But the non-complete clause that was in place is up now, leaving the Finnish firm free to develop and launch new phones.
A new leak on Weibo, showing a chunky handset, suggests the company has already started, but don't get too excited yet, this may not be the phone you're looking for.
Metal mystery
Supposedly the handset is made completely of metal and it looks a lot like the HTC One A9 from the back, which isn't such a bad thing, even if that phone was already derivative of the iPhone 6S.
But take a look side on and you'll see it's got a very chunky rectangular design that we'd go as far as to call ugly.
It's an odd mix of seemingly premium materials and a cheap look. But then the phone will apparently launch for no more than 500 yuan (around £54 / $75 / AU$110), so this is a distinctly low end handset.
That makes sense, as round the front it appears to be a feature phone with physical keypad buttons below the display.
It's also possible that it's still a work in progress, especially as an earlier Weibo leak showed the same phone sporting a 'prototype' label.
There's not much else we can take from the image, though given the larger phone beside it it's probably quite compact.
Speaking of that larger phone, that's a bit of a mystery in itself. The leak only seems to be talking about the small one, but the odd navigation keys and lack of a Windows Phone logo remind us of the Nokia X range, yet it's not one of them.
So it's possible that we're seeing not one but two new phones here. Only time will tell, but with any luck we're about to get our first Nokia handsets in quite a long time.
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