So Mobile World Congress wrapped up in Barcelona a couple days ago, and buried under all the folding-phone concept nonsense and 5G-this, AI-that keynote filler, there was one story that actually stopped me mid-scroll. Nokia changed its logo. The actual wordmark, the blue connecting-hands thing that's been on every Nokia phone box since the mid-60s, is gone. They unveiled the replacement on the 26th, right before the show floor opened, and its just... NOKIA in a kind of blocky, geometric sans-serif, no color specified, meant to flex across five different logo "shapes" depending on where its used. Very 2023. Very safe.
I know this is a dumb thing to care about. Nokia the company barely makes phones anymore anyway, its HMD Global that licenses the brand and slaps it on budget Androids and the occasional 3310 reissue. The actual smartphone business Nokia used to run got sold off to Microsoft back in 2014 and then quietly euthanized a couple years after that. So functionally this is a B2B networking-equipment company rebranding itself for 5G infrastructure contracts, not some emotional betrayal of my teenage years. I get that. And yet.
I still have a drawer, an actual physical drawer in my desk, with three dead Nokias in it. A 3310 thats missing its back cover. A 6210 that still turns on if you charge it, which I know because I checked about an hour after reading this news, like some kind of test. And an N95 that I bought in 2007 for way too much money because it had GPS and a 5-megapixel camera and felt like the future. Snake, the actual original Snake, not some app-store remake, lived on two of those phones. That logo, the two hands almost touching, was on the startup screen of literally every one of them. It's such a specific, tiny visual memory and now its just retired to make room for a wordmark that could belong to a fintech startup or a scooter company or honestly half the SaaS logos I see in my own analytics dashboard every day.
Thats my actual complaint, if I'm honest: everything is starting to look like this now. Flat, geometric, interchangeable sans-serif with rounded corners. I get why, it scales cleanly to an app icon and a favicon and a billboard without anyone having to think too hard, but it also means brand identity is turning into this weird beige soup where I genuinely cannot tell three different companies' logos apart at a glance anymore. Nokia's old mark had actual personality, two curved shapes reaching toward each other, slightly awkward, very analog. The new one has none. It could be anything. Thats sort of the point of these rebrands now, I think, and I dont love it.
Anyway, the rest of MWC was the usual parade of concept devices nobody's going to buy, a rollable phone here, a see-through laptop panel there. None of it stuck with me the way a company quietly burying a 60-year-old logo did. Maybe thats just what happens when you've been writing about this stuff since 2011 — the actual specs stop registering and the small symbolic stuff hits harder. I remember doing a whole post here back in like 2012 about Nokia's Lumia line and whether Windows Phone had a shot (it did not, in hindsight, obviously), and reading that now feels like reading about a different industry entirely.
If youre younger than, say, 28, none of this probably means anything to you, and thats fine, thats how it's supposed to work. But if you ever owned a phone where the ringtone editor used actual musical notation and you had to compose your own ringtones note by note like some kind of medieval scribe, go dig out your old phone drawer tonight. Charge one up if you can find the right charger, which is its own nightmare because none of them take USB-C. See if Snake still loads. It's a small, slightly pointless exercise, and I did it for about twenty minutes tonight instead of writing this paragraph on time.
Also, unrelated but I noticed it while writing this: Twitter's been emailing people warnings that SMS-based two-factor login is going away for non-Blue accounts soon. Worth turning on an authenticator app before that actually lands, whenever it lands. Small housekeeping note, not really connected to Nokia, but it was sitting in the same inbox tab as the MWC news and I didnt want to open a whole separate post for one paragraph.