Today HMD Global, the company that has licensed the Nokia brand and is to make new handsets under the venerable Finnish name, unveiled its first phones. Unfortunately the new Nokia 150 feature phone (coming in single- and dual-SIM flavors) isn’t really all that new. In appearance and under the hood the new Nokia 150 is simply the older Nokia 216.

Nokia 150

The Nokia 216’s biggest claim to fame is that it was the last phone produced by Microsoft, introduced in September 2016. Like the 216 the Nokia 150 is a Series 30+ mobile phone whose best attribute is its 22-hour talk time, month-long standby battery life and it’s super-low price of just ~$26 retail.  The dual-band 900/1800 GSM/GPRS/EDGE will be released in Q1 2017 for the APAC and MEA markets, both of which are seeing enduring, and in some cases growing, pockets of feature phone users.

Despite the somewhat underwhelming nature of the first HMD Nokia product, fans need not despair. The first HMD Nokia smartphones, running Android, will appear in 2017 – most likely at MWC in Barcelona. Strategy Analytics will be there and will be updating clients on the most important news and implications announced there.