Anyone in here who speculates what Nokia may or may not do in the future is doing just that, speculating.

The fact seems clear, once Nokia deal with Microsoft expires they can do anything they want.

Does that give reason for optimism? Perhaps, but not really. A broken company with no ambitions is unlikely to revisit the past and a theoretical "what could have been", 5 years later on.

At best Nokia will use their patents and redesign the whole mobile arena and make a whole new range of products which might or might not have mobile phone features.

But most likely it wount hire among the tens of thousands of highly skilled and educated Finnish people to do something like that. They seem more likely to throd along and licence boring mobile products to other companies (as indicated) and maybe even as a Microsoft partner. Their VR cam is a good indication of what they might do, and the Android tablet, two boring products.

Nokia used to be a tyre producer, then they started making phones. Now they stopped making phones and is likely to survive doing something entirely different. The phone market is ruled by stupidity and poor products anyways and its almost impossible to break into it, so its in my opinion unlikely that Nokia is even interested in that.

On the bright side, Nokia might also become a Jolla partner and try to make money on Jolla growing, using old (and new) Nokia technology. Which means we could hope for exciting Jolla products in the future and hope that Jolla could become a semi-important player in the mobile market.

Time is running out though. Some people predict that mobile products as we know today might not exist in 10 years at all.