HMD crosses its fingers for a second barbie summer. The company, which has exclusively sold phones under the Nokia brand for the past seven years, has announced plans to launch a Barbie-branded foldable phone in July in partnership with Mattel. It's one of several devices HMD has on the way this summer, which also includes a new retro phone with Nokia-branded features and an HMD-branded smartphone. Finally, the company also announced initial plans for a new development platform it will call “HMD Fusion.”
No pricing, specifications or features were announced for the as-yet-unnamed Barbie phone, but it is expected to be a foldable phone with traditional features rather than a smartphone. In an interview, HMD's global head of product insights, propositions and marketing, Adam Ferguson, confirms that it will be a completely new device. “Barbie's is not the type of brand you prefer; here is a solution available in the market,” he says.
The collaboration is an extension of plans first announced in September, in which the Finnish company (which now calls itself “Human Mobile Devices” instead of simply “HMD”) said it planned to stop exclusively producing branded products. Nokia and sell them. devices under its own name, in addition to collaborating with “interesting new partners.” Mattel is the first such partner, but Ferguson says it won't be the last.
“Are there any other partnerships besides working with Mattel? Absolutely. Are they as big and triple A as Mattel? Absolutely. Can I tell you what they are right now? Absolutely not.”
As for the own-brand phone, the company isn't ready to talk details, but we know it will. also will come this summer. The announcement comes just over a month later 91Mobiles Images have been leaked of a smartphone that looks a lot like the company's existing Nokia phones, albeit with an HMD logo where Nokia's used to be.
None of this means that HMD is abandoning the Nokia brand entirely, and Ferguson denied that HMD is exploring other brands due to a decline in the popularity of the Nokia name. “It's not at all that we think there's a diminution of power there,” says Ferguson, “it's just that, from HMD's business point of view, we have the opportunity to do more… with this multi-brand strategy.”
The company says it plans to “bring back an iconic phone this summer,” similar to its other retro versions of devices like the Nokia 3310 and Nokia 8110.
Aside from the brand announcements, HMD had a couple of more product-focused initiatives to announce. The most interesting of these is the HMD Fusion, a new smartphone-style device that HMD is launching as a DIY platform for hobbyists. Like Moto Mods, but you have to create and program your own accessories.
Essentially, HMD's goal with Fusion is to offer the kind of modding possibilities of a Raspberry Pi, but in the form factor of a full smartphone with an integrated display and battery. It achieves this with a series of six pogo pins on the back of the device, which are designed to allow the connection of hardware accessories. For software, it runs Android with an unlocked bootloader, and HMD calls the types of hardware that can be built around the device “outfits.” Among them, HMD's ambition is to provide a device that end users or even businesses can customize to meet their needs.
“Say, for example, you're working in the medical field and you need to be able to help analyze people's blood,” Ferguson says. “You have a software service, you have an application that you need, but you need connected hardware. It can be expensive and people won't necessarily know how to use it. You build a machine based on this, for the Fusion device, and then it can do the blood test, calculate it, determine if you need to schedule an appointment, and all that kind of stuff.” Other ideas Ferguson mentions include building a case with built-in flashing notification lights or a streaming accessory with a high-quality built-in microphone and streaming controls.
For now, HMD just announced the Fusion platform and is releasing initial designs and specifications for the device to allow potential experts to start thinking about how they would like to use it, but Ferguson warns that these specifications could change as people start to use it. inform about the company's plans.
Rounding out its MWC announcements, HMD also reaffirmed that it is moving forward with the repairability initiative it started with the Nokia G22 at last year's MWC, and that this initiative will also apply to its HMD-branded devices. The company's goal is for half of the phones it sells this year to be easily repairable, and it's also specifically improving the repairability of its devices' screens. “The fact that we did it without glue and all that was a big step for that time, but it had to be better,” Ferguson says. But while he says this time it's “much better,” we'll have to wait for the actual announcement of the device to find out how.
