AllThingsD » Finland

Nokia Loss Narrows

Juhana Rossi and Gustav Sandstrom — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:22:53 +0000

Nokia Corp. posted a narrower first quarter loss helped by continued cost cuts, rising sales of its new lineup of smartphones and an improvement at its network equipment business.

The Espoo, Finland-based company said its net loss in the quarter shrank to €272 million ($354.4 million) from €928 million a year earlier, beating analysts’ expectations for a loss of €434 million.

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Top Angry Birds Exec Flies the Coop

Ina Fried — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:00:50 +0000

Ville Heijari, who has spent the past three years leading brand marketing for Rovio, has traded in his Angry Birds sweatshirt for something of the more button-down variety.

Heijari, who had been a senior VP for Rovio, is remaining in Finland to lead European operations for PlayHaven, a San Francisco-based company that helps mobile games earn money through in-app ads for other games. The company offers game makers the opportunity to promote their titles on a pay-per-install basis, and is in about 4,000 iOS and Android games used by 115 million people each month.

“From my experience at Rovio, I see the importance in this industry of cross-promotion,” said Heijari, who left Rovio last week and started in the new role earlier this week. “PlayHaven is in exactly the right position.”

In January, PlayHaven hired former AdMob exec Charles Yim to be its chief operating officer. Heijari said he was introduced to PlayHaven by Yim, and has been watching the company closely over the last year.

Heijari, who said in an interview last year that he had yet to tire of Angry Birds, said Thursday that it was great helping build such a massive consumer brand, but he was attracted by PlayHaven’s business and culture.

Will Bad Piggies Give Rovio the Boost It Needs?

Ina Fried — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 23:04:22 +0000

This week, Rovio let fly Bad Piggies, the company’s latest effort to both build on and move beyond its signature Angry Birds franchise.

The game shot to the top of the charts, but the real question is whether the game will help or hurt Rovio’s cause to prove itself more than a one-hit wonder.

Rovio has raised a ton of money and billed itself as a company looking to be the next Disney and build an entertainment franchise with animation, games and more. It already boasts an impressive collection of products from toys to candies, but all are hitched inexorably to the company’s signature birds.

There have even been squawks about Rovio potentially going public, but it is unclear whether investors would want to see more of a track record before plunking down for the shares.

Earlier this year, the company released Amazing Alex, its first non-Angry Birds title since the avians made their debut. It had a brief stint atop the charts but is now no longer in the top 100 U.S. titles, according to App Annie.

Bad Piggies is an Angry Birds spinoff, but unlike Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Seasons, it features an entirely new type of game play. Plus, in the new game, the pigs are the protagonists rather than the targets of weapons.

The pigs have to reach a map piece at each level and, instead of slingshots, the pigs travel by a conveyance put together each round by the player, using a set of available parts.

The result is a game that, if entertaining, also resembles a lot of other physics simulation titles on the market. The big question is whether the well-known characters will be enough to help it stand out.

I chatted on NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday about the game and what it all means for Rovio.

And here’s a look back at AllThingsD’s coverage from our visit to the Angry Birds roost in Finland earlier this year.

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Rovio's Bad Piggies Shoots to the Top of the Charts, but Will It Stick?

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:03:49 +0000

Rovio is back on top of the iPhone charts today with a game called Bad Piggies, a spinoff of its insanely popular Angry Birds franchise.

In the new game, released today on iOS, Android and Mac, players build elaborate vehicles for their pigs before sending them through elaborate obstacle courses. The goal is to collect as many eggs as possible.

The 99-cent app has already risen to the No. 1 spot on the iPhone and iPad paid charts in the U.S., according to AppData, which tracks user downloads. The game is not yet registering on Google Play. A company spokesperson did not immediately return emails seeking comment.

There’s a lot riding on Bad Piggies for the Finnish game maker Rovio, which attempted to move beyond its core Angry Birds franchise this summer with the release of a game called Amazing Alex. However, while the game initially zoomed to the top of the charts in 54 countries, it failed to stay there. After less than two months, Amazing Alex ranked as the 73rd most-popular paid app worldwide.

As Reuters noted, the stakes are high for Rovio to get this one right:

A hit on app stores would give the Finnish company a boost as it looks to a possible stock market flotation next year. Some analysts put its market value at between $6 billion and $9 billion, nearly on par with another top Finnish tech name, phone maker Nokia Oyj.

Rovio was founded in 2003, and became a global phenomenon after it launched Angry Birds for Apple’s iPhone in late 2009.

The highly-addictive game helped Rovio’s sales jump tenfold to $100 million last year, a fraction of the 38.7 billion euros ($50.2 billion) that Nokia chalked up.

What Rovio has proven with Amazing Alex — and now with Bad Piggies — is that it has the network power to get a game to No. 1 on the first day, a skill any mobile game developer would covet. But whether that alone is worth as much as $9 billion, it’s hard to know.

Will a return to its original hit franchise help justify its sky-high valuation?

Eight Questions for Nokia CEO Stephen Elop

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:00:56 +0000

Saying that today is a big day for the Finnish wireless concern Nokia is putting it lightly. With its shares trading at levels not seen since the mid 1990s, and its once-dominant position atop the world market for wireless phones shattered, Nokia has placed a huge bet on a software partnership with Microsoft.

Today, the company announced two new phones, the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820, the latest in its line of smartphones running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Their key features: New cameras designed to eliminate blurriness and improve image quality in low light conditions; big, bright displays; and wireless charging. It is, in many ways, a reintroduction of the Nokia brand to North America, territory that has become more or less dominated by Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sat down with AllThingsD for a few minutes today to talk about the new phones, and the company’s strategy going forward.

AllThingsD: So, Stephen, Nokia is releasing two new smartphones today. Let’s start there. What’s special about these phones?

Elop: Let me give you a little context. You may recall that back in February of 2011 we announced a pretty significant shift in Nokia’s strategy. And that included the partnership with Microsoft, it included a new focus on what we call mobile phones, which are the lower-priced devices and sold primarily in emerging markets, and also on what we call future disruptions, like what comes next, research and innovation. Then, in October of last year, we introduced the first Lumia phones, the first Windows Phone-based Nokia products. Today is the next big step in that journey with Microsoft. We’ve introduced the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820.

The first thing I notice here are the displays. They’re pretty big and pretty bright.

Just to give you a sense of these devices, they have big, bright displays, but they also react uniquely under direct sunlight. So, through polarization and special brightening capabilities, you can stand out in direct sunlight and continue to use your device. Or if it’s winter, and you happen to be someplace cold, and you have gloves on, the screen responds to gloves, it responds to fingernails. It’s a very sensitive touch display. But the other feature that makes us confident about this phone is that we think it will enable people to take the best photos. I suspect from the device you have on your lap (an iPhone), you’ve probably taken a few thousand pictures in low light conditions, at night, where it’s a bit blurry, or the flash blasts out the face. Our PureView technology, which is a unique Nokia capability, in the Lumia 920, we’ve built a unique sensor and lens capability that is floating.

What do you mean by “floating”?

Mechanically, it moves. So to counterbalance the movement of your hand, or you’re walking down the street or in a car taking a picture, the lens is moving to counterbalance your movements. And we have unique software on the device that interprets it all to give you amazing images. In low light conditions, the hand-shaking is a big problem because it leads to blurry images.

So I take it that the camera’s capabilities are going to be a key feature you use in marketing?

Absolutely. Because when you talk to consumers, they say they’re taking blurry images with their phones all the time. Now you can hold the phone up in that concert and get a beautiful image, or of the kids at a soccer game. Now it goes further than that. This type of camera technology and the screen, they both take a lot of power, so we have a very large battery. But the other thing we have is wireless charging. You can set the phone down on a wireless charging platform, and it charges.

Is this Nokia-built charging technology, or did you license this from someone else?

We’re using a wireless charging technology standard called Qi (pronounced “chee”) in a lot of these technologies. We want to drive the standard. There’s also a very fashionable brand in Europe known as Fatboy; they make beanbag chairs, so now there’s a beanbag chair that charges your phone.

These phones are Windows Phone 8. Will we be seeing any Windows 7.8 devices?

We’re not announcing any today, but the statement we have made is that we will continue to sell devices with that software, and we’ll continue to upgrade them. For example, the start screen with the newly sized icons, those will start to show up on the existing Lumia devices as well. So some of those devices will continue to be sold. We may introduce some new ones, but we haven’t announced any yet.

It seems like the Windows phone market is growing for Nokia, but not fast enough to offset the declines in the Symbian and other lines. How do you plan to address that?

We don’t think about it as one offsets the other. We have to grow, and it is our intention with these devices to grow the number of Windows Phone devices that are out there, and to grow our market share as it relates to the smartphone segment. But at the same time, the other parts of our business, the mobile phone business in volume, it grew quarter on quarter. So there’s an opportunity to continue to grow a market that’s been very good to us.

Microsoft has Surface coming, which puts them in the hardware business. It has yet to say it is going to build its own phone, and Nokia hasn’t spoken of a tablet. But there’s a lot of potential for both of you there to make some moves. In that eventuality, what do you think of the prospect of competing with your most important partner?

It is the case that these relationships are complicated. Now, we haven’t announced a tablet, but if we were to do so, it would be competitive with whatever Microsoft does. That’s okay. I’ll use another example: Samsung. We compete directly with them on smartphones. They are, at the same time, one of our largest suppliers. And so you have different meetings with them at different times of the day. And that’s okay. These relationships are so complicated, you can be competing in one segment of the market and doing business with them in another. And that’s okay.

Netflix Heads to Scandinavia

Peter Kafka — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:12:26 +0000

Here’s the next stop on Reed Hastings’s world tour: His video service plans to launch in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland by the end of the year.

The move is both expected and a sore spot with some Netflix investors. The company’s expansion outside the U.S. (starting with Canada, moving to Latin America and then the U.K.) has been an expensive one, with mixed results.

Netflix had already announced that it would be expanding again in 2012; last month, it told Wall Street that it would lose money in Q4 because of a move into “an additional attractive European market.”

More than 3.6 million of the company’s 27 million streaming-video subscribers come from outside the U.S.

Canada has worked well for Hastings, but he admits that the company has stumbled in Latin America. In the U.K., Netflix says, it has acquired a million subscribers in its first six months of operation, putting it ahead of Amazon’s Lovefilm, which it will also compete with in some of its Scandinavian markets.

Nokia: "Made in Finland" No Longer

John Paczkowski — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:00:47 +0000

Nokia has manufactured its last handset in Finland.

Come September, the struggling cellphone maker will shutter its Salo, Finland, handset factory as part of its global overhaul intended to save €1.6 billion by the end of 2013. Nokia’s Salo facility is the company’s last remaining manufacturing plant in its home country. It produced its final handset last Wednesday.

Sad news for Finland and the 780 Salo residents who are losing their jobs, but a necessary move for Nokia, which is in the midst of a difficult transition to a Windows-based smartphone business.

The company is shifting handset assembly to its factories in Asia, where the majority of its component suppliers are based. And by doing so, Nokia expects not only to cut costs, but to bolster its long-term competitive strength.

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market,” Niklas Savander, former EVP of Nokia’s Markets unit, said earlier this year. “By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive.”

Nokia did not respond to a request for comment.

Moving Beyond Angry Birds, Rovio Releases Amazing Alex

Ina Fried — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 08:25:11 +0000

Finnish game maker Rovio on Thursday released Amazing Alex, a physics game that will test the company’s ability to expand beyond its core Angry Birds franchise and justify its sky-high valuation.

The title is available now for iPhone, iPad and Android, and is coming soon to PCs, Macs and Windows Phones.

Amazing Alex has some 35 different interactive objects that game players can cause to bang into one another to create a single device to move among more than 100 levels. Fans can also create and upload their own level.

In an interview with AllThingsD earlier this year, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said that the company would release at least one non-Angry Birds title this year, even as it worked hard to leverage its popular avians.

There have been more than one billion downloads of Angry Birds titles to date.

Start-Up to Revive Nokia Smartphone Software

Sven Grundberg — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:30:37 +0000

Finnish start-up Jolla Ltd. is in talks with hardware makers, aiming to release a smartphone that runs on Nokia Corp.’s largely abandoned MeeGo operating system within the next six months.

“We are seriously making a smartphone here,” Jolla Chief Executive Jussi Hurmola said. “But we definitely can’t do it alone.”

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Teardown Shows Nokia's Lumia 900 Costs $209 to Build

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:30:46 +0000

As smartphones go, the Lumia 900 has a lot of hopes tied up into it. It represents the collaboration of Microsoft, the software behemoth on the PC that has struggled in recent years to make a go of the smartphone business, and Nokia, once the king of wireless phones, period, now struggling to get back in the game versus Apple and Google.

So far, the launch hasn’t gone quite so well. First there was a lackluster review. Then, days after going on sale on Easter Sunday, the company has admitted to a software glitch and is offering people who bought one a $100 credit in addition to a software patch. The credit makes the phone free to buyers willing to take a two-year service contract.

Now the market research firm IHS iSuppli has taken a Lumia 900 apart and, in a report shared with AllThingsD that will be released later today, has determined that it costs Nokia about $209 to build. And, judging from the parts being used, it’s not exactly built like the most cutting-edge phone on the market.

In fact, it seems like Microsoft and wireless chipmaker Qualcomm are both making an effort to showcase how efficient Windows Phone 7 for mobile can be; at the same time, they seem to be aiming to entice other hardware manufacturers by demonstrating that a full-featured smartphone can be built using components that are about a generation behind the current high end, and therefore cheaper, says Andrew Rassweiler, the iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown.

For example, the teardown found that the Lumia 900 uses a single-core Qualcomm chip that costs $17 as its main applications processor; a phone with similar features running Google’s Android OS, such as Samsung’s Galaxy SII Skyrocket, uses a higher-end dual-core processor that costs $22.

“It appears what Microsoft and Qualcomm and Nokia are trying to do here — and this is being driven by Microsoft more than anyone else — is streamline the OS so it can run on a lighter processing platform,” Rassweiler told me. “The point being is to undercut the higher end phones.”

The choices don’t end with the processor. The phone contains only 512 megabytes of DRAM memory, where most phones would use one gigabyte. And the trend is expected to continue, as the next generation of Microsoft’s mobile OS will require even less memory.

Another example: The Bluetooth chip. Nokia is using a slightly older chip from Broadcom, and not the latest, greatest Bluetooth part. The difference between them is only $2.50, but it serves as another example showing that Nokia is aiming to compete on price.

For Nokia, the strategy seems to be one of aiming to compete against other phones on price, while offering similar features. The Lumia is thought to sell for $450 at retail without a subsidy, or about $200 lower than Apple’s iPhone 4S, which starts at $649 without a contract, depending on model, and costs between $188 and $245 to build.

Microsoft is also thought to be helping Nokia out, says iSuppli’s Wayne Lam, who also participated in the teardown analysis. While software costs are not considered in a teardown analysis, he says Microsoft is thought to be making less than $5 per phone in licensing fees on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, far lower than the $15 per device it is said to want. That would be in line with the $3 per phone price that Nokia is thought to have paid in licensing fees for the Symbian OS it used previously, and of which it was a partial owner. “Nokia is getting a fantastic discount,” Lam told me.

One place where Nokia didn’t skimp? The gyroscope chip, which determines how the phone is being moved. It contains the same gyroscope chip from STMicroelectronics that goes into the iPhone 4S. There are, apparently, some things on which you simply can’t compromise.

My Kid Is an Honor Student at Windows Phone AppCampus

John Paczkowski — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 18:57:57 +0000

Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform has some slick hardware in Nokia’s new Lumia line, particularly the ridiculously low-priced 900. But its mobile application ecosystem continues to lag behind those of its rivals, so Microsoft is teaming up with Nokia to give it a boost.

On Monday, the two companies announced that they will together invest nearly $24 million in a new mobile app development program. Dubbed “AppCampus,” the effort will be held at Finland’s Aalto University over the next three years and, according to its proprietors will not only offer funding, but will also provide coaching in app design, usability and commercialization.

Best of all, participants will retain full intellectual property rights for whatever they create while attending.

An interesting initiative and one that demonstrates the urgency with which Microsoft and Nokia are approaching the deficits in the Windows Phone ecosystem. Currently, there are only about 70,000 applications in Microsoft’s Marketplace application store, with some glaring omissions, like Angry Birds Space and Instagram.

That’s a paucity compared to the more 550,000 Apple’s got in the App Store right now. But with this sort of commitment and some luck, Microsoft could begin to close the gap.

Nokia Completes Talks on Planned Job Cuts

Anna Molin and Sven Grundberg — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:49:34 +0000

Nokia Corp., the world’s largest handset maker by shipments, said Thursday it has completed negotiations with its labor unions over jobs cuts at its Salo plant in Finland.

The cuts are part of a plan announced last month to cut about 4,000 jobs at smartphone manufacturing plants at Salo, Reynosa in Mexico and Komarom in Hungary, in a push to move device assembly closer to components suppliers in Asia.

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I Went to Espoo, Finland, and All I Got Was This Angry Birds T-Shirt (And Plush Toy, And …)

Ina Fried — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:13 +0000

There’s no mistaking what pays the bills at Rovio.

The company’s offices, in the Helsinki suburb of Espoo, are filled with Angry Birds memorabilia. There are stuffed birds and pigs everywhere, and each of the company’s conference rooms is named for one of its hallmark characters.

“It sets the right tone,” CEO Mikael Hed said in an interview at the offices last month, an Angry Birds T-shirt peeking out from underneath his gray sweatshirt. “It shows what we are really about.”

Hed’s office has stuffed birds and pigs, along with several Dilbert figurines and other toys. The only anachronism is a business book, which Hed says was sent to him and he has yet to crack open.

“I went to business school,” Hed said. “I used to read these kind of things.”

These days, he’s more interested in seeing what his two young children think of the latest game or Angry Birds toy than he is in hearing an academic toss around business theory.

[ See post to watch video ]

That focus on fun and simplicity pervades Rovio’s main offices, which look as much like a playroom as a business center. Stuffed Angry Birds are practically as common as monitors or staplers.

The company’s offices, overlooking the Baltic Sea, are just a slingshot away from Finland’s best-known tech company, Nokia. Rovio began life in Helsinki as a small, struggling game maker. It moved to nearby Espoo in August 2010 after its Angry Birds game started to take off.

The company initially occupied an office designed for 50, and expanded to the building next door once its ranks swelled to 70. It now occupies four floors there, along with the original spot.

Its main business is on the sixth floor, with sales, marketing, and finance staff, along with a concept retail store featuring a slingshot chair and all manner of Angry Birds gear. A theater is home to regular employee movie days, while other employee groups meet to play board games or barbecue outside (yes, even in the snow).

The company’s game designers and animators work on other floors, hidden away from outside visitors. The second floor, with the animation team, has a more relaxed, artistic style, with unfinished wooden furniture and vintage pieces. It also has a “no outdoor shoes” policy, so people leave their shoes at the door, putting on slippers or other indoor shoes.

The third and fourth floors, home to the game teams, are more similar in style to the business floor, but without nearly as many plush toys.

Brand head Ville Heijari works near the 10-person marketing team, but he admits he occasionally goes downstairs to the other floors to get help on an Angry Birds level he is stuck on.

One has to wonder, though: Don’t they ever get tired of birds and pigs?

“So far, never,” Heijari said. That’s true of both the games and the products, he insists. “Even some of the small things that we do — completely random things — I think they are delightful.”

Of course, with essentially just one product — however big it has become — the more critical question is whether the broader public will keep feeling the same.

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Tablets That Have a Certain Feel to Them

Ina Fried — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:13:48 +0000

Given that most Android tablets look the same, a couple of companies are showing technologies in Barcelona that make sure they don’t feel the same.

One of those companies is a Finnish start-up called Senseg. Its technology, which it says is just now ready to go into products, lets you rub your hand over a flat glass tablet screen and feel texture that is eerily like a real world object. Touch a picture of kitchen tiles, for example and it feels smooth until the bump where the grout is.

A different approach is offered up by Immersion, a longtime player in this field, which is showing off a new generation of electronics that open the door to far more realistic sensations than the current vibrations or simple touch feedback from a virtual keyboard.

Haptics — or the technology that enables adding a sense of feel to electronics — has been around for a while. Immersion, for example, demoed how a phone or tablet could gain a better sense of feel back at our D7 conference in 2009.

Early devices just rumbled or vibrated at certain times. Touch feedback has already made its way in more limited uses, with the most common being virtual keyboards that offer a physical sensation when a key is pressed.

But the field has continued to evolve. Some of the technology just on the horizon reproduces the way things feel much more authentically.

At its booth this year, Immersion was showing a phone with digital maracas that feel like you’re actually rattling rice. Then there’s the roller coaster video that gives you both the click-click-click as you climb and the “whoosh” as the descent begins. Yet another demo app adds to any music playback a bass track you can feel.

Both Immersion and Senseg also demonstrated haptics used another way — as a physical cue to something in a long list of data. Imagine, for example, scrolling though email and feeling a physical bump when you get to a message from your spouse or boss.

Similarly, varying amounts of touch feedback can be used to indicate the popularity or rank of something. Immersion had a demo app, for example, where users could flip through a set of images and feel increased touch sensation when they scrolled to a photo with lots of comments.

The technologies from Immersion and Senseg have some similarities, but work in different ways. Immersion’s technology uses a rectangular bar-like component called a piezo module, that physically vibrates the device in varying locations and frequencies. Senseg, meanwhile, uses the combination of a custom chip and a special screen coating to create an electric field on the front of the display.

Senseg’s approach requires developers to explicitly write their software to use the technology, meaning it could be most attractive to device makers that want to add a feel to their user interface skin. Immersion, meanwhile, has programming interfaces that developers can use, but also has a mechanism to add haptic feedback even to apps that were not designed for it.

The two technologies are also at different stages. Senseg is just now looking to sign its first customers, while Immersion says its newer technology is already in a tablet from Pantech and will come soon to other tablets. Phones should also get the new touch tech, once the piezo modules are reduced a bit in size.

[ See post to watch video ]

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With Lumia 610, Nokia Aims to Take Windows Phone to a New Low (Price)

Ina Fried — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:20:51 +0000

As hard as Nokia has been working to improve upon Windows Phone, it has been working perhaps even harder to find ways to bring the phone further downmarket.

That’s because it badly needs models that can fill the spots occupied by its waning Symbian platform to sell in strongholds like China and Indonesia.

With the Lumia 610, introduced on Monday, Nokia is not only hitting the lowest price for a Windows Phone but also going into new languages.

“The expansion of the portfolio downwards in price points is obviously quite important,” Nokia VP Ilari Nurmi said in an interview last week at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland.

The 610 is made possible in part by a new version of Windows Phone that has lower memory requirements, but also through lower-cost display and processor technology.

As a result, Nokia says it can sell the Lumia 610 for 189 euros unsubsidized ($252), roughly $100 less than it charges for the Lumia 710, and less than half the price of the Lumia 800.

Despite the cost-cutting moves, Nurmi insists that the core of the Windows Phone experience is preserved, something he said is not always the case with low-end Android phones.

It is true that its lower amount of memory means that not all Windows Phone apps will run, but Nurmi insisted that “a supermajority” of programs will run.

Nokia is also announcing global availability for the Lumia 900, announced for the U.S. with AT&T at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The global version of the device, however, will feature an HSPA+ modem, as opposed to the LTE one being used for the U.S.

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Nokia's Challenges: One Cabbie's Perspective

Ina Fried — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:30:14 +0000

Mika Saaristo has been driving cabs in Helsinki for 25 years, and he has been a solid Nokia customer for almost as long.

Recently, though, he bought a pair of Samsung Galaxy devices.

“All my friends, they wanted to have the iPhone,” Saaristo said. Not one to follow the crowd but still wanting a powerful smartphone, Saaristo bought a Samsung Galaxy S II, as well as a Galaxy Mini to use with his second SIM card.

In perhaps an even more troubling indicator, Saaristo has seen a marked decline in the number of trips he makes to drive partners to Nokia’s offices. It used to be at least once a week that he was taking a foreigner to one of Nokia’s offices in Espoo, Finland, or in the Helsinki area.

Now, he said, it is more like once a month.

“Maybe not even that much,” he said, as we drove from central Helsinki to the airport.

Saaristo is hopeful that the company’s bet on Windows Phone will pay off, but notes that it is more a matter of pride than economic necessity, observing that Finland’s once Nokia-dependent economy has diversified significantly.

(Note: While my time in Finland is at an end, I still have a bunch more stories to tell about Rovio, Nokia, the Finnish start-up scene and my first experience ice fishing. I’ll tell as many as I can before Mobile World Congress, though some may have to wait until after Barcelona.)

At Nokia, a Stroll Down Cellular Memory Lane

Ina Fried — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:34:28 +0000

While most of my time in Espoo, Finland, was focused on learning about what’s coming next from Nokia, I took a little bit of time to revisit a bit of cellular history.

In the center of its grand Nokia House headquarters, the company has a showcase for some of its long-ago devices, with many more showcased in the Nokia Lounge, a swanky conference room used to meet with important visitors.

All the greatest hits (and a few of the misses) are there.

Phones of all shapes and sizes are featured, from the nearly suitcase-sized 1982 Mobira Senator to the first Communicator smartphone, among the earliest to flip open to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. There are phones with circular keypads, phones with square keypads, and a few devices with no keypads at all.

Even the ill-fated N-Gage gaming devices are there.

While there is much to admire about the modern smartphone, the Nokia collection is a reminder that physical hardware design has gotten a lot more uniform — and, quite frankly, boring — compared to some of the wacky designs from days gone by.

An Exclusive Look Inside Nokia's Smartphone Torture Chamber

Ina Fried — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:30:02 +0000

Teijo Makinen grabs an unreleased Nokia smartphone, a product that engineers have been working on for five years to make a reality. He gives it a quick glance, then straps it to a machine and lets it free fall from about five feet onto a slab of concrete. Then he picks it up, sets it at a slightly different angle and gives it another drop.

Makinen, a hardware test specialist, has been abusing cellphones for years. It’s all part of Nokia’s effort to make sure that the devices can handle the same abuse once they are in the hands of customers.

“The purpose is to break things,” says Teemu Ala-Hynnila, director of quality operations at Nokia. That way, they can spot weaknesses and correct them before the products are released. Plus, he said, they don’t want customers to have to protect the phones with ugly rubber cases.

One room over, more prototypes are enduring other hardships. One chamber cooks phones to 55 degrees Celsius, while another sees how they do at -15 degrees Celsius. A third produces somewhere between 93 percent and 95 percent humidity.

In each case, a Nokia worker is able to pull the phone out, press a button and take a picture without delay.

The torture area is just one part of Nokia’s testing labs in Tampere, Finland. AllThingsD got a rare peek inside an area normally off-limits not only to visitors, but to most Nokia employees.

The labs themselves are a mix of old and new technology. One room resembles a 1970s sound studio. In there, enough sound is pumped in to simulate the noisiest of New York restaurants, while a robot talks into a cellphone. The robot is barely audible in the room unless you get right next to it. On the call, though, the sound is clear.

A few rooms over, a human-shaped plastic mold is filled with liquid, an effort to recreate the human form in order to test how much of a phone’s radiation is making it inside the body of a person using the phone.

Nokia is certified to do its own radiation emissions, a key step in getting new devices approved by the Federal Communications Commission and other regulators across the globe. Having its own labs, while costly, helps Nokia save the time needed to send new devices for outside testing, a move it hopes will help it crank out new devices faster.

How the Angry Birds Almost Died Before the First Level

Ina Fried — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:01:23 +0000

Mikael Hed almost pulled the plug on Rovio while the Angry Birds were still in development.

After several years in business, his mobile game company had yet to produce a hit. Rovio’s chief backer, Hed’s father, Kaj, was struggling to figure out how to keep the company going.

“He told me that he wanted to mortgage my grandparents’ flat so he could put some more money in the company to keep it afloat,” Mikael Hed said in an interview. “That was pretty tough. I certainly did not want to be the person responsible for putting my grandparents on the street.”

Angry Birds was in development and Hed thought he might have a winner on his hands. But at the same time, the company had made dozens of games already without striking it rich, and even the best iPhone games weren’t making that much money.

“Just looking at the odds, we shouldn’t take that kind of a risk,” Hed recalls thinking. But his father went ahead anyway.

“I’m glad he did,” Hed said, noting his grandparents still have their home. “Now I am glad he did, but it was a big gamble.”

The move has clearly paid off. According to figures made public and noted this week by a Finnish newspaper, Kaj Hed owns nearly 70 percent of the company, worth by some estimates between $6 billion and $9 billion.

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How the Angry Birds Almost Died Before the First Level

From the Land of Angry Birds, Nokia and Linus Torvalds

Ina Fried — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:14:21 +0000

Once again, AllThingsD is taking a roundabout path to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Last year, we made a stop in London to hear Nokia announce its big tie-up with Microsoft.

This year, we’ve traveled to Nokia’s home country, Finland, to see how that partnership is going and to get a closer look at a company that remains one of the biggest players in mobile, despite its recent struggles.

Also on the itinerary, another notable mobile company: Angry Birds maker Rovio. Like Nokia, Rovio is based just outside Helsinki, in Espoo. Unlike Nokia, Rovio has been on a rapid growth track, thanks to those unflappable birds.

We’ll have plenty in the coming days from our visits to both companies.

But it hasn’t been all work and no play. In just the first two days, we have also managed to visit the site of the 1952 Olympics, sip coffee at a cafe whose tables and chairs are controlled remotely over the Internet, and take a ferry through icy waters to see a fortress that was originally designed to protect the Swedish from the Russians.

Nokia to Cut 4,000 Manufacturing Jobs as It Shifts Production Work

Ina Fried — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:55:32 +0000

Nokia on Wednesday announced it plans to cut around 4,000 jobs as it reduces production at plants in Hungary, Mexico and Salo, Finland.

The three affected plants focus on smartphone production, and Nokia said it planned to shift much of that work to Asia, in order to be closer to its suppliers and speed up the time it takes to get products ready. Nokia will continue to do some customization work at all three plants.

“With the planned changes, our factories at Komarom, Reynosa and Salo will continue to play an important role serving our smartphone customers,” Nokia Executive VP Niklas Savander said in a statement. “They give us a unique ability to both provide customization and be more responsive to customer needs.”

The cuts will be phased in through the end of the year.

Nokia, of course, is in the midst of a major transformation, as it makes Windows Phone its primary operating system, shifting away from its homegrown Symbian OS.

The company previously announced other rounds of job cuts, including one related to the closure of a plant in Romania.

Sari Baldauf to Leave Hewlett-Packard's Board

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:14:34 +0000

Hewlett-Packard just filed an 8K with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that director Sari M. Baldauf, a Finnish executive and former head of Nokia’s Networks business, will not be standing for re-election to the company’s board of directors. She has been a director since 2006. She sits on the board’s Audit Nominating and Governance committees.

Baldauf was Executive Vice President and General Manager of Nokia’s Networks business from 1998 until 2005. She had joined Nokia in 1983 and held several executive positions there, including VP of its Asia Pacific unit from 1997 to 1998, and president of Nokia Cellular Systems from 1988 to 1996. She sat on N Executive Board of Nokia from 1994 until January 2005. She’s also a director of German automaker Daimler and of three Finnish companies one of which is the computer security firm F-Secure.

The filing reads in full:

On January 18, 2012, Sari M. Baldauf notified the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard Company (“HP”) that she will not stand for re-election at the next annual meeting of stockholders. Ms. Baldauf will continue to serve as a director of HP until HP’s next annual meeting of stockholders, which is scheduled to be held on March 21, 2012.

It’s not entirely clear whether HP will move quickly to put another director on its board or not.

Nokia Beats Views as Low-End Shines

Christopher Lawton and Arild Moen — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:15:09 +0000

Nokia swung to a second successive net loss in the third quarter, but reported better-than-expected results thanks to higher sales of its low-end cell phones. Its shares rose more than 8 percent, as results highlighted an increase in shipments of its cheaper feature phones. The company’s American depositary shares jumped over 8%, as results highlighted an increase in shipments of its cheaper feature phones owing to strong sales of dual-SIM handsets, which allow users to have multiple phone numbers. Nokia shipped 89.8 million feature phones in the quarter, up 8% from a year earlier.

The world’s largest cell-phone company by volume posted a net loss of €68 million ($93.6 million), beating Wall Street expectations of a €321 million loss. Sales dropped 13% to €8.98 billion.

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For Data Center, Google Goes for the Cold

Sven Grunberg and Niclas Rolander — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 07:00:10 +0000

Google Inc.’s opening of a €200 million ($273 million) server hall in Hamina, Finland, over the weekend is boosting Scandinavian hopes that other big Internet companies will choose to build data centers in the region, attracted by its cold climate and low electricity prices.

Along with other Internet giants, Google has spent large amounts on building server capacity, to allow users remote access to stored files and programs through so-called cloud computing. In the past two years, it has converted an old paper mill close to the small town of Hamina, on the Baltic Sea coast of Finland, into a massive data center.

The mill was built to produce paper for magazines and newspapers, but the paper industry has seen demand for its products decrease as competition from online media has left many newspapers struggling. Paper manufacturer Stora Enso Oyj closed production at the mill in 2008, and Google saw the opportunity to fill the structure with the technology that contributed to the demise of papermaking in Hamina. A main attraction for the U.S.-based company was the cool Finnish climate.

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'Angry Birds' Spreads Wings

Nick Wingfield — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:00:45 +0000

“Angry Birds” is flapping from touch screens to big screens, books and toys, testing whether one of the best-known mobile apps can become an entertainment franchise akin to Mickey Mouse and Iron Man.

Finland’s Rovio Entertainment Ltd., the game’s developer, this month will publish the first in a line of books, “Bad Piggies Egg Recipes,” with such fare as egg-salad sandwiches and egg sushi. The title refers to the game’s porcine thieves, who become targets for an enraged group of birds after stealing their eggs.

Next up: Angry Birds in the classroom.

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