- For the Finnish town, see Nokia, Finland.
Nokia Corporation is one of the world's largest telecommunications equipment manufacturers. Headquartered in Keilaniemi of Espoo, Finland, this Finnish telecommunications company is best known for its leading range of mobile phones. Nokia also produces mobile phone infrastructure and other telecommunications equipment for applications such as traditional voice telephony, ISDN, broadband access, professional mobile radio, voice over IP, wireless LAN and a line of satellite receivers .
Nokia provides mobile communication equipment for every major market and protocol, including GSM, CDMA, and WCDMA.
History
Nokia was established in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill by Fredrik Idestam . The company expanded to producing rubber products in the Finnish town of Nokia, and began using Nokia as its name. After World War II Nokia acquired Finnish Cable Works, a producer of telephone and telegraph cables. In the 1970s Nokia became more involved in the telecommunications industry by developing the Nokia DX 200, a digital switch for telephone exchanges. In the 1980s, Nokia offered a series of personal computers called Mikromikko , however, these operations were sold to International Computers, Ltd. (ICL), which was later merged with Fujitsu-Siemens. Nokia also began developing mobile phones for the NMT network; unfortunately, the company ran afoul of serious financial problems in the 1990s and streamlined its manufacturing of mobile phones, mobile phone infrastructure, and other telecommunications areas, divesting itself of other items, such as televisions and personal computers.
In 2004, Nokia resorted to similar streamlining practices with layoffs and organizational restructuring, although on a significantly smaller scale. This, however, diminished Nokia's public image in Finland, and produced a number of court cases along with, at least, one television show critical of Nokia.
Recently, Nokia joined other mobile phone manufacturers to embrace Taiwanese Original Device Manufacturers. Nokia signed a contract with BenQ, a Taiwanese Original Device Manufacturer, to develop three high-end mobile phones, which are scheduled to retail by the end of 2005.
Pronunciation
"Nokia" is properly pronounced according to Finnish phonetics, i.e. ['nokia], with the stress on the first syllable. Also, all sounds in the name are short and unreduced — there are no schwas ("a" [ə] or "uh" [ɒ]). This creates problems for some, especially English speakers, who replace the vowels with schwas, as there are no short [o] or [a] sounds in English. Some English mispronunciations include [nəυ'ki:ə] "no-KEY-uh" and [nɒkki:ə] "knock-E-uh". English approximation spelling cannot be used, but the Spanish spelling would be /nókia/. Often, mispronunciation will lead to other words and meaning such as in a Nokia television commercial in which the name is mispronounced /nakkia/, which means "(a bit of) wiener" in Finnish.
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