Human Mobile Devices (HMD), formally HMD Global, is a Finnish mobile phone manufacturer. The company is made up of the mobile phone business that the Nokia Corporation sold to Microsoft in 2014, then bought back in 2016. HMD began marketing Nokia-branded smartphones and feature phones on 1 December 2016. The company has exclusive rights to the Nokia brand for mobile phones through a licensing agreement. The HMD brand was initially only used for corporate purposes and does not appear in advertising, whereas the name "Nokia Mobile" is used on social media. As it was launched, the acronym HMD stood for Hon Hai Mobile Devices. This was in reference to the main shareholder at the time of its creation: the Taiwanese group Foxconn. In January 2024, HMD rebranded to 'Human Mobile Devices', and will use their own branding on future devices alongside that of Nokia.
Nokia 6, HMD's first smartphone and the first Google Play certified Android-powered Nokia
Nokia smartphone with Android
The first Nokia 5G smartphone, released by the company and sponsored in the James Bond film No Time To Die
The original early 2017 lineup: Nokia 3310, 6, 5, and 3
A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area, as opposed to a fixed-location phone. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture, and therefore mobile telephones are called cellphones in North America. In addition to telephony, digital mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, multimedia messaging, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications, satellite access, business applications, payments, multimedia playback and streaming, digital photography, and video games. Mobile phones offering only basic capabilities are known as feature phones ; mobile phones that offer greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.
Two decades of evolution of mobile phones, from a 1992 Motorola 8900X-2 to the 2014 iPhone 6 Plus
Martin Cooper of Motorola, shown here in a 2007 reenactment, made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call on a prototype DynaTAC model on 3 April 1973.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. In 1983, it became the first commercially available handheld cellular mobile phone.
Dupuis and Haug during a GSM meeting in Belgium, April 1992