Nokia’s past and what could have been Nokia’s future come together in the evening sun on the Helsinki waterfront, outside a café housed in the Finnish group’s old cable factory. Harri Kiljander, a former Nokia manager, is showing off a prototype of the chunky, half-moon-shaped 7700, one of the company’s first forays into the touchscreen devices that now dominate the mobile phone market.

The 7700, which dates from 2003, was never released. A follow-up model was discontinued. When Apple revolutionised the smartphone market with its iPhone in 2007, Nokia, the world’s largest handset manufacturer until last year, was left trailing. On Tuesday, the company passed to Microsoft the supremely difficult mission of catching up with rivals, agreeing the takeover of its mobile phones business in a $5.4bn deal.

The announcement helped lift the market value of the whole of Nokia to €15bn, which is only a fraction of the €100bn it was worth five years ago. Nokia will keep its network equipment and mapping businesses, as well as a portfolio of patents and the ownership of the Nokia brand, but it will hand to the US software company what was once Finland’s greatest source of corporate pride.