Microsoft announced the Lumia 535 today, and the thing that actually stopped me mid-scroll wasn't the specs. It's a fine phone for what it is, a $110 dual-SIM budget handset aimed mostly at India and other emerging markets, 5-inch screen, 5MP front camera they're marketing hard as a "selfie" feature because apparently that's a word we're all using now. What got me is the box. There's no Nokia on it anywhere. This is just a Microsoft Lumia. Full stop.
I know, I know, this has been coming since last spring when the Nokia devices deal actually closed. But seeing it in writing, in a press release, on a product that's shipping in a few weeks, hit different than the acquisition news did back in April. That was a business story. This is a "the phone company that made the phone I had in ninth grade doesn't get to have its name on phones anymore" story, and those hit different.
I had a Nokia 3310 for I think three straight years starting around 2001. Not because it was cool (it was not, even then) but because my parents wouldn't buy me a new one and the thing simply refused to die. I dropped it down a flight of concrete stairs once, watched it skitter apart into three pieces, picked up the pieces, snapped the battery back in, and it worked. I'm honestly not sure any phone I've owned since has felt as sturdy, including the iPhone 5 sitting on my desk right now with a hairline crack across the corner from a fall onto carpet, which is a much softer landing than concrete stairs and yet here we are.
So there's something a little sad about watching the name get quietly retired off the low end of the lineup while Microsoft keeps the Windows Phone branding front and center. I get why they're doing it. Windows Phone is the thing they're actually trying to sell as a platform, and "Nokia" was starting to read like a legacy tag nobody under twenty-five had strong feelings about anyway. Still. Feels like watching someone paint over a mural because the building has new owners now, even if the new owners are being perfectly reasonable about it.
Windows Phone itself I still think is underrated, for what that's worth, which admittedly isn't much since approximately nobody I know uses one. The tile interface actually makes sense to me in a way iOS's grid of identical squares doesn't, and Here Maps was doing offline turn-by-turn navigation before Google Maps could reliably do that at all. But market share is market share, and a $110 price point aimed at first-time smartphone buyers in markets where a lot of people are still on feature phones is a much more honest strategy than trying to out-flagship Samsung and Apple, which Nokia tried for years with the Lumia 920 and 1020 and mostly just burned cash doing it.
Separate thing, barely related, but it's eating at me today: tomorrow ESA is supposedly sending Philae down to try to land on a comet. An actual comet, 67P, moving at something like 40,000 miles an hour, and they're going to attempt to put a small robot fridge-sized lander on its surface using harpoons. I've had the livestream page open in a tab since this morning just in case something happens early. It probably won't land until the afternoon at the earliest going by the timelines I've seen floating around, but I'm not closing that tab. If it works it's one of those things I want to say I watched happen live, the way people talk about watching the moon landing, except this one I get to actually witness instead of hearing about it secondhand from my dad.
Anyway. New phone, old name gone, comet landing maybe happening tomorrow. Wednesday, in other words.