Kodak is getting into the smartphone business

The days of pictures have come and gone. There have been casualties. One of them was thought to be Kodak, a company that failed to adapt and failed even more when it came to building a stronger public image. Now, they hope to reverse those trends in a last-ditch effort to emerge victorious in the digital age. Yep, they’re getting into smartphones.

For a while there it looked like Kodak’s moment had come and gone, but the past few months have seen the imaging icon fight back from the brink of irrelevance. Now the company’s planning to push a Kodak-branded smartphone, and thankfully it’s not going to sue everyone in the business along the way this time. To be clear, Kodak won’t actuallymake its own devices — instead, it’s going to farm out most of the development work to an English company called Bullitt (you know, the people behind those uber-rugged Caterpillar phones). Oh, and it won’t look anything like the mockup you see above… we hope.

https://www.engadget.com/2014-12-25-kodak-smartphone-bullitt.html?ncid=rss_truncated

Kodak is probably a name that most of you guys would associate with imaging products, like cameras, film, and we guess to a certain extent even photo printers. They are not necessarily a brand that one would associate with mobile devices, but it looks like that could change soon. The company has recently announced a partnership with the Bullitt Group where both companies will work together to showcase new Android devices at CES 2015.

Kodak is a brand that everyone knows, but is one that has been struggling for quite a few years now. After going through the horrors of bankruptcy court and being forced to sell off some of its patents to make up for the debt, Kodak is making a new return into the arena that makes the most sense for the brand: cameras. Specifically we’re talking about cameras on smartphones, since most people don’t have point and shoot cameras anymore but just use their phones instead. These new Android-powered phones will be manufactured by Bullitt Group and branded with the Kodak seal of approval. Kodak is promising heavy focus on both design and usability, citing phones that have become increasingly more complicated over the years and effectively closing out users who aren’t willing to spend the time to use something that complicated.