I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate. Sure, they made mistakes, but it wasn't entirely unfeasible to assume that the mobile phone market had matured in terms of features, and the next big thing was going to be "phones as fashion statements." When you think about it, prior to the phone, everything people carried on them everyday was some sort of fashion statement. Clothes, glasses, jewllery, watches, handbags, backpacks etc. I think they assumed that the phone was like the watch; peaked functionally, but room to grow in terms of form.
And in a way that actually happened with the iPhone. Yes, that was also a functionality boost, but it was also a fashion object. I did a (for university, small scale) observation study at the time and found it notable that some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus - that was a shift, a thing formerly seen as a functional device became a fashion accessory.
Think about how different the target group for blackberry for example had been, or how little glamour the (mostly) cheap and small nokia phones of the past years had been.
Nothing tops the middle-aged man I spotted in the iphone 3g days, sporting his on his belt, screen out and always on to show off the fact that he had all the apps.
Argh, I translated that wrongly. Replace purse with handbag.
It seemed important. Instead of hiding a technical artefact it was presented to outside world by someone obviously placing a lot of importance on their looks.
Where do you see the hate? Everyone seems to have fond memories of Nokia, on the HW, camera and especially their adventurous fashion and industrial design side that's sorely missing these days in the boring smartphone world.
They didn't fail because it was hated, they failed because Apple and Android beat them fair and square before they could adapt to the new world driven by taking a 30% cut of sales of high-level apps in walled garden apps-store ecosystems, instead of one driven by sales of embedded hardware in plastic cases with no money on app sales.
Nokia didn't adapt because of cost cutting. Their engineers wanted to get into smartphones asap. Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred, but it was led by nokia and it was fragile
>Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred
Do you have a source for this? I think phone manufacturers prefer whatever sells best, has lowest cost and highest margins, preferably all at once.
And compared to Android, Symbian lagged on all those fronts. At its origins it was still a low-level embedded OS that was forced to mutate into an app-based OS and it showed in UX sluggishness, the convoluted soruce-code, dated build toolchain that took days to compile, and in the lack of cheap and easy ways for indie devs to develop and ship apps to consumers. By the time Symbian opened its source code and app build tools it was too late to compete with Android and iOS.
dang - if the source archive is the same as the submitted URL, then this would probably be a better URL to use in this posting which is returning an error for me and a number of other users
HN mods don't magically appear here when mentioned (unless you do it three times in a mirror while sacrificing DRAM), but they are absurdly responsive when contacted via hn@ycombinator.com.
It seemed to be struggling earlier, perhaps it has hit some sort of bandwidth quota and the error response is an unhelpful 403.
I've seen that before, perhaps it counts as unauthorised because the server is not authorised to send when the quota is breached?. It isn't correct use of 403 (which implies the server knows the identity of the user, 401 is the more general state for unauthorised. Of the standard responses 503 (Service Unavailable) seems most correct.
I think it's funny how most of the pictures are about people doing usual things (talking with friends physically present, having dinner, having a meeting, etc.) and there is also a phone in their hand, like it's nothing. It feels weird to see people doing something on the phone while also being so present in other activities, and also interesting that some photos from 90' nailed it how it will be in the the 20'
At one of our big Nokia meetings back then, one of the board members, quite elderly, joked enviously that all the imagery in our advertising and internal documentation showed young people ''jumping over things'' while holding a mobile phone. It was a heady time of paradigm shifts from phoning a location's land line in order to reach someone, to actually phoning them directly (call the person, not their location). So much of that imagery was very prescient.
Well, that aged differently, on different fronts...
All set aside, I did always wonder, why the screen has to fold (be flexible), surely a very thin line between 2 hard screens is very workable, perhaps it is even possible to make it (almost) invisible with some optical tricks at the touching edges.
Another point: It is easy to think of such things, it's the manufacturing and specifically manufacturing at scale that is the real work. That's why I think patents can really hold us back, by blocking the market from trying stuff because a company made some nice drawings (coming from a guy that was in a company that wanted to "blanket some markets" with patents). Perhaps we could have had our flying cars ;)
Btw, that last slide is very much like the communicator from Earth: Final Conflict [0], but then again, what can you make with a rolling screen?
The most insane flexible screen proposal from Nokia was the "nanotech" one - Nokia Morph [1], where the phone "normal" candybar shape was formed out of folding it twice with a clip for speakers - you would pull the clip and unfold it into something akin to A5 or A4 paper. Future sounded bright with software defined tactile buttons and the like.
> Strategy2 : Maslow’s_Media Scenario’s
Media for a purpose. ‘Need to Know’ Media. Media not only for Entertainment.
Foreground and Background – I am in control when I can see and access simultaneous media.
Routine and Rituals – I have sensible devices that respond to my daily rhythms.
Forecasting and Broadcasting – I can ‘anticipate the future’, future needs and responsibilities.
> Strategy 3: Media_Passions Scenario’s
Behaviour Passion Experience
Product categories and communication strategies defined by media passions
Behavioral passions:
I’m Social and Share – Focus is Sociability
I Consume - Immersive consumption
I Organize – Media management
I Collect and Mix – Low threshold creativity
> Trans_Life is a project sponsored by the Nokia Multimedia Business Group, to investigate the convergence and integration of multi media products, and develop scenarios visualizing new use patterns and new product propositions for the near future
Still have fond memories of my Nokia Lumia 925. The combination of an OS based around a pure black background and that beautiful AMOLED display put it a solid class above anything my peers had at the time, and I loved Windows Phone 8.1's implementation of the Metro UI after drooling over a friend's Zune several years prior. Shame that Snapchat killed Windows Phone.
I had a WP7 Lumia phone and had a similar experience. It was light years ahead of what Apple and (particularly) Android had at the time.
But it wasn’t Snapchat that killed them. Less than a year after getting my WP7 device I was told it was end of the line and never getting and upgrade to 8. The maps app was straight up bad. When faced with the decision of paying again for a WP8 device or switching, I switched.
I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but there was a developer who made absolutely FANTASTIC Instagram and Snapchat 3rd party apps for Windows Phone back when Snapchat was the must-have GenZ communication app. The CEO of Snapchat killed the project, naturally. If I recall it was genuinely out of malice, as the CEO is a well known Apple fan to the point of supposedly originating the "Android cameras suck" meme by not properly hooking Android camera APIs on the Android version of snapchat resulting in extremely poor photo quality even on flagship devices (IIRC until recently it would simply screenshot the viewfinder instead of requesting a photo be taken).
Lacking some of the most popular apps of the zeitgeist at the time made the whole platform effectively a nonstarter.
I think browsing this gives you a good idea of why Nokia failed. they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit.
they would never have the same kind of focus or philosophy as Apple, nor the willpower to pivot to real smartphones and a proper OS for them
It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.
Nokia, the giant at the time, was designing a better phone. And then a better phone. And another phone after that. Their design and engineering were in no way inferior to Apple's, but they were designing phones, not a personal computer.
I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.
They didn’t sell it for most networks in the USA (because your uncompetitive oligopoly cellphone market had not been shaken up yet and did not have competition rules governing it).
This thing was in every sense a computer. Good battery life considering its screen, IMAP email, a Webkit web browser with full JS support before Apple released theirs, a music player, fully functional apps and tools to make them, 3G and wifi, office file support, VoIP support, Blackberry support if you wanted it. Great little keyboard.
Excellent device that was vastly more capable for actual work than the first several generations of iPhone (you could select and edit text, copy and paste) and available affordably to consumers in the UK.
Text selection and editing on iOS (and iPadOS!) is still more frustrating than it was on the E61.
The fact that we were already using these sorts of phones for functional work in Europe is a bit of the reason why the early Android phones with their “silly” trackballs that could actually control a text cursor did well compared to the early iPhones, and why interesting niche phones like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (that I subsequently owned, incredible device) did well here.
It took me to the iPhone 5S to even bother looking at iPhones, even though I had been a Mac user for fifteen years by then. Even then I only got it because the light sensor on my Xperia Mini Pro died; I would have carried on using that for years, it was fabulous.
I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.
Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.
The number of buttons on N95 is a hint to why it didn't see as wide adoption as the iPhone. My elderly relatives would be intimidated by that alone, afraid to press the wrong one and break something. A single-button iPhone with a touch screen that showed applications in a simple grid format fit them much better.
Jobs' genius was in understanding that the customer needed a rope that they couldn't accidentally hang themselves with, not a construction crane with a 800-page manual. He spoke about designing devices that his friends and family could use, and you can very clearly see that reflected in the products of that era.
Despite all the Apple copycats nowadays, few copy that focus on the customer.
Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).
The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.
The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.
from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
which makes sense because they had these half button half touchscreen hybrid phones
the internet browsing features were something akin to like paid phone numbers which you'd avoid using because it was like special stuff
it wasn't first class in any way, it was perpetually stuck in the past. and as you can see, their entire business model was based on iterating on the same thing in a million ways, so there's no way they were gonna do something from the ground up to focus on a first class experience for one form factor which could support 3rd party developers etc.
It was lunacy business-wise but it sure brought some color to the market and I really liked seeing what they came up with. It wasn't for me, and not for most people, of course. But now we all have a black glass slab. Does make me a bit sad and am always eyeballing new form-factors (ie cyberdeck like). Idk, it's how capitalism works, but perhaps one day technology will find a way to be more flexible and we can bring back some lunacy...
Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.
There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.
The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.
So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.
Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.
And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.
But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.
It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.
Apples ability to force flat-fee internet was crucial. Nokia had to customise every phone for about 1000 operators because as you say the operators had the "whip hand." It probably fell apart because of converting to a "matrix" organisation which essentially assumed that there would be 100s of different models to fit in various price segments. This made it impossible to achieve the kind of experience that could be achieved by concentrating on 1 expensive model.
Nokia was into making affordable phones but there was obviously a point where the ARM chips suddenly got a lot better and it was so optimised around squeezing performance from slow chips that it couldn't adapt. The management was aging and had become very hierarchical.
Despite all of this we were beginning to get somewhere at the end - standardising on Qt and my project got the build times under some control. Then Elop f*ked us. It was fine for the shareholders because Microsoft took the big hit for them but it was shitty for us developers who were trying to get things turned around.
>from how handsets could interact with their network
Yes? Imagine millions of devices spamming your radio and core network to death?
>because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
? The performance just want not there until 4G LTE came around. You could only push 2G and 3G so much. 2G was built for voice, data was bolt-on. Just physics. If you have another brilliant idea on how to solve that please comment.
Well, they also thought it would be great to have a custom OS for every phone model. They had symbian-based S60 in different variations, S40 (or was it S30) in different configurations, some with Java ME support, some maybe not, and so on. Symbian came with different UIs I think, so some other vendor also had symbian phones that were completely different (was it sony?).
Clusterf...
And then Stephen Flop thought it would be cool to go exclusively with Windows Slown instead of the widely popular Android. (or arguably he was probably paid to decide that, coming directly from MSFT)
I can only imagine how defunct the organization Nokia must have been, with this cornucopia of different phones. Impossible to reform, so the only way for them to go was ... to go.
yes, it was the plethora of models even within the same OS - the build-test cycle was abominably slow because you were building 20 phone models at a time - 85GB of output.
The number of bugs greatly multiplied by the variety of configurations - dfifferent hardware and just different amounts of RAM forcing dodgy software workarounds to deal with insufficient hardware.
It was a matrix organisation that was optimised on the theory of making many models to fit different price points and that made it extremely difficult to react to the iPhone - of which beat Nokia with 1 model that poor people got into debt to buy.
They made real smartphones (if you are in the USA you may not have seen them until it was too late).
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
> and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit
To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.
point is they weren't pushing the technology, they were pushing the existing form factor, not thinking ahead.
I could be wrong, but I recall an exec at one of their events on stage doubling down and saying they know better than Apple - that people want buttons (or something like that), which basically means their decline was inevitable due to the culture
I miss my Nokia N9 so much. As far as I’m concerned it (with Meego) was the best phone ever made, with an awesome design that the OS itself was built around: the curved pillow shape of the screen was used for the core gestures that you used to operate it
Ahead of its time, IMO. I wonder how Jolla is gong these days.
In the UK the N95 was the first of what they called a multimedia computer. It was a huge success...the N96 was launched a year later in 2007, right before the first iPhone. The rest is history.
Stupid wiggly and slightly laggy dots with no option to stop motion altogether are making it annoying to browse on desktop as well. Everything is constantly moving and there's hardly any telling what's what among model dots, and they don't have much spatial persistency so you're just constantly lost. The only predictable way to browse is just going thru 755 cards page by page.
Otherwise, extremely interesting materials. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to include later nokia smartphones, like ones with maemo and meego like n900 and n9, even though in my opinion they still very much had something to say and to show with their design, both physically with shape and look of the phones, and with phone interfaces. dare i say, they were quite influential still, and those design sensibilities, at least phone look wise, still echoed for years in later nokia (lumia and even hmd nokia) phones
It's clearly not the Mobile-First Design Archive ;)
Sadly it's a reflection of why Nokia failed - Mobile Safari on iOS pretty much nailed the coffin for the Nokia approach to mobile browsing.
I think what's interesting is how looking back at the Nokia nostalgia is compelling because iOS and Android have become such overlords over our digital lives.
The irony, for those that missed it, is Nokia did a lot to make WebKit usable on S60, thereby setting up the foundations for mobile Safari in the first place.
Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.
what a coincidence, less than an hour ago I looked for pictures of Nokia 2110 since I just found out that the letters on older phones were placed on different keys: OQZ were on the 0 key, not listed alphabetically, and that is still happening on small keypads used by cashiers, at least here in Italy, that's why I noticed it
The unknown model here [1] looks a lot like the Nokia E6 to the point it might be a prototype. The date on the screen suggests it's from ~8 months before the E6's launch. AFAIK only the mic hole is places slightly off from the E6.
I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate. Sure, they made mistakes, but it wasn't entirely unfeasible to assume that the mobile phone market had matured in terms of features, and the next big thing was going to be "phones as fashion statements." When you think about it, prior to the phone, everything people carried on them everyday was some sort of fashion statement. Clothes, glasses, jewllery, watches, handbags, backpacks etc. I think they assumed that the phone was like the watch; peaked functionally, but room to grow in terms of form.
And in a way that actually happened with the iPhone. Yes, that was also a functionality boost, but it was also a fashion object. I did a (for university, small scale) observation study at the time and found it notable that some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus - that was a shift, a thing formerly seen as a functional device became a fashion accessory.
Think about how different the target group for blackberry for example had been, or how little glamour the (mostly) cheap and small nokia phones of the past years had been.
Nothing tops the middle-aged man I spotted in the iphone 3g days, sporting his on his belt, screen out and always on to show off the fact that he had all the apps.
> some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus
Sorry, what does this mean? Could you explain?
Argh, I translated that wrongly. Replace purse with handbag.
It seemed important. Instead of hiding a technical artefact it was presented to outside world by someone obviously placing a lot of importance on their looks.
>I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate.
Where do you see the hate? Everyone seems to have fond memories of Nokia, on the HW, camera and especially their adventurous fashion and industrial design side that's sorely missing these days in the boring smartphone world.
They didn't fail because it was hated, they failed because Apple and Android beat them fair and square before they could adapt to the new world driven by taking a 30% cut of sales of high-level apps in walled garden apps-store ecosystems, instead of one driven by sales of embedded hardware in plastic cases with no money on app sales.
Nokia didn't adapt because of cost cutting. Their engineers wanted to get into smartphones asap. Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred, but it was led by nokia and it was fragile
>Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred
Do you have a source for this? I think phone manufacturers prefer whatever sells best, has lowest cost and highest margins, preferably all at once.
And compared to Android, Symbian lagged on all those fronts. At its origins it was still a low-level embedded OS that was forced to mutate into an app-based OS and it showed in UX sluggishness, the convoluted soruce-code, dated build toolchain that took days to compile, and in the lack of cheap and easy ways for indie devs to develop and ship apps to consumers. By the time Symbian opened its source code and app build tools it was too late to compete with Android and iOS.
I noticed nokia pop up in telecom infrastructure around the same time I noticed nokia phone users using something else.
My guess is they didn't realize what telecom was preparing for and decided a foothold in that industry was an investment in telephone future.
They were doing phone switching in the 70s. The Nokia DX 200 had a couple of firsts on the wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_DX_200
Not sure what others are seeing for this to be upvoted as I get this error message at this URL:
Aalto University web hosting service
nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi
403 Forbidden
Access denied by server configuration and/or resource permissions.
You can still browse the source archive at https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
dang - if the source archive is the same as the submitted URL, then this would probably be a better URL to use in this posting which is returning an error for me and a number of other users
HN mods don't magically appear here when mentioned (unless you do it three times in a mirror while sacrificing DRAM), but they are absurdly responsive when contacted via hn@ycombinator.com.
It seemed to be struggling earlier, perhaps it has hit some sort of bandwidth quota and the error response is an unhelpful 403.
I've seen that before, perhaps it counts as unauthorised because the server is not authorised to send when the quota is breached?. It isn't correct use of 403 (which implies the server knows the identity of the user, 401 is the more general state for unauthorised. Of the standard responses 503 (Service Unavailable) seems most correct.
Same for me.
same. shame.
I think it's funny how most of the pictures are about people doing usual things (talking with friends physically present, having dinner, having a meeting, etc.) and there is also a phone in their hand, like it's nothing. It feels weird to see people doing something on the phone while also being so present in other activities, and also interesting that some photos from 90' nailed it how it will be in the the 20'
At one of our big Nokia meetings back then, one of the board members, quite elderly, joked enviously that all the imagery in our advertising and internal documentation showed young people ''jumping over things'' while holding a mobile phone. It was a heady time of paradigm shifts from phoning a location's land line in order to reach someone, to actually phoning them directly (call the person, not their location). So much of that imagery was very prescient.
Opened a random one: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_b81c4b91-a275-40b5-9b...
third slide...
Well, that aged differently, on different fronts...
All set aside, I did always wonder, why the screen has to fold (be flexible), surely a very thin line between 2 hard screens is very workable, perhaps it is even possible to make it (almost) invisible with some optical tricks at the touching edges.
Another point: It is easy to think of such things, it's the manufacturing and specifically manufacturing at scale that is the real work. That's why I think patents can really hold us back, by blocking the market from trying stuff because a company made some nice drawings (coming from a guy that was in a company that wanted to "blanket some markets" with patents). Perhaps we could have had our flying cars ;)
Btw, that last slide is very much like the communicator from Earth: Final Conflict [0], but then again, what can you make with a rolling screen?
[0] https://earthfinalconflict.fandom.com/wiki/Global
The most insane flexible screen proposal from Nokia was the "nanotech" one - Nokia Morph [1], where the phone "normal" candybar shape was formed out of folding it twice with a clip for speakers - you would pull the clip and unfold it into something akin to A5 or A4 paper. Future sounded bright with software defined tactile buttons and the like.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs
Looks amazing! And absolutely reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFsRif1wVGs
That's some nice cbf spelling of always and recognition on that slide.
Surely, foldable screens are not new desires
> Strategy2 : Maslow’s_Media Scenario’s Media for a purpose. ‘Need to Know’ Media. Media not only for Entertainment. Foreground and Background – I am in control when I can see and access simultaneous media. Routine and Rituals – I have sensible devices that respond to my daily rhythms. Forecasting and Broadcasting – I can ‘anticipate the future’, future needs and responsibilities.
> Strategy 3: Media_Passions Scenario’s Behaviour Passion Experience Product categories and communication strategies defined by media passions Behavioral passions: I’m Social and Share – Focus is Sociability I Consume - Immersive consumption I Organize – Media management I Collect and Mix – Low threshold creativity
> Trans_Life is a project sponsored by the Nokia Multimedia Business Group, to investigate the convergence and integration of multi media products, and develop scenarios visualizing new use patterns and new product propositions for the near future
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_3a24c0ae-8f52-4cf4-a7...
Still have fond memories of my Nokia Lumia 925. The combination of an OS based around a pure black background and that beautiful AMOLED display put it a solid class above anything my peers had at the time, and I loved Windows Phone 8.1's implementation of the Metro UI after drooling over a friend's Zune several years prior. Shame that Snapchat killed Windows Phone.
I had a WP7 Lumia phone and had a similar experience. It was light years ahead of what Apple and (particularly) Android had at the time.
But it wasn’t Snapchat that killed them. Less than a year after getting my WP7 device I was told it was end of the line and never getting and upgrade to 8. The maps app was straight up bad. When faced with the decision of paying again for a WP8 device or switching, I switched.
I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but there was a developer who made absolutely FANTASTIC Instagram and Snapchat 3rd party apps for Windows Phone back when Snapchat was the must-have GenZ communication app. The CEO of Snapchat killed the project, naturally. If I recall it was genuinely out of malice, as the CEO is a well known Apple fan to the point of supposedly originating the "Android cameras suck" meme by not properly hooking Android camera APIs on the Android version of snapchat resulting in extremely poor photo quality even on flagship devices (IIRC until recently it would simply screenshot the viewfinder instead of requesting a photo be taken).
Lacking some of the most popular apps of the zeitgeist at the time made the whole platform effectively a nonstarter.
The captions are pretty great:
"Image of a man holding a woman and a phone."
I think browsing this gives you a good idea of why Nokia failed. they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit.
they would never have the same kind of focus or philosophy as Apple, nor the willpower to pivot to real smartphones and a proper OS for them
It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.
Nokia, the giant at the time, was designing a better phone. And then a better phone. And another phone after that. Their design and engineering were in no way inferior to Apple's, but they were designing phones, not a personal computer.
I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.
They didn’t sell it for most networks in the USA (because your uncompetitive oligopoly cellphone market had not been shaken up yet and did not have competition rules governing it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61
This thing was in every sense a computer. Good battery life considering its screen, IMAP email, a Webkit web browser with full JS support before Apple released theirs, a music player, fully functional apps and tools to make them, 3G and wifi, office file support, VoIP support, Blackberry support if you wanted it. Great little keyboard.
Excellent device that was vastly more capable for actual work than the first several generations of iPhone (you could select and edit text, copy and paste) and available affordably to consumers in the UK.
Text selection and editing on iOS (and iPadOS!) is still more frustrating than it was on the E61.
The fact that we were already using these sorts of phones for functional work in Europe is a bit of the reason why the early Android phones with their “silly” trackballs that could actually control a text cursor did well compared to the early iPhones, and why interesting niche phones like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (that I subsequently owned, incredible device) did well here.
It took me to the iPhone 5S to even bother looking at iPhones, even though I had been a Mac user for fifteen years by then. Even then I only got it because the light sensor on my Xperia Mini Pro died; I would have carried on using that for years, it was fabulous.
Communicator devices with Symbian were pretty clear personal computers.
You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60
I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.
Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...
N95 was the first Nokia model where OpenGL ES was fully hardware accelerated and not using software rendering, by the way.
It had a quite cool launch demo with Asphalt,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YMdIswaW8
Remember that this are PS like graphics on a phone.
Nowadays there are plenty of WebGL games that aren't half as good.
The number of buttons on N95 is a hint to why it didn't see as wide adoption as the iPhone. My elderly relatives would be intimidated by that alone, afraid to press the wrong one and break something. A single-button iPhone with a touch screen that showed applications in a simple grid format fit them much better.
Jobs' genius was in understanding that the customer needed a rope that they couldn't accidentally hang themselves with, not a construction crane with a 800-page manual. He spoke about designing devices that his friends and family could use, and you can very clearly see that reflected in the products of that era.
Despite all the Apple copycats nowadays, few copy that focus on the customer.
> they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back.
You mean like Apple today ?
The Apple watch is from 2015.
What new product Apple produced since Tim Cook took over ?
The iPhone Duo ? Ironically it has quite a smell of Nokia N95 all over again.
Different times. Companies aren't allowed to fail in 2026.
Nokia was also European. We Euroopeans aren't good at not letting our companies fail, also see Philips, Acorn etc.
Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).
The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.
The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.
Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750
from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
which makes sense because they had these half button half touchscreen hybrid phones
the internet browsing features were something akin to like paid phone numbers which you'd avoid using because it was like special stuff
it wasn't first class in any way, it was perpetually stuck in the past. and as you can see, their entire business model was based on iterating on the same thing in a million ways, so there's no way they were gonna do something from the ground up to focus on a first class experience for one form factor which could support 3rd party developers etc.
It was lunacy business-wise but it sure brought some color to the market and I really liked seeing what they came up with. It wasn't for me, and not for most people, of course. But now we all have a black glass slab. Does make me a bit sad and am always eyeballing new form-factors (ie cyberdeck like). Idk, it's how capitalism works, but perhaps one day technology will find a way to be more flexible and we can bring back some lunacy...
no, if they were like Nokia, they'd be desperately trying to make everything and new versions of things
instead they're refining their existing products until they can come up with a hit. although I'm not sure the iPhone Duo is gonna be a hit
there's simply not that much innovation going on these days, there was a lot more low-hanging fruit in the early 2000s
Why? Duo feels pretty nice. Wouldn’t want the first generation (but it is never a good idea to have the first generation of anything)
The N95 was the phone to have.-
It is a far more complex story than that.
Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.
There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.
The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.
So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.
Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.
And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.
But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.
It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.
It could have gone very differently.
Apples ability to force flat-fee internet was crucial. Nokia had to customise every phone for about 1000 operators because as you say the operators had the "whip hand." It probably fell apart because of converting to a "matrix" organisation which essentially assumed that there would be 100s of different models to fit in various price segments. This made it impossible to achieve the kind of experience that could be achieved by concentrating on 1 expensive model.
Nokia was into making affordable phones but there was obviously a point where the ARM chips suddenly got a lot better and it was so optimised around squeezing performance from slow chips that it couldn't adapt. The management was aging and had become very hierarchical.
Despite all of this we were beginning to get somewhere at the end - standardising on Qt and my project got the build times under some control. Then Elop f*ked us. It was fine for the shareholders because Microsoft took the big hit for them but it was shitty for us developers who were trying to get things turned around.
>from how handsets could interact with their network
Yes? Imagine millions of devices spamming your radio and core network to death?
>because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
? The performance just want not there until 4G LTE came around. You could only push 2G and 3G so much. 2G was built for voice, data was bolt-on. Just physics. If you have another brilliant idea on how to solve that please comment.
As a consumer I enjoy when companies try out random shit in such a user friendly way.
Apple’s focus and philosophy sure gives them an advantage. At the same time users who like e.g. smaller screens have to suffer or go elsewhere.
Well, they also thought it would be great to have a custom OS for every phone model. They had symbian-based S60 in different variations, S40 (or was it S30) in different configurations, some with Java ME support, some maybe not, and so on. Symbian came with different UIs I think, so some other vendor also had symbian phones that were completely different (was it sony?).
Clusterf...
And then Stephen Flop thought it would be cool to go exclusively with Windows Slown instead of the widely popular Android. (or arguably he was probably paid to decide that, coming directly from MSFT)
I can only imagine how defunct the organization Nokia must have been, with this cornucopia of different phones. Impossible to reform, so the only way for them to go was ... to go.
yes, it was the plethora of models even within the same OS - the build-test cycle was abominably slow because you were building 20 phone models at a time - 85GB of output.
The number of bugs greatly multiplied by the variety of configurations - dfifferent hardware and just different amounts of RAM forcing dodgy software workarounds to deal with insufficient hardware.
It was a matrix organisation that was optimised on the theory of making many models to fit different price points and that made it extremely difficult to react to the iPhone - of which beat Nokia with 1 model that poor people got into debt to buy.
They made real smartphones (if you are in the USA you may not have seen them until it was too late).
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
Interesting - one of the presentations I found was this one on Design Insights From Apple's iPod (2006).
They highlight:
- core design team
- start with an idea for an unmet customer need
- drive innovation from imagining user’s experience
- define essentials for “insanely great”
- simplify to great lengths to hide complexity
- grow user involvement through evolution
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_7b149a54-2085-4f7d-9b...
> and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit
To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.
point is they weren't pushing the technology, they were pushing the existing form factor, not thinking ahead.
I could be wrong, but I recall an exec at one of their events on stage doubling down and saying they know better than Apple - that people want buttons (or something like that), which basically means their decline was inevitable due to the culture
Many people forget that the Apple of today only exists out of sheer luck, by bringing back in house one of their founders.
Apple of today gets idolatrised to a point that it never us in the 1990's, when they did enough random shit that they almost went bankrupt.
Also, Nokia Alumni over here, from 2005 - 2010.
Yeah, I use a Jolla phone today but wish it had the power of a properly resourced company behind it.
I miss my Nokia N9 so much. As far as I’m concerned it (with Meego) was the best phone ever made, with an awesome design that the OS itself was built around: the curved pillow shape of the screen was used for the core gestures that you used to operate it
Ahead of its time, IMO. I wonder how Jolla is gong these days.
More discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721915 (58 comments)
It's missing the Booklet 3G. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Booklet_3G
In the UK the N95 was the first of what they called a multimedia computer. It was a huge success...the N96 was launched a year later in 2007, right before the first iPhone. The rest is history.
Loved my N95. Had one at the same time as the original iPhone. Ended up using the Nokia. 3G, better camera, native Spotify, and still had navigation.
Yeah, they used to be way more adventurous with design. Retro-futurism and all that stuff. Now everything just looks so boring.
Cool, but damn this is annoying to browse with phone.
Stupid wiggly and slightly laggy dots with no option to stop motion altogether are making it annoying to browse on desktop as well. Everything is constantly moving and there's hardly any telling what's what among model dots, and they don't have much spatial persistency so you're just constantly lost. The only predictable way to browse is just going thru 755 cards page by page.
Otherwise, extremely interesting materials. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to include later nokia smartphones, like ones with maemo and meego like n900 and n9, even though in my opinion they still very much had something to say and to show with their design, both physically with shape and look of the phones, and with phone interfaces. dare i say, they were quite influential still, and those design sensibilities, at least phone look wise, still echoed for years in later nokia (lumia and even hmd nokia) phones
a lot of funky stuff in presentations, like this one https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_68d7aeff-c4fb-49c0-be... or this one https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_b5225dd0-743a-4b6d-ba...
To be honest, it's not much better on desktop. Jittering dots everywhere.
This version is slightly more tolerable:
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_eef40316-aa3b-4fe3-8...
It's not that great on desktop either
Well, its a media-rich & heavy site, clearly not develped for mobile usage :-)
It's clearly not the Mobile-First Design Archive ;)
Sadly it's a reflection of why Nokia failed - Mobile Safari on iOS pretty much nailed the coffin for the Nokia approach to mobile browsing.
I think what's interesting is how looking back at the Nokia nostalgia is compelling because iOS and Android have become such overlords over our digital lives.
The irony, for those that missed it, is Nokia did a lot to make WebKit usable on S60, thereby setting up the foundations for mobile Safari in the first place.
Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.
I love whenever this is posted everyone gets so mad about the UI (it is terrible)
403 Forbidden
what a coincidence, less than an hour ago I looked for pictures of Nokia 2110 since I just found out that the letters on older phones were placed on different keys: OQZ were on the 0 key, not listed alphabetically, and that is still happening on small keypads used by cashiers, at least here in Italy, that's why I noticed it
The unknown model here [1] looks a lot like the Nokia E6 to the point it might be a prototype. The date on the screen suggests it's from ~8 months before the E6's launch. AFAIK only the mic hole is places slightly off from the E6.
[1] https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0383
"Hey claude make me the most annoying bs UI possible for the data I want to display, make no mistake"
Was posted on Hackernews nearly 2 years ago with the same UI so this being a vibe coded project is unlikely.
I guess it was just part of the current website generation's training set!
Then I'm sad someone put so much effort to deliver this
I was thinking it was maybe GPT since I've had it generate this kind of black/green UI when I've prompted for just a blank skeleton page