The HMD phones I bought before 2020 were really great (e.g. 7+) - I kept needing to replace because got stolen or I broke screen. After Covid I bought an underpowered HMD which was really terrible - maybe they had trouble sourcing good CPUs?
With Android I find my choices are either buy a cheap shitty phone, or pay too much. It's hard to find a good value Android. At least the battery can last 2 days on some Androids (my favourite feature).
HMD was founded by a bunch of ex-Nokia people. They're based in Finland, like Nokia. I assume plenty ex-Nokia people work there now, would love to know how true this is if anyone knows.
There's a smattering of old Nokia hands at HMD, but in my experience you're likely to find at least a few ex-Nokia people in almost any tech company of note out here. For all its faults as a company it birthed a generation of truly exceptional electrical and embedded engineers, and they in turn have birthed a metric ton of startups in the last decade all over the place.
It looks like HMD Global's headquarters are in Espoo, which is kind of like the Long Island of Helsinki if that makes sense. So they definitely have access to a lot of that human capital if and when they need it.
Fair, still calling it a successor just because it was founded by some employees is reaching. Nokia still exists and has just lent its brand and some patents to HMD. All the manufacturing style, innovation, basically the hallmarks of Nokia are gone. Nokia was one of the biggest companies in Finland so it is no surprise to find people working at HMD or any other tech company.