, among other devices. The firm recently fully embraced Google’s Android One program, having took to MWC 2018 to announce a wide variety of smartphones running a stock version of the world’s most popular operating system. It’s still unclear whether a potential refresh of the Nokia N series would ship with Android or a feature phone OS given how the original lineup was already advertised as a “smartphone” family since first launching in 2005.