Nokia rumoured to be launching a new flagship this year

(Pocket-lint) – Rumours have picked up pace over the last 24 hours suggesting Nokia is planning a new flagship phone launch at some point later this year. 

With the company having focused primarily on the lower end and mid-range market since re-entering the smartphone space, it would come as something of a surprise if the speculation is true. 

In a since-deleted post on Weibo – seen and reported by multiple sites – Nokia’s project manager in China, Zhang Yucheng, stated the company would host a special launch event around China’s “Single’s Day” on 11 November. 

There was no further detail on what the phone might be, except that it’s 5G. And the post, according to reports, never used the term “flagship” either. 

The speculation here is that because there’s a special event taking place, it would have to be a notable smartphone launch, and therefore a flagship. 

Suggestions have been made that it could be the Nokia X60 or X50, fitting in with the new naming scheme at the higher end of HMD’s portfolio. 

One thing worth considering however, is that this post (which is now gone) was shared specifically for the China market, and it could well be that whatever launch happens has no impact on HMD’s plans outside of China. 

Nokia’s last flagship phone was the Nokia 9 PureView launched a good couple of years ago in 2019, and since then it hasn’t really made any effort to follow it up. 

Still, when it launched the new C-series, G-series and X-series phones, it made it clear that each series would get new models and that its simplified naming scheme would make it easy to place the phones in their categories. 

That means, if Nokia does launch the rumoured X50 and X60, it would make sense that they would be more powerful than the X10 and X20.  And that means they could be more like the top level flagships in performance.