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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest mistake in their engineering execution was skimping on the specs of their phones. For example, the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen, 433Mhz ARM11 processor, and without a GPU (they already had GPUs in some earlier models). N97 would have been a "decent" phone with modern specs, and bought them more time to innovate in software.

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Yep that was one their problems. Bought an used Sony Ericsson P800 running UIQ and used it for years because it had ten times more ram than new Nokia Symbian phones in 2005-2007. Something like 10 MB vs 128. Of course the UIQ system was iPhone of the early 2000s but quite few noticed it and in Finland everybody were chanting Nokia Nokia Nokia.

EDIT: Forgot to say that few earlier Nokia models had accelerated GPU but the OS and the developers didn't use those, so they just stopped adding the GPUs later on ;D

A colleague who worked with some early Ericsson smart/feature phones told me they had a model with dual processors. Then they designed a cheaper version of it, and cut costs by dropping one cpu. It turned out the interprocessor communication added so much overhead, the cheaper model ran faster.

Oh man, I remember I wanted to get a P910. Interesting phone line, that was.

The UX design of the P* line and M600 was really something at the day. The last ones P1i and M600 started converting more and more of the UI to finger touch instead of stylus control. And it ran so smoothly on nowadays obsoleted hardware <3

the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen

I had a similar experience working with another company. It was after the iPhone was available. But they still wanted to support a resistive screen in a high end product that wouldn't debut until years later.

I just couldn't believe the cognitive dissonance. Once the iPhone screen appeared, resistive screens were deader than Kurt Cobain. People in the trenches understood it clearly. But somehow top management either didn't get the memo or managed to rationalize it away.

To this day I strongly prefer N900's resistive screen than any other capacitive screen when it comes to mobile phones.

While it's easy to find crappy resistive screens, and in such case capacitive ones clearly win, I definitely wouldn't replace N900's screen with one from iPhone - it'd feel like a downgrade for me.

I did a quick search. Apparently the N900 can't handle multi-touch[1], which is a big advantage of capacitive screens.

I'd really miss that feature of the iPhone if it were taken away. Presumably the N900 has alternative ways of implementing equivalent features.

[1] https://www.starryhope.com/15-ways-nokias-n900-is-better-tha...

Yes. Personally I don't really miss it, but it would still be nice to have. However, multitouch resistive screens exist, and even most of the older singletouch ones can simulate basic multitouch gestures like pinching, swiping or rotating (which is what Neo900 wants to do using original N900 digitizer).

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