Check out new Nokia devices and more #MWC2023

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona opened its doors to numerous exhibitors, visitors as well as journalists and bloggers. We unfortunately could not be there this year, but our friends from Mob.hr, who host Nokiamob on their servers, are on site and took some photos of the new Nokia booth as well as new Nokia devices for us.

But before I show you the new Nokia devices, there were a lot of new and exciting things to see in the huge halls of MWC2023. A good friend of the site, CSS analyst Ben Wood, tweeted about some interesting things, and the best for me is Motorola’s new Razr rollable smartphone, where the display can be rolled out, turning it into an apartment. Since it’s still a concept device, the surface is still a bit curved, but I am sure Motorola will flatten it out completely and finally defeat the wrinkles that foldable devices have. Another interesting thing was certainly Honour’s new Magic5 phone, which has a new silica-carbon-based battery that packs up to 12% more power into a battery, which means the 5100 mAh battery should save some internal space.

Check out the video in a tweet by Ben Wood.

👀 Wow! Think I've found my favourite gadget at #MWC23 before it even starts. This concept rollable is really impressive and @Moto was confident enough to let us have hands-on time. Interesting to watch the road to commercialisation on this one… pic.twitter.com/EDgkWsOm1t

— Ben Wood (@benwood) February 26, 2023

MrMobile visited Honor which showed their new foldable device that looks sleek enough to compete with Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo although not sure with a price tag of 1599€. Honor MagicVs has 54MP main and 50MP ultrawide, which sounds promising. However, I like the format Oppo introduced with the Find N2 foldable and its FindN2 Flip model better. There’s also an interesting concept phone from Xiaomi on which you can attach DSLR lenses to, that sounds both interesting and familiar, and probably will not launch as a commercially available product. Many tried this and failed. Just remember Samsung clumsy attempt.

The Mob.hr guys were instructed to find a booth with Nokia products, and to my disbelief, the booth was nowhere near Nokia’s newly redesigned Hall 3. With the recent strategy and brand change, Nokia has divested itself of licensed products that are nowhere to be found. At least Krešo and Mislav did not find them. However, the two told me that the Nokia booth looked impressive and they were not let in, although I told them the secret password Nokiamob.

Nokia did a nice overview of its booth at Hall 3, so check it out.

If you are at the Nokia booth, you can even participate in the #MWC23 #NokiaToTheMoon selfie challenge and find some enthusiastic Nokia employees taking selfies with Nokia devices from last year, like the Nokia X20 in the photo :). It’s nice to see Nokia employees using Nokia devices.

All this did not discourage them and I found out that HMD is exhibiting Nokia phones in the very last Hall 7 and the guys went there. The booth with Nokia phones was successfully found and it looked great with all the latest portfolio there.

Those who were there could see the Nokia X30, G60, Nokia T10 tablet and the recently announced C and G series phones. The guys from iFixit were also there and took apart the Nokia G22 and put it back together. Krešo told me that the G22 and C32 look good for the asking price, but the back covers are a magnet for fingerprints, as you can see in the photos.

However, he also said that there is not enough space for the brand and the number of phones on display. The space could be a bit bigger or at least as big as at the MWC convention before the pandemic COVID.

Nokia Mobile also exhibited the latest Nokia Original series phones and showed the competition that Nokia also has a clamshell phone. Visitors could play with the Nokia 2660 Flip, the Nokia 5710 XA, which comes with Nokia headphones, and a refreshed classic Nokia 8210 4G.

I must say that I like the simple C02 because I find that this device is able to successfully replace KaiOS running Nokia originals.

All in all, it appears that Nokia’s new strategy has taken the licensed products a bit further away from the Nokia booth, which is OK because licensing is one thing and a new business strategy is quite another. It’s obvious now that Nokia had a hard time shaking off its glorious past, as Ericsson did, and that a drastic, Coldplay-like change was needed. A Nokia you know, but have never seen before.