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Light is expanding from smartphone cameras to self-driving cars
This year’s MWC has been very much the beginning of a new phase for Light. Until now, the Palo Alto startup has been best known for its 16-lens DSLR competitor, an utterly fascinating, if not particularly practical device.
At this week’s show, however, we’re seeing a wholly different side of the company, one focused on partnerships. The event has seen the company announce three big alliances — Nokia device maker HMD, Chinese handset company Xiaomi and Sony, whose component manufacturing division will be teaming with Light to develop advanced modules for its near-near-ubiquitous camera hardware.
It’s a promising new start for the five-year-old company, and one that could help Light become a major player for mobile cameras going forward. In an interview, CEO Dave Grannan told TechCrunch that the trio of deals are just the beginning, with more partnerships planned for a 2019 announcement.
The Nokia 9 is the first product of these deals. Announced at the show this week, the five-camera limited-edition flagship is the product of a module that appeared last year, utilizing the array to create complex composite image similar to the sorts of RAW shots one takes with an SLR. It’s one of a number of different arrays that can utilize Light’s technology to build a better mobile multi-camera system.
“When we started Light five years ago, it wasn’t obvious that we would build a dedicated camera to begin with,” Grannan tells TechCrunch. “We realized that we really needed to build a reference device. Something to show the world what could be done. The idea from the first days was to prove to the world that it could be done and then start licensing our technology into other verticals starting with mobile phones.”
The proof-of-concept 16-camera system was always meant to be a limited-edition product, according to the executive, and it ultimately sold out of its initial run. That number was in the tens of thousands, according to Grannan, though he won’t go into any more detail beyond that.
He was happy to discuss the startup’s future, however. In July, Light raised a whopping $121 million, led by SoftBank, bringing its total funding up to $181 million. It was the CEO Masayoshi Son who suggested the next step in the company’s evolution, moving to autonomous vehicles. While Light would be a new entrant in a field that already involves dozens of focused startups, Grannan believes it can offer imaging systems at a fraction of the cost of current LIDAR rigs — at around $5,000 apiece.
Light also plans to expand into security cameras, helping systems better process the information they collect. For now, however, it’s focused on mobile. And in spite of a push toward a more software-focused approached to mobile camera improvement, Grannan believes that phone camera arrays will continue to expand — though perhaps not quite to the 16-camera level Light implemented on its own devices. Currently the company is working on a nine-camera module.
“Within a couple of years, three cameras will seem quaint,” Grannan says. “People are going to need this approach because it’s never good enough with imaging.”
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Need cameras? The Nokia 9 PureView has lots
You want camera? The Nokia 9 PureView has them — more than you could ever possibly need, really. The latest premium device from HMD sports a five camera hexagonal array, along with the flash and color sensors. The two front-facing cameras, meanwhile, bring the total up to seven.
Overkill? Yeah, probably. But the device certainly maintains the Nokia brand’s legacy of pushing mobile imaging to its limits. What’s most interesting here, is how it all works. Rather than, say, switching between different focal points, the device takes shots on all five at once, fusing them together into one big picture.
Working in tandem, the cameras capture more than 60-megapixels worth of data. The system builds on the expertise of Light (the name of the even more silly nine-camera array) and Qualcomm to process the information into one complex photo that allows for tremendous editing leeway and deep depth maps. Users can shoot in RAW format and edit those images with the mobile version of Lightroom, made available through a partnership with Adobe.
The phone’s design is nice — certainly one of the newly reborn Nokia brand’s nicer to date. Though the rest of the aspects are fairly middling, including a 5.99 inch POLED display and a Snapdragon 845 chipset.
The price is right. At $699, it’s a decent mid-range phone with a heck of a gimmick. HMD, however, seems to be keenly aware that this one will have a relatively niche appeal. The company says it’s a limited edition device with a “defined production run.” No word what that means in terms of numbers, and it seems pretty reasonable to expect HMD to make this manner of device more widely available should it sell.
No word on timing, but HMD says we should expect the product to be available in the States.
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HMD keeps feature phones and Snake alive with the Nokia 210
HMD was something of an instant success when it launched at Mobile World Congress two years back. That rapid rise owed to a few key things: price, familiar branding and its predecessor’s long time commitment to the feature phone.
Those who’ve been following the industry for some time will recall that the original Nokia mobile wasn’t particularly quick to adopt the smartphone lifestyle, but the company maintained marketshare by catering to the low end of the market. HMD has continued to embrace the category by re-releasing some familiar designs and creating altogether new non-smart phones.
While it shares a number with the QWERTY-sporting Asha, the Nokia 210 is more burner than BlackBerry. The Palm-sized handset sports a small screen, surrounded by thick casing and some big buttons. The handset can access the internet via Opera mini, so users can do some light social network.
And yes, it runs Snake.
HMD promises an impressive month of battery life, packed into a handset that should run around €30 ($34).
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HMD Nokia phones are coming to Verizon, Cricket and Rogers
The North American market can be a tough one to crack for a number of reasons, not the least of which is consumers’ continued reliance on carriers. Without their distribution channels, most handset makers just can’t get a foothold here. In a meeting earlier this week, HMD told me that North America is going to be its primary focus for 2019, a push that starts with a trio of carrier deals.
This morning, the Finnish smartphone maker announced that it will be bringing its Nokia-branded Android handsets to a trio of key carriers — Verizon and Cricket in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada. The U.S. devices are arriving this month, with Rogers’ arriving “very soon” through its Chatr brand.
Cricket users will get access to the Nokia 3.1 Plus, which focuses primarily on its 3,500mAh battery, which the company optimistically puts at two days of life. It’s a budget device, of course, priced at $160, sporting a 5.99-inch screen, a middling Snapdragon 439 and dual rear-facing cameras.
Verizon users will get access to the Nokia 2 V, which sports an even larger 4,000mAh battery and a 5.5-inch screen. That one will be available through Verizon stores on January 30. Rogers, meanwhile, will be getting the Nokia 2.1.
HMD’s already had pretty solid growth in its first few years of existence, bucking the trend of an otherwise stagnate mobile market. That growth comes thanks in part to its out of the gate brand recognition from acquiring Nokia IP, some buzzy early retro handsets, a focus on budget devices and its continued commitment to the oft-neglected feature phone market.
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HMD raises $100 million to bring even more Nokia phones to market
HMD Global has been one of the mobile world’s biggest surprise hits in recent years. Founded by former Nokia execs, the Finnish company has made a name for itself reviving the dearly departed brand on Android smartphones to great effect. And it just managed to raise another $100 million, led by Ginko Ventures’ Alpha Ginko VC branch.
The new round puts the company’s valuation at more than $1 billion, according to HMD. It’s set to use this latest round to push even more “aggressively” into the mobile category with its branded devices, “doubl[ing] down on expanding channel reach in strategic markets while continuing to deliver innovation where it matters most to consumers.”
Not that the company’s been cautious in its push thus far, of course. HMD already has a lot of options out there for a business that’s essentially been in existence for a year-and-a-half. At MWC back in February, it announced five new phones sporting the legacy brand, including a reboot of the 8110. The company has also been positioning itself in developing markets, where the Nokia name still has a fair amount of cache, by wholeheartedly adopting Google’s Android One program.
It’s a tricky line to walk, between an embrace of retro appreciation and an attempt to offer innovation. Continuing its successful run is going to require more than just playing upon user nostalgia for a bygone brand.
The question moving forward is whether HMD will be able to reassert Nokia as a truly bleeding-edge brand as it continues to flood the market with branded devices. After all, the smartphone market is starting to plateau, and much of the competition has begun to scale back their releases.
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Nokia 3310 returns as HMD reimagines a classic (and Snake)
HMD hopes that its licensing of the Nokia brand brings in the punters for what might otherwise be viewed as three very vanilla Android phones, but at the same time it’s also announcing another new handset that plays into another side of its brand strategy. Today, it unveiled the 3310, a small “candy bar” feature phone that is a reimagining of one of the classic Nokia… Read More
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Watch HMD unveil the Nokia 3310 live right here
HMD is holding a press conference at MWC in Barcelona to showcase some of its first Nokia-branded phones. The conference starts at 4:30 PM CET (3:30 PM GMT, 10:30 AM EST). Get ready for the Nokia 3 and Nokia 5, two new smartphones under the Nokia brand. But, let’s be honest, I’m more excited about the Nokia 3310. Rumor has it that HMD is going to reboot the legendary device and sell… Read More
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HMD’s first Nokia smartphone is heading to China
Nokia fans hankering to get their hands on a new smartphone with their beloved brand name — and without Microsoft’s unloved mobile OS — will need to go to China if they want to buy the first Android-powered from the Finnish phone maker that’s now licensing Nokia’s IP for phones. Read More
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Microsoft offloads Nokia feature phone business to Foxconn for $350M
Microsoft is selling the feature phone business it acquired from Nokia back in 2013 to a subsidiary of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn for $350 million, it announced today. At the same time former owner Nokia said it has inked a deal to license its brand to HMD Global, a new Finnish company run by ex-Nokia and Microsoft devices staff, to “create a new generation of Nokia-branded mobile… Read More
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