Nokia made too many phones
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Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.
The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though.
Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.
Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off. Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.
Any iPhone could replace its metal housing with an equally strong polymer and become exponentially more difficult to break.
There was a tragic brief era when we might have had synthetic sapphire / "transparent aluminium" screens: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/3/18528920/sec-charges-apple... (sapphire is aluminium oxide)
The 3210 era devices had easily replaceable polymer covers; they definitely did break and scratch, but these operated as disposable ablative shielding for the phone itself. Which also had a much smaller screen that was away from the corners of the device. So what people do nowadays on all of these devices is add third party cases to absorb the everyday wear .. but you can always take the case off for a "dress" phone, which like party or formalwear trades durability for looking good.
The Nokia 1040 (Windows, glass screen) was also pretty good at damage resistance. My wife stuck with hers until the Flash started wearing out round about five years in.
Yeah, but that doesn't help when the phone lands with the glass hitting something. And a heavier metal phone will have accumulated more kinetic energy during the fall than a lighter plastic one, so have a greater probability of shattering the glass.
Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes than anything Nokia ever released. Something as simple as those devices would be much less noticeable if replaced by mood.
You never tried symbian I guess.
Do tell me what kool aid did I drink?
As I read it, "people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users" says not that people who hold the caricature view are kool-aid-drinkers, but that they hold a view of iPhone users as kool-aid-drinkers. So I don't think there was any claim that you drink anything at all. (Though I'm fairly sure you do: At least water, or you'd be dead.)
But arguably Nokia did the same, at the time Nokia was a decent phone even if they had no standards between models - no one else did either. Blackberry found more consistency then lent into the status symbol approach.
I suspect that there's probably a common pattern with brands building a decent product, becoming renowned for that, then becoming more fashion like to play up their new status. Eventually someone else able focusing on the product features over the name steals the market.
There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600, 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique.
Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or whatever color each year so that the few people who care about showing off their latest model can do so.
From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's actually pretty wild!
When you're on top of the industry, you may have a shot at selling lifestyle.
This more analogous to different model years of a car, rather than entirely different car models.
The customer immediately and intuitively understands 14 is better than 13, 15 is better than 14, etc.
The main thing clear to me is that the "mental flow chart" involved in selecting an Apple phone is much, much clearer than it would be for selecting a Nokia.
Apple made almost $200B from iPhone in 2023, for example; per model, even including the older ones, that's an insane revenue per model. Not sure I can think of any other product at that level.
Software did their own thing, design their own and the poor industrial designers tried to keep up.
Apple's secret sauce was proper vertical and horizontal integration so that every design feature was also supported by software.
Sauce: Worked at Nokia in the "let's release 200 phones a year" -times.
Not indulging in the fancy moodboard stuff wouldn't have helped Nokia the tiniest bit.
(edit: reply might have better fit GP directly)
I am a pretty late adopter, but I bought the original iPhone. Totally worth it. Two years later when everyone's phone contract was up, they all got iPhones.
Back in the day, phones would be sold on 12mo contracts. Now, I’m surrounded by people (who are of very sound means) rocking iPhones from 5+ years ago, which are able to function in the tasks most adult phone users care about just as well as a recent model. Friends are passing old iPads down to kids instead of binning.
Quite a humbling experience
Form that did not follow function, phones that looked liked some flashy "original-but-not-really-original" design study straight out of a bachelor's Product Design class.
They could never have invented the iPhone, even if they were organised differently. The culture just wasn't there. The herculean drive to simplify, beautify and improve and NOT ACCEPT HALF-BAKED CRAP that propels Apple is impossible to replicate if it is not part of your DNA and vigorously enforced from the very top.
Nokia wanted to "segment markets", Apple wanted to build the perfect phone.
I made them a cappuccino-themed pinball game. The underlying idea was that when the customer is bored with the autumn colors and fabric edges and whatever, they’re buying the next Nokia for the new experience.
Apple made a phone whose physical form was adaptable to any software experience. They didn’t need to put in a cappuccino pinball on the device because users could get that, and a million other experiences, from the app store, and mold their own experience.
Some parts of Nokia understood this — Symbian was actually a capable smartphone OS under the clunky UI — but the company DNA kept thinking of smartphones as just another feature column for the plastic fantastic market segment games.
They were so unintuitive that some 75% of their coders could not handle strings without severe errors. It did not help that they hired coders directly out of the university (many without a degree yet) and every good coder was promoted to management tasks.
There was no standard to begin with (actually the first release of Symbian and the first C++ ISO standard are pretty close on the timeline), but STL and likes existed.
Then again, Symbian was on the market until 2013, but programming for Symbian always sucked. Especially in the later years, when Nokia completely missed the advent of touchscreens, and tried to keep afloat by throwing Symbian on a touchscreen and seeing if it sticks.
For example, one of the most frequent patterns in touchscreen UI design is an infinite list of views with dynamic data loading and filtering. A lot of use cases fit into this abstraction - social media feeds, storefronts, messaging apps, dictionaries, streaming music players, etc. Android supported this pattern in UI framework from the very beginning and continiously improved it, while Qt's answer at the time was "oh, just write it from scratch".
And the fact that Qt uses highly specific dialect of C++ doesn't really help adoption.
The first Qt version for Symbian was around 4.6, and IIRC QML didn't even exist then. The latest was around 4.8, and it did have QML and Qt Quick, but it was too little, too late.
I know first hand multiple people (some of them my classmates) who decided otherwise and either burned out or quit. The ecosystem was just _horrible_ from the start. The amount of different phone form factors didn't help in the least.
I would like to mention here though that Apple eventually introduced a fair amount of things that Nokia did first with the Nokia N9 (especially once they went buttonless with the iPhone X). Once Nokia had Apple's example to work from, they actually kind of leapt ahead of them for a brief moment, then immediately gave up.
The iPhone X's big splash is easily explained.
Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs.
Somebody at Nokia got something right somewhere along the way? Maybe the engineers? After all presumably the engineers were eating their dogfood.
Yes, for making calls, texting, taking pictures and changing settings, Nokia phones were really nice. The whole games (Java) and apps (WAP) side wasn't the greatest. To be fair, no one had a decent game and app experience until the iPhone and G1 (Android) hit.
Point to where I said snake was novel, or nokia invented snake
This wasn't Nokia, but I believe the experience on their phones was about the same.
The story I heard was that Ericsson had a culture of not handing bad news up the management change unless it was a real problem. Senior management didn't want to be bothered by small details.
By the time they realised it was a massive problem it was too late to buy on the open market and they were forced to spin out the mobile business into a join venture with Sony.
I don't think that was down to "differences in skillsets". It was generic short sighted management that killed Ericsson's handset business and it could just as easily have killed the network infrastructure side of the company if the problem had it happened there first.
If management don't won't accept hearing bad news from their subordinates they won't be told it.
Yes-Men kill you in the long run.
I think you're suffering from a kind of observation bias specific to forums like HN, which have a disproportionate number of people with a chip on their shoulder about defunct tech products and companies. The people who liked Nokia's UI are loud and visible about it, especially when it lets them gripe about Microsoft/Apple/whatever, while the people who didn't like it don't feel the need to talk about it.
You could be generically correct. However I never bought a Nokia and I haven't used one much. I am not a Nokia apologist.
I lived through the period, and I'm commenting on what I saw at the time. Sometimes there are fans of a product or brand for good reasons.
Perhaps one of Nokia's major skills was familiarity between their models - especially for keeping the same menu structure and keyboard shortcuts. Familiarity is a powerful force. Oh, and they reliably worked - a definite plus!
I did own mobiles from other manufacturers and I have the scars from dealing with their (edit) painful UIs (Sony, Kyocera*, Motorola, Dell). A keypad and small screen (or worse a one-line numeric display) create some difficult constraints.
Cordless and Voip phones proudly continued the tradition of crappy handset UIs well into the age of iPhone.
* I loved my Kyocera Palm Pilot phone - there was even a LISP App that you could program a simple UI in -magic! Although my first love was an Atari Portfolio DOS handheld (not a phone): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio
It's just that consumers wanted the big screen over everything else.
N95 photos still look decent even by today's standards, the original iPhone was a potato in comparison.
* 5MP camera with an amazing lens and dedicated shutter button
* 8GB(?) of flash and dedicated music controls
* Internet Hotspot
* Copy and paste (zing!)
I loved it then and yet I was still awful at making use of its potential.
Everyone has their silo'ed version of SIP plus a few extra features resold & repackaged as something unique and new to the market.
Trying to use the browser on the N95 was difficult it was slow to load pages and the reformatting was barely usable most of the time. Everything was high latency even on wifi.
With the iPhone it didn't really reformat websites so much as allow you to render it normally and then zoom and centre on to the bit you wanted to read. This was pre-responsive web design so everything stayed roughly the same as a desktop screen layout.
That and the multi-touch screen were the bits that made it superior enough for me to swap by the time the iPhone 3G came out.
Nokia 3310 was great for it's use case.
But then someone else invented the steam engine. Hard to go back to horses.
That said, S40 was being used on feature phones for more than a decade (from Nokia 7110 in 1999 up to Nokia 515 from 2013), so it spanned across multiple UI generations and while it was very successful initially, at the end of its lifespan it didn't do particularly well when put on models with big touchscreens.
Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading.
But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also.
Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it.
That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet.
Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic
2: https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg
There's no Symbian on that phone. Symbian was pretty much a smartphone OS that didn't really show up on feature phones. It had a full-blown WebKit browser, native apps, multitasking, productivity suites... you could even install Python interpreter and play with writing apps this way on Symbian phones from around that time (which is what I kept borrowing my mom's E65 for). Later versions even had Qt built-in.
Nokia 2600 Classic used one of the iterations of Series 40. Looking at the videos, it indeed appears rather slow on this phone.
At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.
Secondly that Nokia model was just a nice piece of hardware that was easy to use without unnecessary complexity. Plus if you turned off the ringer it would buzz and hop around on the table like a small but enraged weasel. It was hard not to feel affection for it.
Edit: typo
Basically the definition of indestructible shifted. Back then it was obvious the phone won’t work after such an immersion. And indestructible meant that with proper care it could be restored to working condition. Today it is more of an exception when a phone dies under the same treatment.
but they also had their normal phones with broad appeal, and could make a good business out of mood-board variants of them. if they didn't make a business out of selling the 3310 in the current season's fashionable colours, they'd have been doing something wrong.
I still think that the wheel (navi-roller) they introduced with 7710 [1] was revolutionary and they should have used it in other phones they made.
(Some brand names to search for are Rollermouse, Mousetrapper, Optapad, andErgoslider.)
It was an extremely cool input device, particularly for navigation.
At an industrial design conference in Gothenburg (spring 2005 iirc) I met a senior designer from Nokia around that time, he had a doctorates in ergonomics and interaction design. He lamented that he was not allowed to so any user interface work, only do the aesthetics. Management from up far had decided that design was only about what it looked like, form was not allowed to work with function.
There is a still a strong market for luxury mens' mechanical wristwatches as jewelry. But I expect that will gradually die off as the population of men who grew up wanting a Rolex dies off.
...Microsoft did a hostile takeover with the help of an "ex"-Microsoft Elop being appointed Nokia CEO? Might I say, MS and Nokia eloped.
Oh, and cancelled the very much beloved Linux-based handset without even advertising it.
Think about the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Worked for Apple, though. (Oh how I hate Apple-made software.)
The oh-so-"intuitive" iOS, with all it's fucking impossible-to-remember swiping gestures this way and that. Aaaargh! Unfortunately Android has been going the same way for the last half a decade or so. :-(
(And Sailfish -- or whatever it's called nowadays -- looked like a contender at first, but then it swiftly marched into the swipey bog.)
Nokia phones had 1 week battery life. They were extending it to one month.
The iPhone had a < 1 day battery life. Ultimately consumers decided that given the app experience available on the iPhone they could live with that.
This was a bet Nokia would have never made—-they were not in the user interface business. The fact that Apple—who was not in the phone business—-entered their market was bonkers. But once you make your own silicon anything is possible. Plus they had already done the iPod.
The conventional wisdow that had to be abandoned was that a phone was a brick that you had in your pocket and that did text messages and phone calls, instead of it being a computer that you might sometimes use for text messages and phone calls.
I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants.
There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support.
Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.
Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.
I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house.
> Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.
> Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.
Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.
The now-hotly-debated 30% cut was seen as a reprieve from telco distribution and brick-and-mortar, where the retailer was taking 60-70% of the purchase price.
This is still better than when Qualcomm was hawking their mobile Java BREW platform around the turn of the century. We had a mid-tier brewery interested in trying a product locator but Qualcomm wasn’t willing to budge on terms which included a percentage of their total gross revenue – they were still insisting on seeing tax filings up until we walked away!
You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t manage a tear for them.
The things that developers want is often orthogonal to what end users want.
1. End users have never said “it would be great to have PWAs so we can have the same lowest common denominator for our phones that we have with electron apps on the desktop”
2. End users have never said “we really want a ‘relationship’ with the developer so they can spam us with related offers”
3. “I feel so bad that Epic and other companies who spam the App Store could get 30% more for selling loot boxes and gems for pay to win games” - this is where 90% of App Store revenue comes from. It came out in the epic trial
15 years ago a lot of telco execs thought smart phones would be a small niche for the next 10 years. And would play only a minuscule role in “emerging markets”.
But then it just sort of died. There was one more release but by then it was clear where it was going. It wasn't even released widely.
Such a sad end.
Its nice that it served you personally, but as a platform it was a gigantic bust.
Had to ship mine from Australia. For me when it launched it was the best phone you could buy. Apple caught up quick though.
In the end, I just gave the thing away to a random HN user[0] (gosh, more than 10 years ago! Wow).
The N950 was a lot better and even the N9 had its moments. But like the GP said, both were killed by internal politics and the move to Windows Mobile. Which eventually tanked their whole mobile phone business unit.
Ironically the mobile web was basically built after that, and built specifically for portrait screens!
And Apple just pushed the idea threw and got it done.
In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. It wasn't your pocket computer back then - it was the phone that isn't tethered to the wall. People just didn't spend a lot of time obsessing over it.
I remember pointing out to someone at Nokia that perhaps the app install experience should be streamlined a bit. His response was something along the lines "well, there isn't much call for third party applications on mobile phones" and then went on to explain how it is silly to develop a more streamlined download and install experience until a clear demand for third party apps materializes.
That would be good, because the vast majority of Nokia phones ran S40 rather than Symbian-based S60.
Symbian appeared in lower-end phones only at the very end with Symbian^3. Earlier it was pretty much exclusively used in higher-end and business-oriented models.
Also, I'm pretty sure that all you needed to install either .sis packages (on S60) or .jad apps (on both S40 and S60) was the built-in browser, and it was already like that since at least Nokia 3410.
I mean, it's almost the name of a sex toy.
Fun detail, one of my coworkers where tasked with implementing the unlocking feature, customers could either pay to have their iPhone unlocked or was entitled to after six months. He absolutely hated Apples API, which seemed weird, because it was totally reasonable, just really secure and radically different than anything else in the telco world.
Zuckerberg said Photos was the killer app inside of Facebook that really made it blow up. Smart phones are the perfect device to feed photo sharing sites.
One comment I remember (but don't remember when/where I read it) was that the best camera was the one you already had with you. If you want to take a picture, but don't have a camera, you're out of luck. But when you carry a smart phone around with you at all times, that becomes your go-to camera.
2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20061123164557/http://flickr.com...
2010 - https://web.archive.org/web/20100130213746/http://www.flickr...
This is something I’ve heard (and said) a lot. Probably why you don’t remember exactly where you heard it. I’m guessing it’s a pretty old adage.
The camera phone, and more so the smartphone, really changed photography.
One of my favorite pictures is one I took on a crap flip phone, it’s 352x288. It’s a garbage quality shot, and I wish it was better, but in an age before camera phones, it wouldn’t have existed at all. Getting it off the phone also required deliberate effort, where it’s now just a couple taps to send it out to the whole world.
The high price of cellular data plans is the most obvious factor - people used to fear letting an app use more data than they expected and getting hundreds of dollars in overage charges – but the other thing was the lack of AT&T control of the device. The carriers used to put ugly skins, disable features which competed with their paid services, lower call quality to serve more devices per cell tower, or use huge percentages of your device storage for undeletable bundled promos, but worst of all was how apps were sold. You didn’t have standard terms but “call us” agreements negotiated with each carrier, with high entry fees and percentages based on your company’s total revenue. There were exceptions like the Treo and (IIRC) Windows CE devices which allowed arbitrary app installs but a lot of devices were locked down by the carrier, and the combination of market fragmentation, limited access, and expensive data meant that not many people were even attempting to write apps. Even if money was no object there just wasn’t enough of a supply.
An interesting perspective. From that angle it looks very much like the "not a smartphone because no apps" wasn't Apple not being ready yet, but Apple deliberately pretending to get a foot in the door.
For a time dumbphones were still overselling smartphones.
It got better as mobile internet got quicker and people got used to the shorter batteries.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1187049600&dateRange=custom&...
funny to read today
I had written a visual basic program when I was a school kid to dial using the modem and avoid having to remember phone numbers. Smartphones didn't exist at the time.
Also I had a friend who had an iphone and claimed that the assisted writing was as fast as typing on a computer keyboard. So we raced. I won, by far.
In other words, it didn't sell more because it was actually viable competition. It sold more because of brand momentum and because it was on sale for longer.
N95 was worldwide.
Also while the N95 stuck around for a while, the N95 did sell more rapidly than the first iPhone. Assuming the dates Wikipedia uses are accurate the N95 reached 7 million units at the end of 2007 after being released in March of that year, and then 10 million by end of Q1 2008. The iPhone was released June 2007 and discontinued July 2008 and sold 6.1 million units. That being said availability of the first iPhone was limited outside the US and it was limited to Cingular, and the N95 wasn't sold via carriers in the US.
[1]https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-iphone-vs-nokia-n95/
There was Nokia N96, N97, N8 (which was nice), N900, Nokia 5800... Let alone N9. There was also Nokia 808, which used basically the same camera sensor as Lumia 1020.
(will exclude here the Windows Phone devices of course...).
N95 being a best seller was one of the reasons why Nokia was so sure that iPhone would fail. It lulled them into false security and proved to them that things were going great.
I happened to review the N95 and it felt horrible after seeing Jobs demoing the iPhone prototype. Couldn't believe for a second that the Nokia's way would work out with S60 series and was super surprised to hear N95 was selling really well.
Of course iPhone would gather steam for a couple of years before getting good enough but still.
They didn’t use their own SoC for six years; it was a custom order Samsung before that.
And oddly enough the (pre Touch) iPod wasn’t their chip or even their embedded OS. It was a thir party OS called Pixo that they perpetually licensed (or bought, it’s not clear from the outside; it may have been merely developed under contract, but Pixo had specific visible credits in the original iPod UI)
I am not saying that Apple don’t make entirely different product and hardware bets (and I have to say I think it’s a shame there aren’t more battery-life-optimising competitors, but the bright screens and the flashy UIs always win; see Pebble).
I'm not sure I agree with this take - it seems to be based on the idea of comparing Nokia phones to something like the iPhone. But at the time these phones were all made, the experience of using a phone was:
- Answer or reject incoming calls with the "answer/decline" button
- Read and send messages using the screen and keyboard
- That's basically it
Nokia created so many freaky looking phones, in part at least, because they were just phones, and the narrowness of their use meant the novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility. I don't see any evidence that they (or anyone other than apple) even considered the possibility of an "app ecosystem" - so criticising them for not making one viable seems a little leftfield.
Take something like the iPhone - all of the sudden you're not looking at a phone but instead a touch screen computer someone can use for banking, messaging, browsing, shopping etc. Supporting all those different use cases provides way more contraints on Apple's design than Nokia ever needed to consider.
Which is a really long way of saying, Nokia phones where just a different category of things to iPhones, and we shouldn't compare them.
I don't remember app stores or game downloads existing up until iPhone and Android, let alone being profitable.
There was MIDP and J2ME, but they were so niche, and I'm only aware of them because of an practical course during university, circa 2008.
But maybe your regional context is different from mine (Germany).
Like that fucking "Amazon Prime" (or something) button on my TV remote control, which does absolutely nothing except every now and then, when I press it by mistake, send me into an app I've never used and will in all probability never use.
My regional context is Poland, but it couldn't have been much different in Germany - otherwise I wouldn't see a service exactly like that being parodied at last Chaos Communication Camp by... actually deploying a working SMS service on the camp's GSM network:)
In my case, I got the weird Nokia (3650?) with the round, rotary phone-layout of the numbers because it would reliably sync contacts with my Mac at the time and could be used as a cellular modem.
The novelty design was... not great. But the usability was exactly what I needed.
Except they weren't and we should.
Nokia had very popular feature phones with S40 and that's what most people likely remember about it, but it was also a huge player on the smartphone market with Symbian - and those smartphones were proper pocket computers with native apps, web browser, multitasking, messaging etc. years before iPhone. As a teenager I have myself played with Python on a Nokia E65 months before the first iPhone was released.
Pretty much the only thing they lacked compared to the first iPhone was a touchscreen (even though Nokia made some attempts years before as well, see Nokia 7710 for example). iPhones didn't even let you install apps at that point (that ability only came in 2nd gen), and let's not even talk about multitasking. Nokia smartphones were doing that for years at that point.
Also, let's not forget that Nokia N800 with Maemo was initially supposed to be a smartphone, and that was already before the iPhone as well. It ended up not being one because of internal politics between Maemo and Symbian teams, so the first actual Maemo phone (rather than merely an "Internet Tablet") was N900 two years later. As a "touch screen computer", iPhone was laughable compared to Maemo.
Nokia lost to Android, not Apple. iPhone merely acted as a catalyst, and certainly did not define a new "device category" in any technical sense. It accelerated trends that caused regular people to start moving from feature phones to smartphones (a market segment that was previously reserved to high-end and business-class models), at which point Nokia was already left behind by Android.
If anything, iPhones harmed Nokia indirectly by making Google redesign Android's UI before it first shipped, while Nokia was too busy enjoying its market leader position and in-fighting to notice what was going on around them.
The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and keys there was less to design anyway.
Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.
if only they can copy iphone fast enough they would be a "samsung" what is today
Then, if I recall correctly, they went with Windows, so every move was forcing their users into a lonely corner.
Also elop.
What they missed was a move from hardware centric world to software centic. The attempts with Linux etc were too little too late.
Hardware problems are low dimensional ones…”optimize this variable (usually clock speed), make this block functionally correct.”
Software problems are high dimensional ones, especially the problem of designing an API the community will adopt. “What set of functions can I provide that will do X…and a subset of X…and a potential superset of X, on hardware generation H and H+1 and so on…all while taking security and OS privilege levels into account…” Oh and we must bow to aesthetics and programmer fashion as well as getting stuff into their hands as fast as possible…plus tools and documentation…plus outcompete everybody else in the world trying to steal the same devs as us.
Sw is what it is because it has so many degrees of freedom.
In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone.
Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular OS to being the secondary manufacturer for the third best supported OS. And not trusted by users to provide any continuity.
I still wish I’d kept my W910i. Unreliable software that would reboot randomly, but a surprisingly sturdy piece of kit that survived many drops and skids. And it was the best camera I had for a while, delivering a wonderful 2MP.
Then they were supplanted by early non-Android Samsung phones with the bad touchscreens, then by 2012 everyone had either an iPhone or Android.
It was only the space of a few years but seemed much longer back then!
Funny that a few years before that I was a big Palm/Clie enthousiaste, so the idea of "all screen no keyboard" wasn't new to me. Yet I gave up after Tungsten T5 and stayed with just Sony Ericssons for several years with no desire to but a PDA or smartphone.
I miss the jog-dial ones. At least, I remember it very fondly but I would probably hate it now.
Because so much is software-based now, my counter would be that most companies that would have died because they failed to get their software operation in order have already done so.
And I'd also question the "killing it at software" statement: remember that Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone, you've got to go to the product iteration before to make the dates line up) was catastrophically hamstrung by an inability to ship anything decent. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device myself, and it was rubbish. They were so focused on making it so you could run a spreadsheet on your phone that they forgot the thing had to be usable. The OS wasn't actually much good until post 6.5, well after the iPhone launch, and they never got to release the iteration that would have brought it up to scratch. They realised very late that they needed to focus on consumers, not businesses, because they could see that businesses would and did buy consumer devices if they were good enough, but the reverse would almost never happen. Once the iPhone was released and they realised how wrong they'd been they made a hard pivot to get Metro out, but they were starting from a very long way behind.
More evidence against "killing it at software": this was the Windows Longhorn/Vista era. We all know how that went. Microsoft managed to survive for a long time on desktop and office suite monopoly momentum without being able to stick the landing on very many releases at all, compared to how much activity was going on. Even though the launches would go OK they'd often get killed later by internal politics. That was actually the era that got me to swear off the Windows ecosystem: you'd learn enough of an exciting new product to be useful, only for it to get sidelined with no updates a couple of months later. It was just exhausting. Half of me thinks that MS was lucky to survive Ballmer at all.
What? Blue screens of death. Malware. ctrl shift del being known by lay people. People being able to use the excuse that their Windows computer is randomly updating as a reason they cannot do the work they want to do. Not being able to create/edit/sign pdfs without downloading sketchy 3rd party programs.
Amount of time spent being tech support for family members when they were all using Windows computers was magnitudes more than the amount of time spent being tech support for family members after they switched to MacBook Airs (10+ years ago).
I am not saying Microsoft is bad at software, but certainly would not claim they kill it at consumer facing OS.
Microsoft now is successful because of cloud and working with cooperations. Not because they made the best OS. Their Microsoft Mobile wasn't very impressive. And their second attempt was ok, but very late.
The were gifted a monopoly by IBM so they constant fuckups that cost them many millions or billions of $ couldn't kill them off like it could other companies.
Taking full advantage of a monopoly isn't the same as being actually good. The beat their office competitors by leveraging their OS monopoly with very cheap bundling deals. They spun the OS monopoly into a 3D interface near-monopoly that made games only work on their platform. The list goes on.
Samsung makes like, the same amount. Xiaomi probably even more.
The thing is, if you are in a developed country, you are not seeing half of Samsung phones. They launch a lot of cheaper/middle range phones on emerging market.
If you want to be successful at emerging markets, you basically need a lot of phones. Because you can't put everything on a $180 device. So instead, the company create several $180 devices aimed at different people.
I have always wondered how a large company like Apple, with 161,000 employees operating in basically every market in the world, can maintain that level of focus.
more importantly, now they treat older models as the lower segment SKU that they continue selling for many years to come. not to forget the even older SKUs that resellers offer in developing countries that come from somewhere. so realistically they got 8-10 SKU actively sold in their own stores, before you consider special "red" editions etc.
to me this is not much different from the developing countries getting some budget SKU from the likes of Samsung and even Nokia in their heyday.
Well, here is one take;
> Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on. [1]
[1] https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did...
https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...
They were beaten by RIM/BB
They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-f...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/blackberry/8688651/Lo...
In retrospect, a better idea than giving out your phone number as WhatsApp requires. And indeed, people were more willing to share BBM pins than phone numbers.
Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.
Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities.
Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.
Japan and the US were both countries with their own weird mobile phone markets. The US market was not as relevant in the 2000s as it should have been. Mobile phone adoption was lower than in Europe and the plans were ridiculously expensive, mostly because of the dominant business model. The plan was the primary product and the phone was a generic device locked to the plan, making the market uninteresting for phone manufacturers.
I don't know if I've ever seen a Blackberry phone knowing that it's a Blackberry phone. Blackberries always sounded like the Atari ST: a device you constantly heard about but never saw in the real world. And when I saw some statistics much later, I was surprised how popular it had been in the US.
> I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
https://www.engadget.com/2011-02-08-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo
When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks.
One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people dev.
They were also the biggest player in Finland. The best logistics. The most market share. They had so many devs in their rollodex. Clearly, they could ship an iPhone killer. Clearly they understood everything about mobile and knew everyone. They even had a cloud project (Ovi) that predated iCloud.
I remember meeting them back in the NGage days and thinking who are these clowns making a portrait screen for games, with no dpad, and a phone you hold sideways. No focus on apps (Palm and other handheld had plenty of homebrew and emulators).
The company was a juggernaut that could ship the old Nokia bricks, but never adapt to be good at software, or have a good mobile OS.
It's a shame, because honestly the best industrial design and UX people I've seen were there.
Having to remove the battery to swap out games was too much for me.
Although 10 years ago they said that 56 models a year were too much [0], they still released ~52 in 2022 [1]
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/samsung-decides-56-smartphones-a-year-is-too-many-will-cut-lineup-by-30/
[1]: https://thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=3574At its peak Nokia manufactured more than one phone per second, 24/7/365. I bet there were more than 57 models.
While I love the N9, by that point it would have been hard to compete with Android. Just as it was hard for Microsoft.
Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones.
Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke phone products based on several internal platforms. They were doing dozens a year. S30 (not Symbian) for their still popular simple phones. S40 (also not Symbian) for their flip phones and other multi media phones. S60 (that one was Symbian) for their consumer oriented smart phones. S80 (also Symbian) for their business phones. Later, S80 and S60 kind of merged and they did a range of phones clearly intended to compete with the black berry. Meanwhile they were making unreasonable amounts of money with S40 covering a wide range of form factors as well as weird luxury phones intended for billionaires.
And then they had a few experimental things. Notably a thing called Maemo that shipped in 2006 (2 years before the iphone, and even longer before Android and the ipad) that was a Debian Linux based touch screen tablet running a modern browser (mozilla) that you could update via apt-get. Amazing stuff. Except (on purpose) it lacked phone hardware so as to not piss off the operators. Those absolutely hated phones they could not control and bastardize and they would frustrate attempts to get new firmware approved.
That's the platform they messed up. Because management thought the future was all the other stuff they were selling by the bucket loads. As it turned out, Motorola flip phone clones were not the future and blackberry did not make it either. And S60 once it pivoted back to touch screen phones (they killed S90 which was supposed to do that) proved to be simply inadequate. So, they dragged their heels on Maemo and declined to ship anything resembling a competitive phone based on it until after the damage had been done by Apple and Google. This was not because of technical limitations but because of indecisiveness, lack of vision, and misguided ideas about how to compete.
The mistake Nokia made was having management without any clue whatsoever about software development while the market was pivoting towards generic rectangular slabs dominated by their software experience. They were hardware and radio specialists headed by a CEO who was a glorified bean counter without a clue.
Early Android and Iphone devices weren't much to look at in terms of hardware. And they were so fragile, you'd cover them up in some fugly cover anyway. Very different than Nokia devices which proved highly resilient against daily abuse. I never broke a phone before I got a Nexus. And then I broke 3 in a row. It was the software that made the difference and the mistake Nokia made was being perpetually indifferent about the software they had. They'd happily ship unfinished or broken software. Or outdated forks of software they had improved for other models with serious bugs and regressions. And without OTA, updating was hard.
Android borrowed heavily from Maemo. Same kernel. Early test devices were Nokia N800s. Nokia was fixing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem to make these devices run efficient. Unlike Nokia, Google was laser focused on getting Android done. That was when they could still get things done. Arguably, they've lost that ability. Nokia could have had an Android killer in the market years before Google got around to shipping Android; before the iphone launched. Declining to do that was what killed Nokia. It had everything needed to do this. Except leadership that understood it needed doing.
Nokia tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing. They could not compete with the joint assault by iPhone and Android.
Nokia never understood the less-is-more thing that Apple are so good at. Hundreds of phones and an overcomplicated OS wuth political and technical problems - Symbian - were the result, not the cause, of a company that lacked focus and direction.
The last version, the one on the Lumias, was actually quite OK on a phone from all I've heard -- and living in Finland, I knew more than a few people who used those back in the day.
That's preciely why Windows 8 sucked so much on the desktop; it was intended to have as much as possible of the look-and-feel of Windows Phone. Windows 8 sucked on computers; apparently not so much on phones.
One of my all time favorite phones was the sidekick ii. Such a fun phone with character.
Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually run on the things was a different matter...
Nokia made great phones during the mid/late 2000s. The N9 was a piece of beauty that continued to have a more cohesive and thought out experience than Android (and even iOS, in some ways) well into the mid 2010s. It was simply a joy to use.
Why Nokia then fell apart might have a little something to do with Stephen Elop and Microsoft, I suspect.
Why Nokia fell apart is because they didn't take the iPhone or Android seriously, repeatedly would say things like "nobody is going to spend $400 on a phone after subsidy", and had tremendous infighting over Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows - tons of engineers and management absolutely didn't want to learn the new thing.
And then, Microsoft, not wanting to pour billions of dollars into what was already becoming a bitter duopoly fight, gave up.
I have an N9 and an labeled windows phone dev kit from post-nokia on my shelf, both devices I used for a year+. They were fantastic.
N900 with its Maemo was pretty good phone. Too bad Nokia could not develop on the success. Then they have MeeGo and then the disastrous Windows Phone. MS had the same problem with Windows Mobile - Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8.
15 years later, the Debian + Firefox + APT platform on which N900 was based is still alive and requires surprisingly few maintenance. If they went with it they will have a solid, hassle-free platform which could compete with early Android, especially as they could easily make it run Android apps as well.
Customer: I have $1,000 burning a hole in my pocket and want to buy your laptop right now!
Dell: Whoooa there, buddy, hold on. First tell me if you're a Small Business so I know what site to send you to...
Looking at the Nokia-era models, none of them support LTE so they're basically worthless these days. People are still trying to sell them on eBay for 100s, though. What a waste.
Perhaps compared with today, but these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally.
Global network technology wasn't as homogenous as now. Phones were usually sold by the phone networks who had specific requirements - technical and marketing. Different phones were also used to price phones differently around the world - from rural Africa to the rich west.
Yeah, they had like 4 "established" operating systems and on top of that some experimental OSes that only came out on a model or two and changed every year.
Can't make a smart platform with apps when you have 7 current platforms.
Their legacy for ever will be the unbreakable and no need to charge phone.
How come this is the future? It's freaking boring.
Compare that to today, when every single phone out there is an awkwardly huge glass slab with minor design variations on the back side.
> it also made it almost impossible to create an app market.
All those Nokia phones form two categories in terms of the software they ran: the firmware that was basically the same across all Nokia non-smart phones (S40 it was called IIRC?), and Symbian. Both were capable of running J2ME apps, and Symbian also supported native ones.
It's disputable whether Nokia was a master in logistics, in fashion/design or in RF-technology or all of them.
However, it's undisputed that they did not master software. Management had no idea about software development, the tooling was awkward. Well, and for OSes, Symbian was from another decade, Linux too little, introduced too slowly because management believed in Symbian being the cash cow.
It worked as long as phones were manufactured in their own factories with high margins. Once manufacturing was outsourced to low cost countries and software became more important, they were lost.
Disclaimer: I was a software developer there for 10 years, but understood to leave well before the bitter end.
The sheer amount of phones available didn't help either, there were just so many of them you could not remember them all.
Not that other manufacturers are any better than this, Apple is the only one that sort of gets this right, though I wish they used their normal numbering scheme for the SE models.
Samsung does the same for their TVs and appliances but at least they got it right with their phones: there's a "public" model name (for example, the Galaxy S23 Ultra) that is sequential and gives you a good idea of where exactly the phone sits in their line up. And then a model name that encodes the region specific variant (for example, SM-S912W for my S23U).
However, I do remember the first time my wife got an iPhone. Her Nokia was breaking down and she was trying to decide which Nokia would replace it. She spent a week comparing models. In the end she said “fuck this” and got an iPhone.
What’s really funny was that Malcolm Gladwell did a TED talk about the importance of segmenting the shit out of markets - just as the market pushed back and demonstrated he was talking nonsense.
What warzone had she been to? I remember dropping my old Nokia down a stairwell once. When I fetched it there was a crack - in the tile floor!
Of course this was one of the older models, I think the marketing material included the phrase "supports SMS!" or something to that effect.. Good times!
My phone of choice in those days were the tiny Sony-Ericsson phones. I really liked the K750i and before that the T610. Not as rugged as the Nokias, but smaller and nicer.
I'm struggling to remember the model name of the absolute unit of a phone I dropped down that stairwell, but it was older than the 3310 at least(I later replaced it with the smaller and lighter 3310)
As I read it that was pretty much exactly what it said.
Every modern marketeer knows it's all about making 1 thing and convincing the idiot herd that this is _the_ thing.
Twerk tick has been a really big help with that...
They paid the price for part of that (the Symbian platform was never really unified so much as it was shared to smithereens), but they were notable in what they did.
I admire their hardware innovation and I think it’s sad we lost it.
My Nokia E61 is still one of my favourite past handsets (Sony’s second version of the Xperia Mini Pro, the iPhone X and the stunning Siemens S35 are the others). And now I probably gave away who I am to at least one person who knows me here.
But developing for Symbian was convoluted, very painful and slow. And it slowed down Nokia itself not to mention the 3rd party/external app developers. There was no reasonable way to fix Symbian as these issues stemmed from the very foundations. One of them being memory management, the other probably cooperative multitasking and callbacks. But the memory management thing was all over the code (think string handling, so everywhere) and it made using existing software hard too. Linux would have been the way to go, one way or another. Sure, they would have to have rebuilt most things for that platform but e.g. webkit would have been a no-brainer and they could have used a lot of existing open source software.
My old Nokia E65 was amazing design-wise and the best phone I had.
A company makes lots of different types of product, constantly iterating and experimenting with wild ideas: Should have made fewer products.
You can't win, I guess.
There were shops at the time who would change the green led to blue and swap the case to convert a lower end model to a more expensive one.
Too many for what? Would you really want the history of mobile phones to be merely the antiseptic aesthetic and walled garden of the iPhone? Why do you think people are buying folding phones, flip phones, phones with screens on the front and the back.
So they ultimately failed, so what? The vast majority of companies of all sizes fail after some time.
Sure, there were Symbian phones that could functionally do almost anything smartphones can do now (and do more than the first iPhone) but those weren't for everyone and those didn't use touch screens so there were multiple form factors. Like the full keyboard communicators (9210, 9300/9500), the Blackberry clone (E61, I think), the slide keyboard (7650?) and then all the non-Symbian phones (S40 OS, IIRC). And, of course cameras were new and shitty so not every phone had them.
Now this could have caused a problem in itself and what the article says about the organization could also cause problems but (I keep saying this when this topic comes up) the real problem was that the Nokia management was too convenient/coward and didn't dare to switch away from Symbian. Especially since they have bought out Erinsson and Sony (again, IIRC), their former partners in the Symbian consortium in ~2004/5.
There were eperiments with a linux based phone OS around that time. They created the Nokia 770 "internet tablet" [1] which was this PDA-like touch screen device with a landscape screen layout, a pen, and a removable front cover. Obviously it was an experiment (and later followed by the 810 then the 900, the latter being a phone). However no one in the management was brave enough to give a linux phone a go. Especially not committing to a strategy to switch over to linux. Symbian phones were selling great, Nokia was the market leader and you can't really do better than that...
I remember, at one point, one team in the Helsinki office of NRC (Nokia Research Center) was coming up with the idea of creating a "unified architecture" (called the "Grand Unified Architecture") where they would create a uniform platform around the 3 operating systems: a linux based one, Symbian S60 and the (non-Symbian) S40. The genius idea was that they'd create a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) then above that would be one of the 3 OSs and above those would be a uniform API that could be used by all app developers. This would have been a great strategy to side-step an actual decision but other than that didn't make any sense, really. (Maybe you could argue back then that the S40 hardware was not capable of running linux, but there was no excuse for trying to keep both Symbian and linux while hiding them below a uniform API.) So the switch to linux never happened and Symbian was a pain in the ass to develop for. Just concatenating two strings took several lines of code in their C++-based API that hasn't even looked like actual C++. And this made developing in-house software slow and made 3rd party software pretty scarce.
Nokia also had an aversion towards touch screens. One of the reasons must have been that back then only resistive touch screens were available (I think the oroginal iPhone was the first phone with a capacitive one, i.e. one that was an actual touch screen and not a press/push screen). The other reason must have been Symbian (and the S60 skin) that was really not designed for touch screen and was hard to develop.
So Nokia just continued to enjoy being the market leader with the management not taking the risk to try to switch direction. And then the iPhone came and then Android came (who, after seeing an iPhone demo, very quickly changed direction because at first they thought they were competing with Blackberry, so their UI was similar to that and maybe Symbian).