Kiran Upadhyay

Nokia has announced that it plans to move ahead with the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, less than one day after confirming that the two companies were discussing a deal. Nokia will pay $16.6 billion in shares for the rival telecom equipment maker. The merger is expected to close in the first half of next year. The marriage of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent will strengthen its position against rivals like Ericsson, Samsung, and Huawei, though the consolidation means that carriers now have fewer options when purchasing equipment. On the other hand, the synergies between Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent may allow it to cut research and development costs and deploy new services, including 5G infrastructure, more quickly. Despite concerns about antitrust concerns, the deal already has the backing of the French government. In a statement, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes said “This transaction comes at the right time to strengthen the European technology industry. We believe our customers will b

Nokia is getting back into hardware after selling its handset division to Microsoft, but its re-entry into the gadgets market doesn’t look like it’s going to be a phone. The Finnish company tweeted out a teaser for an announcement it’s making November 18, which included a photo of a device that looks quite a big like an Apple TV, or some kind of streaming set-top box. It could just as easily be a box with the Nokia logo on top that contains something else entirely within. Some on Twitter are also speculating that it could potentially be a Nokia set-top device running Android TV, akin to the Nexus Player just launched by Google to premiere the platform for consumers. The company has discussed its willingness to license the Nokia brand to new third-party hardware devices, and it also aims to begin building new and innovative hardware through a kind of rapid prototyping skunkworks it established post-Microsoft sale. Nokia can’t put its brand on smartphones until the end of 2016, how