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.
The translation seems fine - purse and handbag are rather interchangeable. I imagine GP and I are both just confused about what it means to wear a phone on a bag. Like there was a see through window in the bag that the phone was placed behind? Or the phone could be adhered to the bag somehow? I am struggling to come up with possibilities. Interested in what you found!
OK :) It was just a really big purse. I don't think the phone was clipped on or the purse see-through, just that it must have been stable enough to carry the phone a little bit when placed on top of it.
I remember specifically being surprised that she didn't put the phone inside the bag.
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
I remember this somewhat differently. I'm still grateful for my time at Nokia at that I had the chance to work in the vicinity of one their 3 (if I remember correctly) design centers. I was young and reckless and on one occasion I started to taunt one of the industrial designers who I was sitting at the next desk. I was telling them, hogy NTT Docomo is already pushing out mobile phones with color screens, polyphonic ringtones and Nokia is just doing n+1 iteration on low-res monochrome displays and beepers. The guy didn't say a word, reached for a key, opened one of the closed drawers and pulled out a Japanese phone. "Who do you think this was designed by?" Turned out that the same guys were doing the design for Nokia's Japanese phones, even for Docomo, under the "NO" moniker. (Docomo enforced a two letter + 3 digits model naming scheme)
Nokia for a long time (as other manufacturers as well) thought that there is no interest in such devices in the US and European markets. The pricier phones targeted business users with a more reserved design. This wasn't (yet) cost cutting, more like how they have read the market.
As for Symbian, others has already explained its shortcomings. There was an internal debate how it would be able to take Nokia to the next generation of smartphones and they have been working on the Linux based Maemo operating system. There were internal prototypes and maybe there was a limited run on N900 released. However, moving to a completely new platform seemed risky. I think ~2-3 years before the iPhone the decision was to try fixing Symbian instead of moving every service and partner to a yet unproven new platform. It was more of a "we have invested in it too much, we can't write it off" case.
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
The 5800/5230/5530 were probably the best value touchscreen phones of the time, considering that their screens had higher DPI than the first three iPhones and they all had similar web browsers.
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.
For better or worse charging a phone every night wasn't that much of a downside in practice. And most users were happy to trade off tactility for touch screens.
My memory of Nokia is that the apps and services just didn't work that well.
Just after I got my first iPhone I arranged a meetup with a friend. I used Google Maps on the phone to find my way, and it worked perfectly - almost unthinkable at the time, because we were all still using paper street maps while driving.
She was late because the map on her Nokia phone had gotten very confused and sent her to the wrong location.
The Nokia experience was like that. Before the iPhone I'd had a couple of Communicators. They were incredible in theory, and I sent bad photos in emails from various unlikely locations to prove it.
But they were big, slow, and clunky in practice. The iPhone wasn't.
I dunno, I was a mobile developer at that time and moved from Symbian to Android/iOS and I didn't have a feeling Nokia engineering leads had any idea what they're doing either.
They tried to persuade us to use Qt to write apps (as alternative to iOS)... and they haven't shipped a single phone with Qt available as toolkit. They told us they might ship an update for N95 and perhaps one other model to pre install the library. At the time when they had literally hundreds of models.
When we finally put an app on their store, they failed to approve it in 6 months (!). Apparently because we chose the whole Europe as launch target so each country's Nokia office had to approve it separately. Silly us.
Afterwards we moved to Android (1.5, with 1.6 coming) and iPhoneOS.
Their Qt story was mostly geared towards their Linux phones. N900, N9 were the last of the kind. They killed the N9 before even it was launched. (The infamous Burning platform memo).
At that time, I genuinely believed that the N9 had the vision and design to beat anything Android was - at that time. Till date, it's still the best UX i experienced in a phone. Even a lot of Nokia managers I talked to called Elop a trojan horse from Microsoft.
But given how Android's source was open while Meego was anything but.. along with the whole Nokia + Microsoft drama... It's just a shame
They burned out a lot of solid programmers rushing Qt for S60. Nothing much came out of it, but the management vision was to have QML apps on S60 compete with iPhones.
Did they want to get into smartphones? I worked for Nokia somewhere in 2004-2006, designing music software for their latest prototypes. I don't remember anyone I spoke to at Nokia seeing the iPhone coming. There were other things that did bits of the iPhone, but nothing as slick and finished. Nokia were bad at software, honestly. They were outsourcing all their "1st party" apps to random dev shops who didn't get enough support and technical docs from the mothership to really make their apps work well. And every dev outfit had their own design ideas and design language. Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.
> Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.
The first iPhone was the opposite of vertical integration. BOM was the same HW parts Nokia, Ericsson and the rest had access to. Samsung ARM SoC, Qualcomm modem, SK NAND, Sharp LCD, basic stuff. Apple had the OS, UX, SW and stuff like full feature HTML browser down to the T in ways that made Nokia and the rest feel like dinosaurs.
Yes and no, I mean many of the parts were off the shelf and the vertical integration did slowly happen over time, but on the other hand iPhones never used off-the-shelf processor silicon. While they were Arm-designed CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores at that stage (Apple would switch to designing their custom designed Arm-compatible cores with the A6 in 2012 and their own GPU design with the A11 Bionic in 2017), the SoC of the first few iPhones and iPod Touches were custom designed for them by Samsung.
Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.
>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.
Like Ericsson and Alcatel, Nokia originally only built the phones to sell the infrastructure.
They pushed devices with new telecom features into the market to create the benefit for carriers to buy new infrastructure, e.g. "with this new revision of GSM, devices can negotiate the polling period with the network to double the battery runtime. But only if you have the infra to actually answer the device."
Citation needed. Nokia Networks and Nokia Mobile Phones (NMP) were run like entirely separate kingdoms within Nokia and their conflicts were legendary.
It's often forgotten that Microsoft didn't buy "Nokia", they bought the NMP division, and the Networks bit is alive and kicking to this day.
You underestimate the age of Nokia in this business.
They built telecom infrastructure already in the 1970s, the Nokia Mobile Phones company was created as an independent arm only in ~1989.
(which by no coincidence is the era the GSM standard was created: A global cellular telephony standard allowing interoperability across countries and suppliers)
And Nokia started making pulp and rubber in the 1800s, I don't see what that has to do with my point.
Nokia's rise started in 1990 when Ollila, who had been the mobile phone lead, was promoted to CEO. This was still very early on (Nokia's first GSM phone only came out in 1992) and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots.
The point is that Nokia was in the telecom sector for DECADES before the Microsoft acquisition of the Handset Division you mentioned.
> "and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots."
Citation needed. Equally I have no idea what that has to do with my initial point that the device business was used to drive the infrastructure business.
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.
Hah. Yeah, they really didn't see it coming. I worked on music player stuff for Nokia's janky 2007 handsets [0] in 2004-2006 and it wasn't on the radar. The security around the iPhone project must have been really good. When Apple was working on the iPod I was getting intel for at least a year in advance because they were talking to so many people in the music biz about it.
Interesting. I worked with another competitor at that time, we got intel that they're working on an exclusive device with AT&T, after Verizon rejected their conditions.
But it was nothing special. It was Apple building a premium touch screen phone (no apps yet, only iTunes and Browser), struggling alot with the connectivity part of it (barely able to assure a stable cellular modem connection for one carrier, let alone a full region of them). Huge 3.x" display, battery runtime less than 24h (in a world where cellphone standby was still measured in days)
What we didn't know at that time was that Steve Jobs managed to push AT&T into a revenue-share deal along with a mandatory data-flatrate bundle, both ensuring a constant revenue-stream beyond the initial launch which would skew the entire competitive field forever.
Because while everyone else earned money only through sales, Apple had not only its above-average sales-margin and their iTunes revenue, but also an incremental monthly revenue-share from AT&T that grew with each device sold.
Within 6 months AT&T paid Apple a per-device share for a million devices each month. We never got the exact figure they paid per device but it was rumored to be more than 10 USD.
So by end of 2007 Apple had a constant influx of more than 10M USD/month on top of ~600M in HW sales-margin, excluding any additional iTunes-profit they made with that always-online iPod (e.g. the only way to get a custom ringtone was to buy one on iTunes at a hefty premium)
And we know how the rest of the story went. That monthly recurring revenue changed everything for Apple. Did they have any recurring revenue of significance before that? I don't think they were doing music streaming. I think Nokia was probably doing streaming subscriptions from ~2005, but I know the numbers were miniscule.
Back then everyone believed that. Even Android vendors. Motorola Droid did sell well. Touch screen typing was really annoying until Swype really took off.
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.
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.
I have their latest phone and it's great UX wise. However they simply lack the funds to put in the best cameras and the dev community for native apps is small, be it most of the actively developed native apps are great.
IMO Sailfish has the best gesture-based controls out of any smartphone OS.
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
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.
Yes, obviously there needs to be standards and controls in place in the lower network layers to prevent degradation of the network. This continues to be true. However, carriers at the time were enforcing things like requiring handsets to use the carrier's own compressing web proxy for access to the web, or whitelisting sites that handsets could access. It was incredibly rare for a handset to have access to the "full web" to save data.
When the iPhone originally launched on 2G, it offered access to the "full web" via Safari, bypassing the carrier's proxies. Many carriers setup dedicated GPRS APNs specifically for the iPhone, which (with the exception of Blackberry), was somewhat unprecedented. The iPhone did place massive strain on networks as a consequence.
Then you had companies like Blackberry, who invested significant R&D in minimising radio traffic to play nicely with carriers - and the value of that R&D evaporated because Apple changed the rules.
Carriers were terrified of the iPhone, because it represented a fundamental shift in the dynamic. I was working for a carrier outside the US when the iPhone 3G launched. It was the first model to be available in my country, and carriers were not convinced they would even make it available. The carrier I was working for only made the decision to move forwards in supporting it four weeks before the launch date. Even with 3G (UTMS) being widely available at the time, it still proved problematic.
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 remember having to buy another Nokia (maybe a C something?) to get the E61. It was only available in a forced bundle deal, because refusing to sell your wares is always a solid market strategy
If that was in the USA, it might have been the only way Nokia could get the carriers to sell the E61. It's hard to believe now but US carriers were aggressively against phones having wifi. It eventually arrived on major carriers as the E62 — without the wifi (and with out the VoIP if I remember correctly, though I may be misremembering)
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.
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.
I don't know. At least when I was hired Nokia was 110% into making music their main priority. They bought LoudEye/OD2 because they want to get really deep into the music biz. They saw iPod as their main competitor, but didn't see iPhone coming at all. I don't remember Rokr came out, but Nokia were sure that a good music experience where you could download or stream music direct to your phone was the winning strategy. And they were partially right, but that was only a piece of the puzzle. Their handsets were just janky compared to the slick iPhone, and they had no universal design language. I worked on their software and not once did anyone at Nokia HQ say "You should make your buttons like this, or use these colors, or these widgets." It was anything goes. Every app on the phone developed by different teams who only talked to each other when something was broken.
That isn't the problem, rather that our companies also got infected by MBAs with late stage capitalism mindset, and followed all US economic think thanks great ideas to outsource everything.
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.
> from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
Nokia had at least three tiers of OS: Series 30, Series 40 (which had subseries) and Series 60. It was S60 which was the smartphone Symbian based one which is where they went especially nuts.
S40 was actually really good and solid, and if someone remembers the UI of a Nokia fondly it's almost certainly a S30 or S40 device. A bit basic, but for a feature phone of that era it was great. The reason SonyEricsson started gaining market share was their phones were more like improved S40 devices (like higher fidelity UIs) than Nokia's S60 lines which were . . . not.
The E61 had S60v3 and it was weird but really very usable. A device that was in many ways ahead of its time. VoIP, Webkit, fully usable IMAP email.
But Nokia smartphones were essentially shut out of the US phone market by the toxic carrier-exclusives situation and their corrupt allergy to on-device Wifi (Nokia couldn't get a major carrier to take the E61 until they repackaged it as the E62 without wifi)
There was also s80 for the 9200/9500 and the s90 family of devices that didn’t get much beyond 2005.
Sad really as I worked several of the UI parts. We had a fully customisable Home Screen where you could add and remove pages, move app icons - long before iPhone or android. It all got bined due to management preferring keyboard devices over touch screens.
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...
> 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 thought something different. If I recall correctly, they did already make a full touchscreen phone prototype 3 years before, but they dismissed the idea because of how clunky the UX was. So they dismissed the iPhone because of that experience, they already researched the form factor, the hardware, and deduced it was a dead-end. But I am no Nokia engineer, I have no insight on that (and that may have lead them to developing Maemo/MeeGo, but by the time it arrived the corporates already decided the fate of Nokia).
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.
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.
I was there for many years, so I can tell you that this is not accurate:
1. Their design process was incredibly focused, especially as it related to concept exploration and use of colors and materials.
2. Apple started in the US, with one expensive SKU, at one carrier. Nokia had 40% of the global market with a mission to put a mobile phone in every person's hand. This required being in multiple price tiers across multiple markets. I guarantee you Apple was not thinking about farmers in India the way Nokia did.
3. It's hard to believe there was a vision of a proper OS versus Nokia's S60/Symbian and Blackberry. Nokia was already invested in Maemo internally, which was more akin to what you think of as a modern OS.
4. Nokia's financial and operational structure was a bit too baked when the iPhone released, which made it difficult to productize Maemo above existing, more profitable product lines. I'd argue this was OPK's (former CEO) lack of decision-making here.
5. Nokia had huge aspirations software-wise, but it had to compete against telco's competing initiatives, while also depending on those telcos for distribution. The way Apple broke that telco model with their brand still amazes me to this day.
Nokia certainly was not perfect, but it didn't lack focus or willpower for the way it understood the market. Apple just did a great job at breaking down telco walled gardens.
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.
> 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 still remember sitting on my mother’s lap and using a Nokia flip phone in the late 2000s. She was teaching me how to use it, and the camera was so cool. When you flipped it open, there was this huge camera right in the middle on the other side of the screen. It looked so futuristic back then. And those oval-shaped phones with rounded edges too. So nostalgic.
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.
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
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 [*generally] 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 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.
The translation seems fine - purse and handbag are rather interchangeable. I imagine GP and I are both just confused about what it means to wear a phone on a bag. Like there was a see through window in the bag that the phone was placed behind? Or the phone could be adhered to the bag somehow? I am struggling to come up with possibilities. Interested in what you found!
OK :) It was just a really big purse. I don't think the phone was clipped on or the purse see-through, just that it must have been stable enough to carry the phone a little bit when placed on top of it.
I remember specifically being surprised that she didn't put the phone inside the bag.
That makes sense, thanks!
Thanks from me, too. That was exactly the question I had.
>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
I remember this somewhat differently. I'm still grateful for my time at Nokia at that I had the chance to work in the vicinity of one their 3 (if I remember correctly) design centers. I was young and reckless and on one occasion I started to taunt one of the industrial designers who I was sitting at the next desk. I was telling them, hogy NTT Docomo is already pushing out mobile phones with color screens, polyphonic ringtones and Nokia is just doing n+1 iteration on low-res monochrome displays and beepers. The guy didn't say a word, reached for a key, opened one of the closed drawers and pulled out a Japanese phone. "Who do you think this was designed by?" Turned out that the same guys were doing the design for Nokia's Japanese phones, even for Docomo, under the "NO" moniker. (Docomo enforced a two letter + 3 digits model naming scheme) Nokia for a long time (as other manufacturers as well) thought that there is no interest in such devices in the US and European markets. The pricier phones targeted business users with a more reserved design. This wasn't (yet) cost cutting, more like how they have read the market. As for Symbian, others has already explained its shortcomings. There was an internal debate how it would be able to take Nokia to the next generation of smartphones and they have been working on the Linux based Maemo operating system. There were internal prototypes and maybe there was a limited run on N900 released. However, moving to a completely new platform seemed risky. I think ~2-3 years before the iPhone the decision was to try fixing Symbian instead of moving every service and partner to a yet unproven new platform. It was more of a "we have invested in it too much, we can't write it off" case.
With all possible love for Symbian, but no.
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
The 5800/5230/5530 were probably the best value touchscreen phones of the time, considering that their screens had higher DPI than the first three iPhones and they all had similar web browsers.
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.
I really would want these three back:
- 1. Battery runtime - 2. Durability - 3. Tactile user-input
But apparently I am not who the smartphones are made for today. It might be that they were kinda like me.
For better or worse charging a phone every night wasn't that much of a downside in practice. And most users were happy to trade off tactility for touch screens.
My memory of Nokia is that the apps and services just didn't work that well.
Just after I got my first iPhone I arranged a meetup with a friend. I used Google Maps on the phone to find my way, and it worked perfectly - almost unthinkable at the time, because we were all still using paper street maps while driving.
She was late because the map on her Nokia phone had gotten very confused and sent her to the wrong location.
The Nokia experience was like that. Before the iPhone I'd had a couple of Communicators. They were incredible in theory, and I sent bad photos in emails from various unlikely locations to prove it.
But they were big, slow, and clunky in practice. The iPhone wasn't.
I dunno, I was a mobile developer at that time and moved from Symbian to Android/iOS and I didn't have a feeling Nokia engineering leads had any idea what they're doing either.
They tried to persuade us to use Qt to write apps (as alternative to iOS)... and they haven't shipped a single phone with Qt available as toolkit. They told us they might ship an update for N95 and perhaps one other model to pre install the library. At the time when they had literally hundreds of models.
When we finally put an app on their store, they failed to approve it in 6 months (!). Apparently because we chose the whole Europe as launch target so each country's Nokia office had to approve it separately. Silly us.
Afterwards we moved to Android (1.5, with 1.6 coming) and iPhoneOS.
Their Qt story was mostly geared towards their Linux phones. N900, N9 were the last of the kind. They killed the N9 before even it was launched. (The infamous Burning platform memo).
At that time, I genuinely believed that the N9 had the vision and design to beat anything Android was - at that time. Till date, it's still the best UX i experienced in a phone. Even a lot of Nokia managers I talked to called Elop a trojan horse from Microsoft.
But given how Android's source was open while Meego was anything but.. along with the whole Nokia + Microsoft drama... It's just a shame
The problem was, they had no non-Qt strategy. Symbian was dying and horribly fragmented and they didn't really have anything else.
(We ended up shipping a webapp which was another kind of disaster on their phones).
They burned out a lot of solid programmers rushing Qt for S60. Nothing much came out of it, but the management vision was to have QML apps on S60 compete with iPhones.
Did they want to get into smartphones? I worked for Nokia somewhere in 2004-2006, designing music software for their latest prototypes. I don't remember anyone I spoke to at Nokia seeing the iPhone coming. There were other things that did bits of the iPhone, but nothing as slick and finished. Nokia were bad at software, honestly. They were outsourcing all their "1st party" apps to random dev shops who didn't get enough support and technical docs from the mothership to really make their apps work well. And every dev outfit had their own design ideas and design language. Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.
> Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.
The first iPhone was the opposite of vertical integration. BOM was the same HW parts Nokia, Ericsson and the rest had access to. Samsung ARM SoC, Qualcomm modem, SK NAND, Sharp LCD, basic stuff. Apple had the OS, UX, SW and stuff like full feature HTML browser down to the T in ways that made Nokia and the rest feel like dinosaurs.
Yes and no, I mean many of the parts were off the shelf and the vertical integration did slowly happen over time, but on the other hand iPhones never used off-the-shelf processor silicon. While they were Arm-designed CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores at that stage (Apple would switch to designing their custom designed Arm-compatible cores with the A6 in 2012 and their own GPU design with the A11 Bionic in 2017), the SoC of the first few iPhones and iPod Touches were custom designed for them by Samsung.
Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.
>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.
Like Ericsson and Alcatel, Nokia originally only built the phones to sell the infrastructure.
They pushed devices with new telecom features into the market to create the benefit for carriers to buy new infrastructure, e.g. "with this new revision of GSM, devices can negotiate the polling period with the network to double the battery runtime. But only if you have the infra to actually answer the device."
Citation needed. Nokia Networks and Nokia Mobile Phones (NMP) were run like entirely separate kingdoms within Nokia and their conflicts were legendary.
It's often forgotten that Microsoft didn't buy "Nokia", they bought the NMP division, and the Networks bit is alive and kicking to this day.
You underestimate the age of Nokia in this business.
They built telecom infrastructure already in the 1970s, the Nokia Mobile Phones company was created as an independent arm only in ~1989.
(which by no coincidence is the era the GSM standard was created: A global cellular telephony standard allowing interoperability across countries and suppliers)
And Nokia started making pulp and rubber in the 1800s, I don't see what that has to do with my point.
Nokia's rise started in 1990 when Ollila, who had been the mobile phone lead, was promoted to CEO. This was still very early on (Nokia's first GSM phone only came out in 1992) and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots.
> "I don't see what that has to do with my point"
The point is that Nokia was in the telecom sector for DECADES before the Microsoft acquisition of the Handset Division you mentioned.
> "and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots."
Citation needed. Equally I have no idea what that has to do with my initial point that the device business was used to drive the infrastructure business.
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
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.
I find Nokia's reaction to the iPhone release always interesting: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
Hah. Yeah, they really didn't see it coming. I worked on music player stuff for Nokia's janky 2007 handsets [0] in 2004-2006 and it wasn't on the radar. The security around the iPhone project must have been really good. When Apple was working on the iPod I was getting intel for at least a year in advance because they were talking to so many people in the music biz about it.
[0] https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_764fa227-8853-45dd-91...
Interesting. I worked with another competitor at that time, we got intel that they're working on an exclusive device with AT&T, after Verizon rejected their conditions.
But it was nothing special. It was Apple building a premium touch screen phone (no apps yet, only iTunes and Browser), struggling alot with the connectivity part of it (barely able to assure a stable cellular modem connection for one carrier, let alone a full region of them). Huge 3.x" display, battery runtime less than 24h (in a world where cellphone standby was still measured in days)
What we didn't know at that time was that Steve Jobs managed to push AT&T into a revenue-share deal along with a mandatory data-flatrate bundle, both ensuring a constant revenue-stream beyond the initial launch which would skew the entire competitive field forever.
Because while everyone else earned money only through sales, Apple had not only its above-average sales-margin and their iTunes revenue, but also an incremental monthly revenue-share from AT&T that grew with each device sold.
Within 6 months AT&T paid Apple a per-device share for a million devices each month. We never got the exact figure they paid per device but it was rumored to be more than 10 USD.
So by end of 2007 Apple had a constant influx of more than 10M USD/month on top of ~600M in HW sales-margin, excluding any additional iTunes-profit they made with that always-online iPod (e.g. the only way to get a custom ringtone was to buy one on iTunes at a hefty premium)
And we know how the rest of the story went. That monthly recurring revenue changed everything for Apple. Did they have any recurring revenue of significance before that? I don't think they were doing music streaming. I think Nokia was probably doing streaming subscriptions from ~2005, but I know the numbers were miniscule.
Slide 10:
> Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success
> Even though Steve Jobs emphasized iPhone superiority to “Buttons”, it is to be expected that the Consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed
Back then everyone believed that. Even Android vendors. Motorola Droid did sell well. Touch screen typing was really annoying until Swype really took off.
> There was little mention of security on the iPhone. Perhaps it lacks VPN, secure e-mail.
Turn out average people care little about that.
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.
"allways" (sic) feels quite 'normal' (as in very frequent for non-native speakers), but "regoqnition" (sic) is truly creative. Appreciated!
There is also "stulys" (sic), supposedly instead of "stylus". That seems almost deliberate…
Surely, foldable screens are not new desires
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.
> I wonder how Jolla is gong these days
I have their latest phone and it's great UX wise. However they simply lack the funds to put in the best cameras and the dev community for native apps is small, be it most of the actively developed native apps are great.
IMO Sailfish has the best gesture-based controls out of any smartphone OS.
had blue N9, people would randomly ask me what model is that?
https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2011/12/15/portable-cathed...
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 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.
Yes, obviously there needs to be standards and controls in place in the lower network layers to prevent degradation of the network. This continues to be true. However, carriers at the time were enforcing things like requiring handsets to use the carrier's own compressing web proxy for access to the web, or whitelisting sites that handsets could access. It was incredibly rare for a handset to have access to the "full web" to save data.
When the iPhone originally launched on 2G, it offered access to the "full web" via Safari, bypassing the carrier's proxies. Many carriers setup dedicated GPRS APNs specifically for the iPhone, which (with the exception of Blackberry), was somewhat unprecedented. The iPhone did place massive strain on networks as a consequence.
Then you had companies like Blackberry, who invested significant R&D in minimising radio traffic to play nicely with carriers - and the value of that R&D evaporated because Apple changed the rules.
Carriers were terrified of the iPhone, because it represented a fundamental shift in the dynamic. I was working for a carrier outside the US when the iPhone 3G launched. It was the first model to be available in my country, and carriers were not convinced they would even make it available. The carrier I was working for only made the decision to move forwards in supporting it four weeks before the launch date. Even with 3G (UTMS) being widely available at the time, it still proved problematic.
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.
I remember having to buy another Nokia (maybe a C something?) to get the E61. It was only available in a forced bundle deal, because refusing to sell your wares is always a solid market strategy
If that was in the USA, it might have been the only way Nokia could get the carriers to sell the E61. It's hard to believe now but US carriers were aggressively against phones having wifi. It eventually arrived on major carriers as the E62 — without the wifi (and with out the VoIP if I remember correctly, though I may be misremembering)
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
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.
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.
I don't know. At least when I was hired Nokia was 110% into making music their main priority. They bought LoudEye/OD2 because they want to get really deep into the music biz. They saw iPod as their main competitor, but didn't see iPhone coming at all. I don't remember Rokr came out, but Nokia were sure that a good music experience where you could download or stream music direct to your phone was the winning strategy. And they were partially right, but that was only a piece of the puzzle. Their handsets were just janky compared to the slick iPhone, and they had no universal design language. I worked on their software and not once did anyone at Nokia HQ say "You should make your buttons like this, or use these colors, or these widgets." It was anything goes. Every app on the phone developed by different teams who only talked to each other when something was broken.
> 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.
That isn't the problem, rather that our companies also got infected by MBAs with late stage capitalism mindset, and followed all US economic think thanks great ideas to outsource everything.
Yes, but the US ones are still around, mostly.
Only in facade, most real work is done out from far Asia, hence why they got this wonderful president with the empty promises to bring them back home.
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)
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
The N95 was the phone to have.-
Airpod is the most successful bluetooth headphone ever.
Apple watch is also on the list.
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.
> from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
Nokia had at least three tiers of OS: Series 30, Series 40 (which had subseries) and Series 60. It was S60 which was the smartphone Symbian based one which is where they went especially nuts.
S40 was actually really good and solid, and if someone remembers the UI of a Nokia fondly it's almost certainly a S30 or S40 device. A bit basic, but for a feature phone of that era it was great. The reason SonyEricsson started gaining market share was their phones were more like improved S40 devices (like higher fidelity UIs) than Nokia's S60 lines which were . . . not.
The E61 had S60v3 and it was weird but really very usable. A device that was in many ways ahead of its time. VoIP, Webkit, fully usable IMAP email.
But Nokia smartphones were essentially shut out of the US phone market by the toxic carrier-exclusives situation and their corrupt allergy to on-device Wifi (Nokia couldn't get a major carrier to take the E61 until they repackaged it as the E62 without wifi)
There was also s80 for the 9200/9500 and the s90 family of devices that didn’t get much beyond 2005. Sad really as I worked several of the UI parts. We had a fully customisable Home Screen where you could add and remove pages, move app icons - long before iPhone or android. It all got bined due to management preferring keyboard devices over touch screens.
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...
> 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 thought something different. If I recall correctly, they did already make a full touchscreen phone prototype 3 years before, but they dismissed the idea because of how clunky the UX was. So they dismissed the iPhone because of that experience, they already researched the form factor, the hardware, and deduced it was a dead-end. But I am no Nokia engineer, I have no insight on that (and that may have lead them to developing Maemo/MeeGo, but by the time it arrived the corporates already decided the fate of Nokia).
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.
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.
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.
I was there for many years, so I can tell you that this is not accurate:
1. Their design process was incredibly focused, especially as it related to concept exploration and use of colors and materials. 2. Apple started in the US, with one expensive SKU, at one carrier. Nokia had 40% of the global market with a mission to put a mobile phone in every person's hand. This required being in multiple price tiers across multiple markets. I guarantee you Apple was not thinking about farmers in India the way Nokia did. 3. It's hard to believe there was a vision of a proper OS versus Nokia's S60/Symbian and Blackberry. Nokia was already invested in Maemo internally, which was more akin to what you think of as a modern OS. 4. Nokia's financial and operational structure was a bit too baked when the iPhone released, which made it difficult to productize Maemo above existing, more profitable product lines. I'd argue this was OPK's (former CEO) lack of decision-making here. 5. Nokia had huge aspirations software-wise, but it had to compete against telco's competing initiatives, while also depending on those telcos for distribution. The way Apple broke that telco model with their brand still amazes me to this day.
Nokia certainly was not perfect, but it didn't lack focus or willpower for the way it understood the market. Apple just did a great job at breaking down telco walled gardens.
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...
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.
The captions are pretty great:
"Image of a man holding a woman and a phone."
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.
More discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721915 (58 comments)
> 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.
I still remember sitting on my mother’s lap and using a Nokia flip phone in the late 2000s. She was teaching me how to use it, and the camera was so cool. When you flipped it open, there was this huge camera right in the middle on the other side of the screen. It looked so futuristic back then. And those oval-shaped phones with rounded edges too. So nostalgic.
It's missing the Booklet 3G. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Booklet_3G
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
Needs more sidetalking.
https://sidetalking.com/original/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Gage
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_379caba7-7356-4d84-8b...
I love whenever this is posted everyone gets so mad about the UI (it is terrible)
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.
Yeah, they used to be way more adventurous with design. Retro-futurism and all that stuff. Now everything just looks so boring.
Ah, back when I was a kid, Nokia phones were the best, with the best sound systems.
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
"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
403 Forbidden
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.
(we've changed the url - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833578)
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 [*generally] 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.
(I just saw this randomly)
Are you saying we should change the link at the top to https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...? I'm a bit unclear...
Edit: I've changed to that from the submitted url (https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html) for now, since that one was 403ing.
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.
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