Elop predicted the launch in an earnings call on Thursday, after the release of Nokia’s results for the first quarter of the year. He said to “expect to see another hero move” during the quarter – a reference to the strategy of arranging strong promotion with a particular carrier, as happened with the Lumia 900 and AT&T last year.

All the rumors point to this hero phone being the Verizon Lumia 928. The Financial Times has also reported that Nokia will soon launch a large-screened Lumia to rival Samsung’s Galaxy Note II, as well as a Lumia phone with the high-quality camera of the Symbian-toting Pureview.

“The next hero move in the U.S. kicks off a season of new product introductions,” Elop added. “We have a lot of juice ahead as it relates to the Lumia product line.”

Elop also addressed falling sales of Nokia’s most low-end “smartphone” line, the full-touch Asha range, noting how the Lumia 520 demonstrated the company’s intention of “driving lower and lower with Lumia products as well”.

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The company’s devices and services division managed to eke out a profit of €4 million ($5.2 million) in the first quarter of 2013, if you ignore “special items” during the quarter (namely, a €72 million restructuring charge, a €27 million boost from a cartel claim settlement and a €1 million hit associated with the purchases of Novarra, MetaCarta and Motally). That’s up from a €126 million loss in the same quarter of 2012, based on the same non-IFRS terms.

However, earnings per share were still -€0.02 for the quarter. That’s a loss of $0.03 per share, slightly better than analysts’ predictions of a $0.05 per-share loss, and significantly better than the $0.10 per-share loss in Q1 2012.

But let’s look at handset sales.

Nokia sold 11.1 million smartphones in the quarter — that’s 5.6 million Lumias (up from 4.4 million in the previous quarter), 0.5 million Symbian smartphones (down from 2.2 million in the previous quarter) and 5 million Series 40-based Asha full-touch devices (down from 9.3 million in Q4 2012, which is probably a combination of seasonality and the rise of cheap Androids in the emerging markets). Nokia CEO Stephen Elop noted in an earnings call that two-thirds of the Lumia sales in Q1 2013 were running Windows Phone 8 while the rest of Lumia sales were phones that run older Windows Phone software.

The average selling price of a Nokia “smart device” is up 34 percent year-on-year, from €143 to €191. This has helped the devices and services division hit underlying profitability for the second quarter in a row – overall, the group has now been profitable for an extra quarter on top of that.

Here’s what Elop said in a statement:

“At the highest level, we are pleased that Nokia Group achieved underlying operating profitability for the third quarter in a row. While operating in a highly competitive environment, Nokia is executing our strategy with urgency and managing our costs very well.”

For the second quarter of this year, Nokia predicted a slight worsening of its devices and services operating margin from -1.5 percent to -2 percent, citing the reason as “competitive industry dynamics continuing to negatively affect the Mobile Phones and Smart Devices business units”.

In short, the turnaround remains far from complete, and Nokia still has to prove itself with the Lumia range. Perhaps the large-screen Lumia smartphone rumored by the FT on Wednesday might help. I imagine the lower-priced Lumias announced in February will also provide a boost.

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In a roundtable Q&A at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Elop said that tablets may fit into Nokia’s mobile-centric strategy, but he seemed to be more thoughtful than decisive on the matter. He noted that all the assembled journalists had traditional notebooks. Not so, I said, unclipping the tablet part of my Acer W510. What did I think of Windows 8, he asked. A mixed bag, I replied. Another piece of feedback for his fact-finding mission.

What is Elop waiting for in the tablet space, another journalist asked. Three things, he said: Nokia is watching the tablet market evolve; it is “watching the specific platforms and where they stand in terms of maturity”; and it is focused on “understanding and seeing with [its] engineers the ability to differentiate under those conditions”.

Now the prevailing wisdom is that Nokia would go with Windows RT/8 in the tablet space. Is that platform mature? Heck no. Could Nokia differentiate on it? Never say never, but Microsoft is still trying to get its customers to wrap their heads around the RT-desktop user interface split – do we really want to see further customization confusing people at this point of initial education?

How about Android? As a tablet platform, Android still isn’t there yet — that’s a function of its paucity of tablet-optimized apps, rather than any intrinsic flaw. True, Nokia probably has more opportunity for differentiation there, but it’s an extremely tough market, what with Samsung ruling the roost as it currently does. There’s no analogy to be drawn with Nokia’s work on Windows Phone, which no-one dominated when Elop dived in.

No other tablet platform is anywhere approaching maturity – with the exception of iOS, of course, though that’s not an option. And so, while Nokia is probably testing Windows RT/8 and Android tablets in its labs — it would be crazy not to be doing so — by the criteria laid down by its leader we can make a pretty educated guess: that we should not expect Nokia to launch a tablet anytime soon.

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This will help Nokia hang onto its position in emerging markets — good news for its fortunes in the next year or two. But the really interesting announcement from the Finnish firm today was that it is opening up its Here mapping, location-based services and augmented reality suite to other mobile platforms and to third-party developers who might now be able to use it for innovative applications. This is a much more long-term play.

“By gaining scale, we can increase the quality and quantity of the data we receive,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told his audience here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That’s a valid motivation and, along with the potential new Here services that third-party developers will create, this move will probably make Nokia’s devices more attractive. It also gives Nokia a serious platform that is abstracted from the underlying smartphone OS. But greater exposure for this core Nokia service could also serve as a hedge against a post-smartphone future.

Bear with me here.

The more I think about Google Glass and the wearables revolution that it presages, the likelier it seems to me that “glass” will eventually supersede the smartphone. With the rise of tablets, particularly small tablets, a vast amount of functionality is now being replicated across two devices that people carry around with them regularly. Smart glass could take over some of the functionality that today works better on the handset – particularly talking, navigation and simple messaging – leaving web surfing and gaming for the bigger screen, with less overall overlap.

If that happens, if people have maps in front of their eyeballs more than they do now, if augmented reality becomes more than a nice idea with few essential use cases, then we’re looking at a wave of service innovation that is hard to imagine in the current smartphone paradigm. There will be limited opportunity for hardware differentiation — the quality of these core mapping and AR services will be where most of the action is.

Someone in the audience asked Elop today whether Nokia would bring out smart glass. “We clearly have established a pattern for being leaders in augmented reality,” he replied. “You can well imagine there’s a whole array of new experiences with new platforms coming in the future.”

A vague, non-committal answer, yes. But Elop and his company have clearly been thinking a lot about this trend. If they make Here the go-to location-based services and augmented reality platform, they’re as well placed as any to take advantage and maybe, just maybe, take the lead. The company has reinvented itself many times before, and it can certainly do so again.

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Here are the main points worth digesting:

- Nokia is back to profitability, having made €439 million ($585 million) in the fourth quarter of 2012. In the same quarter of 2011 it lost €954 million.
- But if you look at the whole of 2012, Nokia’s annual losses deepened from €1.07 billion to €2.3 billion.
- Nokia shed 25 percent of its staff during 2012 as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures. That’s more than 32,000 jobs gone.
- The PureView super-cameraphone from last year, is the last Symbian phone Nokia will make.
- Nokia’s sold less than half as many ‘smart devices’ – that’s Symbian plus Windows Phone – during 2012 than it did in 2011, down from 77.3 million to 35.1 million units. That’s mostly because of the collapse of Symbian.
- Over the same period, sales of more low-end ‘mobile phones’, including the Asha full-touch range, fell a relatively small 12 percent from 340 million to 300 million units.
- However, look at the fourth quarter, and you’ll see a quarter-on-quarter rise in unit sales of both smart devices and mobile phones, up five percent and four percent respectively. That said, seasonality plays a big role here.
- The fourth quarter was particularly good for Nokia Siemens Networks, which saw a 14 percent quarter-on-quarter rise in sales to €3.99 billion. That’s not a seasonally-affected division.

In the earnings call this afternoon, Stephen Elop made a couple points that may be worth revisiting down the line:

- Elop thinks Asha can ward off the low-cost Android threat because it has “a lower overall total cost of ownership”, mainly due to the Asha browser’s use of compression to cut down on data costs.
- Remember Google’s cutting-off of Exchange ActiveSync support for Windows Phone – the technology Nokia uses to support push Gmail on its phones? Elop says Nokia is looking “very closely” at “alternative technical means to achieve the same type of thing”.
- Speaking of Google, Elop bashed the company again, repeating his mantra of operators wanting a third ecosystem and characterising Android as becoming increasingly “closed”.

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We’re not talking the glory days of old, but bear in mind that the third quarter of last year saw the division shed an unholy €683 million ($895 million). Before today’s preliminary results for the fourth quarter, analysts were warning that people shouldn’t get too hopeful about the Finnish firm returning to profitability anytime soon.

But then:

“Nokia now estimates that Devices & Services has exceeded expectations and achieved underlying profitability in the fourth quarter 2012.

- Mobile Phones business unit and Lumia portfolio delivered better than expected results; and
- Operating expenses were lower than expected.
- Devices & Services non-IFRS operating margin for the fourth quarter 2012 now expected to be between break even and positive 2 percent.”

Net sales within Devices & Services totalled €3.9 billion for the quarter. The biggest sellers were, unsurprisingly, the really low-end Series 40 phones, which sold 70.3 million units. However, the company also sold 15.9 million smartphones: 9.3 million Asha full-touch handsets, 2.2 million Symbian smartphones and a cool 4.4 million Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones.

Better-than-expected sales of Lumias and low-end devices were only part of the picture, though – lower-than-expected operating expenses also helped.

Nokia Siemens Networks also beat expectations in the fourth quarter, achieving underlying profitability for the third consecutive quarter. That said, “seasonality and competitive environment” will likely weaken profitability in both divisions this quarter, Nokia noted.

Stephen Elop is delighted, as would I be if I were him. After all, this was a man whose decision to bail on the ‘burning platform’ that is Symbian led some embittered ex-Nokians to brand him the “world’s worst CEO”.

“We are pleased that Q4 2012 was a solid quarter where we exceeded expectations and delivered underlying profitability in Devices & Services and record underlying profitability in Nokia Siemens Networks,” he said in a statement. “We focused on our priorities and as a result we sold a total of 14 million Asha smartphones and Lumia smartphones while managing our costs efficiently, and Nokia Siemens Networks delivered yet another very good quarter.”

Finalized results will come out later this month, but the preliminaries have already sent up Nokia’s share price a whopping 16 percent on the Frankfurt stock exchange.

Of course, it’s too early to call this a full turnaround, but it’s certainly a slap in the face for those predicting Nokia’s imminent demise.

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Nokia’s Lumia smartphones have been critically acclaimed as one of the first true answers to the iPhone that were based around a unique experience, rather than a homage (or copycat, depending on your perspective) to the iPhone experience that kicked off the mobile computing renaissance. However, they have done nothing to change either Nokia or Microsoft’s mobile market position, as the modern smartphone market remains a two-horse race in the U.S. according to Comscore’s latest data.

And after Microsoft shocked the PC industry earlier this year with plans to build its own tablet based around Windows 8, persistent rumors have circulated that Microsoft also plans to build its own smartphone, which would throw the “special relationship” between Microsoft and Nokia into a new place. In an interview with GigaOM Tuesday, Elop declined to comment directly on whether Microsoft has plans to undercut his business. However, he did point out that because of the strong bet that Nokia placed in Windows Phone when no other phone maker would make more than a tepid commitment, Nokia won certain “exclusivities” that no other Windows Phone maker — not even Microsoft — has the right to duplicate.

A transcript of my interview with Elop (edited for length, clarity, and to remove all of our “ums”) follows below.

When did you learn that Microsoft was doing the Surface tablet?

I think everybody in the industry, PC manufacturers, OEMs, partners, we all heard in the days before the Surface tablet was released. We were no different than anybody else, it was in the days leading up to that announcement.

What was your reaction?

Well, I have some history with Microsoft as you know…

Just a tad.

I think I understand it, in that Microsoft wants to have the best combined experiences — hardware, software and services — to showcase what Windows is capable of. I think there is a point of view, that either through using stores of their own, creating specific hardware to highlight things, (that) they have to take steps to set a certain bar in terms of what they expect the Windows experience to be. And so to the extent that there’s quite a bit of history on the PC side of things, where they understand pretty well what the OEMs will do, and the nature of the hardware, how that compares with competitors that like sitting on your lap (points at my MacBook Air), (they) need to make sure the bar is pretty well set.

On the phone side of things, we’re particularly proud of the fact that with the devices we’re introducing, like the Lumia 900 at CES a year ago, we’re winning awards like best of show, saying this is the best that’s being done. On the phone side, there’s a bit of a different pattern there, particularly given the close relationship with Microsoft and Nokia.

Well there has been several reports today that suggest Microsoft is in fact building their own branded phone. They’ve clearly signaled an interest in doing their own hardware with Surface, and over the past months since that introduction, have been very coy about the prospect of a phone. How would that change the relationship?

The way I think about that, I don’t think it changes the relationship. It’s incumbent upon us at all points in time to build the world’s most innovative smartphones. Which is what we believe we’ve done, for example, with the Lumia 920. That’s something that’s done based on years and years of work, and years of investment in what makes great mobile devices.

A sample photo from the PureView camera on Nokia’s Lumia 920.

For example, the reason the Lumia 920 is standing out so well amongst the competition, one of the reasons is the imaging capability, this low-light photography capability. That’s five or six years of work in our labs, engineers doing nothing else but working on that technology. Saying, “oh, this year, we’re going to do our own phone,” doesn’t allow you to do that. You have to make those investments over a period of time.

You are putting many of your eggs in the Microsoft basket. How do you carve out that space for Nokia, to make sure you don’t lose control of the fact that at the end of the day, you have to move phones. Microsoft is licensing bits, but you have to move product.

The way we do that is that we have defined contractually and in practice, a way we operate to make sure that jointly we’re setting priorities for what needs to be done, to make sure there are certain capabilities or even exclusivities that are included for Nokia products for things that are most important to us. Clearly, photography and optics are an example of things that are important to us.

They have to create an environment in which our work can be done; they have to give us the hooks. But then, the actual magic that makes optical image stabilization work, which is hardware and software, is done by Nokia engineers.

But they aren’t necessarily creating custom parts of Windows Phone that are exclusive to you.

They could.

That’s not what I asked. Are they doing it?

What they’ve done in the camera case is given hooks, capabilities that others could take advantage of, to plug things in. Of course, you need something to plug in, and we happen to have made the investment over the years in this PureView technology that can be plugged in. From our perspective, this is an important point about what we’ve done at Nokia, the percentage of our R&D that’s focused on productive R&D–not plumbing–has gone up substantially.

What Microsoft has done with Windows Phone is create a square in which you guys can do certain things, Samsung, can do certain things, HTC can do certain things. And then the things that you do within that square are things that are unique to you. But, there isn’t necessarily a Nokia build of Windows Phone.

We have rights beyond any of the other manufacturers to do unique things and to enforce certain exclusivities for our products. We don’t disclose what those are, or the extent of those. But we have the ability to differentiate.

We earned that right by being the only company who said, “we are placing our primary bet on Windows Phone.” That was a specific negotiated aspect of the relationship.

If the OEM you’re competing with is Microsoft, that makes the world a little more different.

We still preserve the same rights under the contract, regardless of who is making those phones. There are certain things we have rights to.

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So what’s the answer? The solution put forward most often is a buyout by Microsoft — already the company’s software partner. But reports suggest that although Redmond did take a look at the idea last year, it didn’t like what it saw. Similarly, rumors of a potential buyout by Samsung seem to have been ill-judged.

So if a sale is off the agenda, what else is there?

Here are five other options that have been suggested as possible paths to redemption.

Keep simplifying

One of the brutal-but-necessary cuts that Stephen Elop made was chopping back the mess of systems and services Nokia was trying to balance. After his burning platform memo laid out the situation ahead of the company, the plug was pulled on MeeGo, and Symbian while not quite dead was put on life support.

These days Nokia is shipping just 10 new handset models: six Asha phones running Series 40 and four Lumias.

That’s dramatically smaller lineup than in the past, but that’s not enough for everybody. Last year Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey suggested that Nokia “focus on 3″ products in an attempt to bring clarity back to its offering.

Nokia: you make too many products. Focus on 3.

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) October 26, 2011

Slimming down further is tough for a business like Nokia which is used to supplying product at all levels of the market, in many different segments. But it is making more progress down this route, offloading things like the blingy but incompatible Vertu brand. The question is which three products would it focus on?

Look to the past

Plenty of people think that while Nokia’s previous strategy was not perfect, it at least had it in control of the full stack: hardware and software. For some that means that there is still a chance that MeeGo, the Linux-based OS that emerged from work done by Nokia, Intel and others. The MeeGo-powered N9, for example, had a lot of fans.

In fact, MeeGo is still considered viable by Jolla, a startup of former Nokians who are trying to build it into a fully-featured OS. In an interview with the Arctic Startup blog, Jolla CEO Jussi Hurmola laid out a few details, including the fact that the phone “will offer a developer mode that developers and enthusiasts can use to get more out of the device.”

But there are a lot of unanswered questions here still:

A smartphone with out any apps is fairly undesirable these days, so building an app ecosystem will be a major challenge for Jolla. Hurmola only commented that they believe they have the answer to that problem, but it’s difficult to imagine how exactly they will build that support considering that Microsoft is pumping millions into its ecosystem (such as programs like AppCampus), with only fair results.

And then there’s Symbian: not yet abandoned by the company, and still being updated to service the millions of existing users out there. If Symbian keeps its head above water, does it become a viable plan B?

Go Android

Nokia has already said in the past that it considered working with Google but decided against becoming just one of dozens of manufacturers building on Android. And in a situation where it has, that argument makes plenty of sense — after all, why become yet another Android supplier when you can work closely with a software provider (in this case, Microsoft) in a productive, close relationship?

Except here’s the problem, Microsoft is not proving to be the partner Nokia expected: the appearance of Microsoft Surface tablet PC shows its apparent willingness to piss off OEMs, while the decision to make Windows 8 incompatible with previous versions left Nokia having to rapidly discount Lumia handsets.

That’s left plenty of people suggesting that maybe Android will be the way to go: from pundits suggesting that “only Android can refloat Nokia’s sinking ship” to the hackers who are trying to make it happen by getting the N9 running Android Jellybean.

Get rid of Stephen Elop

Like many former Nokia staff, Tomi Ahonen — now a prominent mobile industry analyst — is bullish about the company’s fortunes… if it chooses the right path. But right now, he suggests, what is happening is “carnage”, as the business jettisons its strengths in order to chase. The answer? A change at the top.

In a blog post on Thursday, Ahonen pointed out that the former Microsoft man has presided over a massive decline and suggested his removal would be best for the company:

When Elop took over, in the first full quarter he was in charge, Nokia’s smartphone unit sold 28 million smartphones and had 29% market share. Nokia was twice as big as Apple and three times bigger than Samsung. Nokia’s smartphone unit was growing sales strongly – the year 2010 Nokia had seen bigger growth in units sold of its own smartphones than Apple had with the iPhone! Now the unit sells 10.2 million smartphones, the market share is down to 6%.

[…]

Nokia has thrown away 4 out of every 5 loyal customers it held only a year and a half ago! Yes, we are witnessing history being made – history of the worst CEO of all time (And it will only get worse in Q3). Pay attention to this, this is the classic case study for MBA’s of the future to study how not to destroy your company, using methods like the Elop Effect.

Ahonen’s not alone. Former Nokia exec Lee Williams is another who has ripped into Elop’s management by saying “There’s no overarching vision for this company”, while former Apple and HP man Jean-Louis Gassée questioned his credentials.

“He has zero experience in terms of what makes a smartphone maker tick. And what is his experience in supply chain management? Zero,” he told Computing earlier this month.

There is one option not listed above, of course:

Don’t change anything

Elop is at least consistent in his messaging: turning Nokia into a winner will take time and pain.

And there were some notes from Thursday’s results that felt maybe, just maybe, like a tiny chink of light. For example the fact that Lumia shipped 4 million units in the last quarter, more than expected. There are caveats: shipping is not the same as selling, expectations were already low, and while 4 million may feel like progress it is really just a drop in the ocean (Apple, by contrast, sold more than 35 million iPhones in its Q2).

But certainly a few posters on my last Nokia story argued that things were on the right track. Here’s S Kyle Davis, for example:

“It’s just their low end phone business that is suffering, as the market overall is shifting to smartphones. Nokia is shifting with it, but it will probably take a year or more.”

Meanwhile Evster88 (who accused me of huffing glue) said things were improving.

“You are indeed missing the big picture here. Nokia’s restructuring is WORKING and public opinion on Windows Phone is steadily improving.”

The evidence for that is hard to see. The market, which had an initial small bounce after Thursday’s results, quickly reverted to its gloomy view of Nokia’s future. But Elop is convinced that if he keeps going, it will click. However, even if he is correct there’s another question: whether he’s got the money to keep the company afloat in the meantime.

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Announcing its financials for the second quarter of 2012 on Thursday, Nokia said it lost €826 million ($1 billion) on sales of more than $9 billion.

Coming after a first quarter that had the industry recoiling in terror, the company’s plan to get its struggling business back on track looks as distant as it ever has.

Here are the headline figures from the results:

Net sales were €7.5 billion ($9.2 billion), up slightly on the previous quarter

But actual mobile sales were down five percent on the same time last year

The mobile devices unit was responsible for €474 million in losses, more than half of the total

There were few surprises in the results, which analysts had estimated pretty accurately. The company’s total volume of Windows Phone handsets reached 4 million — as predicted — and most other figures were in line with expectations. That was partly due to an update issued by the company in June, but even that did not manage to stop shares sliding. They are now at their lowest point for 20 years.

The grim reality is that the rot seems to be pretty much everywhere, with all of the major business units (mobile, location and Nokia Siemens Networks) losing cash and mobile sales or revenue falling in every region where the business operates. And there are costs all over the business too: restructuring and job losses are cutting deep, and even an asset like Navteq was responsible for €126 million in writedowns and depreciation.

The only real bonus — if you can call anything that relates to a $1 billion deficit a bonus — is that the company is not losing quite as much money as it did in Q1. But then compare it to this time last year when losses were $692 million, and you realize that’s little comfort.

From the leadership, the story was the same as it’s been for a while: it’s a difficult time, this ship will take time to turn around, the market’s challenging but stick with us.

Observe Elop, from the announcement:

“Nokia is taking action to manage through this transition period. While Q2 was a difficult quarter, Nokia employees are demonstrating their determination to strengthen our competitiveness, improve our operating model and carefully manage our financial resources […] While Q3 will remain difficult, it is a critical priority to return our Devices & Services business to positive operating cash flow as quickly as possible.”

And here’s what he said last quarter:

“We are navigating through a significant company transition in an industry environment that continues to evolve and shift quickly. Over the last year we have made progress on our new strategy, but we have faced greater than expected competitive challenges.

“[…] We have a clear sense of urgency to move our strategy forward even faster …We are confident in our strategy and focused on responding urgently in the short term and creating value for our shareholders in the long term.”

Elop’s clear on one thing: it’s not going to get better any time soon, and the expectation for Q3 is not good. The question, surely, is whether he can maintain leadership and convince the company it’s on the right path while all the evidence points in the other direction.

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But not everybody is taking their fate lying down.

In fact, more and more of the engineers, are starting to look for ways to build — and rebuild — a new identity out of the ashes of Nokia’s burning platform.

The Verge reported this weekend that a small team of former Nokia staff have linked up to work on Jolla, a startup that’s looking to extend the life of MeeGo — the mobile OS cut loose by Nokia and Intel. It’s pulling together a team of former MeeGo executives to do what Nokia decided it couldn’t.

The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.

Together with international private investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production.

And they aren’t the only ones looking for something positive out of Nokia’s implosion.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on a team of engineers who were now looking for work after building the company’s secret Linux project for low-end phones, Meltemi. Fired en masse when the company closed its research facility in Ulm, Germany, they had banded together to under the name of “Kyvyt” to try and find new jobs (it’s Finnish for “talent” in case you were wondering).

In fact, there are actually dozens of startups coming out of Nokia over the last few years, either from those who were forcibly moved on or those who chose to get out. Some are more traditional spin-outs like enterprise mobility service Newelo, others are more consumer-focused, like Tellyo and Skimm.tv, two different sorts of interactive TV services.

Among the most interesting is Uplause, a Helsinki startup that creates games meant to be played by huge crowds on big screens at a stadium — effectively taking the joystick to the Jumbotron. It was founded by a duo who took the chance to leave Nokia at the start of its cutback programs in 2009.

And then there are those who have turned into an opportunity. Mobile Brain Bank was founded by Petra Söderling — who previously worked on Nokia’s Symbian team — to help mobile industry workers who lost their jobs find something new.

Earlier this month she told local newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that she couldn’t have started without Nokia’s help — but that there are plenty of people crying out for the kind of knowledge and experience that former staff at the company have acquired.

Let’s not blow this up too much: it’s still very much early days, and it will take a few successes of huge proportions to make up the gap that Nokia has created. But in the end, the company’s struggles could be opening up the door to a generation of entrepreneurs who would otherwise have remained locked inside the business.

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