In upsetting news relevant to anyone who remembers programming their favourite 50 Cent song as a monophonic ringtone (“In Da Club”, always), emoticons and indestructible mobile phone devices, the makers of the first mobile phone every person born before 1995 owned, Nokia, has gone the way of MSN Messenger and extinguished itself like a pixelated snake eating its own tail off.
The Finnish telco brand – acquired this year by Microsoft – will soon be rebranded as “Microsoft Lumia”, thus ending its rapidly diminishing presence in the consumer mobile phone market.
According to The Verge, Microsoft France will be the first place in the world to phase out the Nokia name, with other markets to follow soon after.
Microsoft paid $US7.2 billion in 2013 to acquire Nokia’s mobile phone and services arms, in a deal which closed last April.
Soon after, Microsoft announced plans to lay off 18,000 workers, and dropped strong hints at taking Nokia behind the woodshed and choking it until its screen blacked out. Now that is a reality. And what a sad one it is.
Them’s the bricks, I guess.
