Nokia Teases “Something” That Either Is, Or Comes In, A Black Box

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, however, and for almost another decade on feature phones, so we can rule out those as potential candidates for this announcement. It’ll still be very interesting to see what Nokia has up its sleeve, as this is the first time we’ll find out what comes next for Nokia’s hardware brand.