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60 free Nokia trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Nokia trivia quiz traces the Finnish company from an 1865 pulp mill to 5G networks and the moon. The easy questions are the ones every former owner knows: which country Nokia comes from, the indestructible phone of 2000, the game everyone played on the bus and the famous ringtone. From there it moves into the surprising back-story of rubber boots, cables, televisions, respirators and gas masks, and the 1990s decision to bet everything on telecoms. The harder end is for tech historians and pub-quiz specialists: the world's first GSM call, the first commercially available GSM phone, the Communicator's Intel chip, the guitarist who unknowingly wrote the Nokia tune, the N-Gage flop, the peak 40 percent market share, the burning platform memo, the Windows Phone gamble, the 5.4-billion-euro Microsoft sale, HMD's revival, the Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs deals, the NASA lunar network and the 2023 logo change. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the company, its phones and its executives before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Apple, technology history and Finland quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nokia is the biggest company and brand ever to come from which country?
Finland
At its peak in 2000 it accounted for 4% of the country's GDP and 21% of its exports.
Q 02What kind of business was Nokia when it was established in 1865?
A pulp mill
Mining engineer Fredrik Idestam built it on the Tammerkoski rapids near Tampere.
Q 03Nokia took its name from what?
A Finnish town where its second mill stood
The town of Nokia lies about 15 km west of Tampere on the Nokianvirta river.
Q 04Which three companies merged in 1967 to form the modern Nokia Corporation?
A pulp company, a rubber works and a cable factory
The new group was organised into forestry, cable, rubber and electronics.
Q 05Besides phones, which safety product did Nokia make from the 1930s into the early 1990s?
Respirators
It also produced the M61 gas mask and military communicators for Finland's defence forces.
Q 06Which tyre company was originally a division of Finnish Rubber Works and split from Nokia in 1988?
Nokian Tyres
Finnish Rubber Works itself followed suit two years later.
Q 07Which country became a major, highly profitable market for Nokia by the late 1970s?
Soviet Union
US concern about high-tech exports there led Finland to join COCOM export controls in 1987.
Q 08By buying Salora, Luxor and Oceanic, Nokia became Europe's third-largest maker of what?
Televisions
Only Philips and Thomson were bigger; Nokia sold the TV business in 1996.
Q 09What was Mobira, established with Salora in 1979?
A mobile radio telephone maker
It became the foundation of Nokia's mobile phone business and was fully acquired in 1984.
Q 10What was Nokia's first mobile phone, launched in 1982?
The Mobira Senator for cars
The board at the time regarded mobile phones as James Bond gadgets, improbably futuristic and niche.
Q 11Which Finnish prime minister made the world's first GSM call on Nokia equipment in July 1991?
Harri Holkeri
The call went over Radiolinja's 900 MHz network built by Nokia.
Q 12Which Nokia model, launched in November 1992, was the first commercially available GSM mobile phone?
1011
A 1992 commercial for it used a rendition of Tarrega's Gran Vals, which became the Nokia tune.
Q 13Which CEO, appointed in 1992, turned Nokia into a telecom company and had opposed selling the phone division?
Jorma Ollila
Operating profit went from negative in 1991 to almost $4 billion by 1999.
Q 21The Nokia tune is taken from Gran Vals, a 1902 guitar piece by which Spanish composer?
Francisco Tarrega
It became the first identifiable musical ringtone on a mobile phone and is in A major.
Q 22Which Intel processor powered the Nokia 9000 Communicator of 1996, one of the earliest smartphones?
i386
Running at 24 MHz with 8 MB of memory, it used the PEN/GEOS operating system.
Q 23Nokia co-founded Symbian Ltd. in 1998 with which PDA maker leading the effort?
Psion
Nokia bought the whole company in 2008 and set up the Symbian Foundation.
Q 14Which company did Nokia overtake in October 1998 to become the best-selling mobile phone brand?
Motorola
It manufactured its 100 millionth phone that December.
Q 15What were the colourful, replaceable back covers on the Nokia 5110 and 3210 called?
Xpress-on
They helped Nokia win the youth and fashion market against Motorola and Ericsson.
Q 16The Nokia 3210 was notable as the first consumer phone without what?
A protruding external antenna
Announced at CeBIT in 1999, it also added T9 predictive text.
Q 17Roughly how many units did the Nokia 3310 sell worldwide?
126 million
Announced in September 2000, it has cult status for its durability and is memed as indestructible.
Q 18Which of these was one of the four games built into the original 3310 handset?
Space Impact
The others were Pairs II, Bantumi and the hugely popular Snake II.
Q 19Which 2003 Nokia model became the world's best-selling phone handset?
1100
It was Nokia's cheapest phone at launch and the last to play only monophonic ringtones.
Q 20On which Nokia phone was the mobile game Snake first released in 1998?
6110
The genre dates back to the 1976 arcade game Blockade.
Q 24What was Nokia's first camera phone, launched with the Series 60 platform?
7650
The 3600/3650 was the first camera phone on sale in North America in 2003.
Q 25What was Nokia's global mobile phone market share by 2000, almost twice its nearest competitor's?
30%
A Reader's Digest survey that year rated it the most trusted brand in Europe, ahead of Sony and Nivea.
Q 26Which German optics maker did the company partner with in 2005 for its camera phones?
Carl Zeiss
The Nseries launched the same month and became the flagship line for six years.
Q 27What was the N-Gage, released in 2003?
A phone-handheld game console hybrid
Nicknamed the game deck, it failed to lure gamers from the Game Boy Advance.
Q 28What all-time-high global handset market share did Nokia reach in the fourth quarter of 2007?
40.4%
Its smartphone market share that quarter was 51%.
Q 29What was Maemo, developed by Nokia in 2005?
A Linux-based operating system
It shipped on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and later merged with Intel's Moblin to form MeeGo.
Q 30What was Ovi, introduced by Nokia in August 2007?
An umbrella name for its Internet services
The Ovi Store faced stiff competition from Apple's App Store from 2008.