Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

The Old, Innovative Nokia Is Back

Its new virtual-reality camera is a bold gamble.

July 29, 2015 at 7:31 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

This might not look silly by 2020.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Soon after Microsoft wrote off the entire value of the handset business it had acquired from Nokia, the Finnish company is unexpectedly back with an innovative consumer product.

Nokia Ozo, a sphere with camera lenses protruding from it, is refreshingly out of left field. It's billed as "the first commercially available virtual reality (VR) camera designed and built for professional content creators and the first in a planned portfolio of digital media solutions." Nokia -- or any company -- has never made anything like it. And it's designed and made in Finland.