'Microsoft Lumia' confirmed as new post-Nokia company phone branding

It might have dropped the maker, but Microsoft happily holds on to the model

Microsoft has announced that it intends to keep the Lumia name for its mobile phones, while dropping the Windows Phone brand, making the official name for its telephony products Microsoft Lumia going forward.

After announcing that it is ditching the Nokia name entirely yesterday, Microsoft has said it is holding on to the Lumia brand due to the range's "strong portfolio of phones that offer something for everyone", and because Lumia is "now part of a compelling family of Microsoft products".

Tuula Rytila, SVP of marketing for phones at Microsoft, went on to promise that existing Nokia products that are already on the market are not "obsolete", and that the company will continue to support and sell devices such as the recently announced Lumia 830, 730 and 735.

This will be good news for customers such as Nottinghamshire County Council, who not only invested in Windows 8.1 just weeks before Microsoft announced Windows 10, but have also purchased thousands of Nokia Lumia devices for their front-line social care staff along with it.

Microsoft has also pledged to keep selling "Nokia-branded, entry-level" categories of phones under the Nokia name.

Microsoft acquired the Nokia mobile phone business in 2013 for $7.2bn (£4.6bn), and has since assimilated the Nokia brand and phone designs into its own Windows Phone range. As Nokia ran Windows Phone 7 and - later - Windows Phone 8 on most of its models anyway, this seemed a neat fit.

However, since the acquisition - most notably in July 2014 with VP of devices Stephen Elop's infamous "Hello There..." memo in which he made 12,500 redundant - Microsoft has been quietly laying off many Nokia staff, and absorbing others into the Windows Phone part of the business.

Whatever Microsoft chooses to call its phones, it still has a tough job convincing enterprises to take them on, with Apple and Android proving to be much more popular BYOD choices.

Conceivably Microsoft's consumer app store, which has failed to turn heads, is causing the low uptake, but in happier news for Microsoft, July 2014 research by Computing shows that 44 per cent of enterprises would consider moving to the Microsoft ecosystem for mobile, up from 42 per cent in 2013.

With BlackBerry on the way out and Apple still showing little or no interest in the enterprise, any fall in trust in the Android platform could allow Microsoft to slip under the door.