HMD Global has made it a habit to remake certain classic Nokia phones, relaunching them with modern specs and a refined design. Since it began doing this a few years ago, it has remade a handful of classic phones, none of which is a smartphone. It turns out that there were plans to remake the Nokia N95, and now we get a first look at a prototype as well as design blueprints.
The Nokia N95 was a popular smartphone back in its days. The phone which had a slider design could be slid upwards to reveal its alphanumeric keypad or downwards to reveal a hidden set of playback controls at the top.
Popular YouTuber, Mr. Mobile, decided to revisit the icon in a special series, and when HMD Global heard about it, they decided to send him a prototype of a modern Nokia N95 that never became a final product.
The video shows that the remade Nokia N95 would have looked like the Nokia 3.4 with its cookie-shaped camera house with three cameras and a fingerprint scanner on the back. That sure doesn’t look like an interesting design until you realize that the phone can be slid sideways to the left to reveal a long speaker grille along with a wide-angle camera, an ultrawide angle camera, and an LED flash. But that’s not all.
The ring around the rear camera can also be pulled out to serve as a kickstand. The design allowed for the phone to be propped down to watch movies or make video calls or even serve as a sort of smart desk clock. Cool, right?
Chief Product Officer of HMD Global, Juho Sarvikas, also took to Twitter to reveal other designs they considered. One sketch shows the phone with a vertical sliding design that revealed a speaker at the bottom when slid upwards while another showed the device could be slid to the left to reveal the front-facing camera and a loudspeaker. Other designs that the company executive shared include a dual slider design and an angled slider design.
We also explored a wide range of sliding options. Objective was to secure usability in both landscape and portrait as well as comfortable single hand use. How do you like the "angle slider"? 😉 You get into some pretty wild mechanics with some of these pic.twitter.com/HHLdSCD17i
— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) November 7, 2020
There is no info that the product has been completely abandoned but we believe this phone should have arrived two years ago when the mobile industry had a “slider phase” with phones such as the Mi MIX 3 and the Honor Magic 2.
What do you think about the prototype Nokia N95? Let us know in the comment box.
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