Qualcomm has shut down rumours that it revealed the as-yet unreleased Nokia 8 smartphone at CES 2017.
This week, a video surfaced on the TotalTech YouTube channel depicting a so-called ‘Nokia 8’ smartphone, which was purported to have been snapped at the Qualcomm booth during last week’s CES 2017 tech tradeshow in Las Vegas. Shortly thereafter, two other videos were posted to the channel making similar claims.
But in an screengrabbed response to specialist blog Nokiamob, a Qualcomm PR rep quashed the theory, saying:
“We do not disclose details of our reference design. We’ve seen a few stories rumouring what we demonstrated in our CES booth to be a Nokia device. Those reports are not accurate, our 835 demos were on our own reference design devices, which we use to demo our latest Snapdragon SOCs every year.”
And speaking to TrustedReviews, a Qualcomm spokesperson confirmed the Nokiamob e-mail chain as accurate and, on the matter of the CES booth handsets, said: "They are our reference design devices that we use for demo purposes. They are the latest iteration of the devices we use for benchmarking and demo events."
It’s no surprise that the original story gained so much traction however; speculation about Nokia phones is rampant, as the first Nokia-branded Android smartphone – the Nokia 6 – was launched in China earlier this week. The handset was actually developed by HMD Global Oy, a Finnish company staffed largely by Nokia employees, which has purchased licensing rights to the Nokia brand after Microsoft’s ownership expired.
What’s more, we’re expecting HMD to announce even more Nokia Android phones, with the next major announcement confirmed for MWC 2017 – that’s Mobile World Congress, a Barcelona-based tech show that kicks off in late February.
If the Nokia 8 does really exist, and there are plenty of rumours suggesting it does, then we’ll most likely see it at MWC 2017 next month. But unfortunately, it seems that the handset images captured by TotalTech at the Qualcomm booth weren’t an early glimpse, but simply a case of mistaken identity.
