HMD Global owns up to Nokia’s confusing product names, may ditch ‘Plus’ models

Ben Schoon | Jun 10 2019 - 6:27 am PT

The past couple of years have seen the revival of the Nokia brand in a huge way, and the numbers speak to the success of these new smartphones. However, the naming of Nokia devices has gotten very confusing, and now HMD Global has owned up to that in an interview.

HMD Global’s Pranav Shroff, Global Portfolio General Manager, spoke to Gadgets360 at the recent launch event for the Nokia 2.2 in India. During the brief interview, Shroff was asked about Nokia’s current portfolio of products, and he quickly admitted that the naming has gotten confusing for the average buyer.

In 2017, Shroff said that Nokia’s lineup was simple with just a few models, but 2018 saw the direction of trying to have a “Nokia smartphone for everyone.” This saw several different models debut, and more variants of those models. Shroff believes that the “Plus” series is where things especially got out of hand, with “something like 12 or 13 phones in a market like India.” Shroff says:

We owe it to our consumers — and generally everybody — to make sure it’s [the product portfolio] clear. If we have not made that clear, and I agree that we haven’t, then that is something we need to work on better…

We have a job to do there if we haven’t done it well enough, which I can see. So yes, the strategy [for the future] is to make sure to bring the simplicity that we always wanted to have.

Responding directly to the confusion from the Nokia 7.1 and the Nokia 7 Plus, he says that the Nokia 8.1 was actually the successor to the 7 Plus, but that they should have called it the Nokia 8. To that end, Shroff also says that Nokia will be using the “Plus” naming a lot less going forward, if not ditching it altogether, in an effort to make the naming convention much simpler.