Microsoft to kill ‘Nokia’ and ‘Windows Phone’ brands

Microsoft to kill ‘Nokia’ and ‘Windows Phone’ brands

Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile division earlier this year, and with that it bought the rights to the ‘Lumia’ and ‘Asha’ brand names. Since Nokia still lives on as a company that no longer makes phones, Microsoft does not have ownership of the brand, but they do have the rights to use the ‘Nokia’ until the end of next year. As such, it’s no surprise that they will be phasing out the Nokia branding from their mobile phones. Infact, the Lumia 730 and the Lumia 830 will apparently be the last smartphones to bear the Nokia brand name on the device.

Microsoft apparently does not have any new Lumia phones in the pipeline to be released until next year anyway, so we might see the first Microsoft-branded smartphones announced at MWC in February 2015, possibly running the ‘Threshold’ update that is supposed to unify Windows on a desktop and Windows Phone.

To that effect, Microsoft will also be rebranding ‘Windows Phone’ and phasing out the ‘phone’ part to just ‘Windows’ instead. Personally, I’ve noticed this happening for a while now, with recent ads only referring to windows phones as running ‘Windows’ and the new HTC Windows Phone called ‘HTC One M8 for Windows’ officially. As annoying and confusing a rebrand as that might be, according to our own sources, this is correct. There is no concrete information about what name Microsoft will be using for their S40, Asha and Nokia X phones though.

The hope is that the ‘Threshold’ update unifies Windows, both on desktop and Phone (or RT) versions, resulting in just one OS that has a desktop and mobile version, all sharing one single layer for modern apps. So in effect, you’d have the same experience as your PC, on your phone, or tablet.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. Microsoft has always been terrible at branding (see MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger, Bing apps to MSN apps, Metro Apps to modern UI apps, etc), but this all had to happen. I still have immense worries about the confusion that dropping ‘phone’ from Windows Phone will cause for general consumers though. Hopefully someone at Microsoft knows what they’re doing.