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Comment by hasmanean | Hacker News Reader

There was also conventional wisdom which had to be abandoned before the iPhone came out.

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.

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I think Apple succeeded because they were outsiders. I worked for a telco 2 years after the iPhone came out and for years I met a lot of people who denied what was happening while it was happening. Because “we know how this works”.

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”.

Nokia N900 was pretty awesome and Maemo was a great OS. Unfortunately killed by internal politics.

On of the big tech letdowns in my life. I was excited about the N900, but to young to really drop that amount of cash on a new fancy phone and I didn't want to buy the first product of the platform.

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.

I'm not sure if I'd call a phone that served me well for a decade a "letdown". There were hardly any phones around worth switching to from N900 for this whole time.

The N900 and Maemo was almost immediately abandoned following launch (<2 Years). Not even Nokia cared

...which didn't matter at all because the community has been doing a pretty good job with CSSU and it was only several years later when it started to truly show its age.

Yes. That just shows how promising it was. But if you only bring out an initial modal and then basically never follow it up, you are simply not competing against competitors who bring out new hard-ware and soft-ware every year and also do hardware-software co-design.

Its nice that it served you personally, but as a platform it was a gigantic bust.

It wasn’t the end, the N9 was the more refined and frankly quite brilliant follow up. Unfortunately they failed to launch it in any major markets because they’d pivoted to Windows.

Had to ship mine from Australia. For me when it launched it was the best phone you could buy. Apple caught up quick though.

Eh, I had one and in the end I just didn't find it that great. It was slow, the resistive touch screen was finicky, and there wasn't good apps or software for it. I remember being in a bar once with a friend and we were racing to get directions on our phone to the next bar we were going to (maps and directions on the phone was a magical thing back then), and his iPhone had the results on google maps before I had managed to finish waking up the phone and loading... Here (?) Maps, or whatever it was called.

In the end, I just gave the thing away to a random HN user[0] (gosh, more than 10 years ago! Wow).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647864

I had a friend who used his N900 as a server at home, with an USB network card and all :D

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.

Oh I remember having a netbook during Maemo times, as a Linux user was really hoping it would succeed and bring a true Linux experience to mobile world

I bought an N800 when the iPhone was new. Figured the extravagant data plan wasn’t important and that the wide (it felt like 18:9!) screen MUST be a better idea for using the web.

Ironically the mobile web was basically built after that, and built specifically for portrait screens!

This also comes out in the Blackberry story. They were like 'AppStore' the Telcos will never allow that.

And Apple just pushed the idea threw and got it done.

I remember being excited by the potential of apps when I heard about Symbian…but some part of me knew that any product named Symbian would never succeed. It’s the type of name you come up with in round 3 of a name-brainstorming session, when the perfect name will only be found in round 10. They obviously gave up too early.

It wasn't so much the name as it was that you needed a special cable and a PC to install one of the dozen or so apps that existed for Symbian phones. (There were probably more, but in all honesty, none of them were worth the cost of the cable).

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.

> 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.

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.

iOS was called "iPhone OS" for the first three years of its life. I don't think operating system names are much of an issue.

> any product named Symbian

I mean, it's almost the name of a sex toy.

When the first iPhone came out I worked for a large regional telco, and you're correct, they did not believe in that thing at all. We where having lunch with one of the sales people and she gave the iPhone three months, something like that, arguing that a new BlackBerry was on the way and once that hit the shelves everyone would forget about the iPhone.

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.

I grew up on the internet in the late 90's and I have to admit I really underestimated how big of an appetite "normies" would develop for being constantly bombarded with "content".

Facebook played a huge role in that. The growth of Facebook happened at the perfect time with the iPhone, where I think they really helped each other grow.

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.

That dovetails nicely with the trends in cameras. When Flickr first started, all of the most popular cameras were DLSRs. Cameraphones were around, but not as common (and Nokia is on that list!). However, as soon as smart phones (iPhones) became popular, they then started to dominate the rankings. In 2010, the iPhone 3G was the most popular camera, with traditional DSLRs right behind. Today, the top 5 are all different models of iPhones.

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...

2024 - https://www.flickr.com/cameras

>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.

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 beautiful thing with the iPhone was that it wasn't a "smartphone" per se, but rather just a beautiful new kind of device and then people would get used to the smart features later. I had a PDA a couple of years before the iPhone and while it was certainly novel to have a digital planner as a teenager the "electronic calendar" or "email on the go" use cases just weren't really big. Listening to music and reading news on the go were great use cases though

I remember when the iPhone came out there were hundreds of articles about how the iPhone was specifically not a smartphone.

Of course it wasn't a smartphone before the App Store update.

No other brand could have had much reach beyond a tiny luxury niche at the price point required to build the iPhone in 2007. It was the iPod that paved the way in the early aughts, when it was quite literally the only way to liberate ones entire Napster hoard from the confines of the minitower. Had the market not been primed by that freak wave incident, those telco execs' predictions might have well become true.

The iPod was key but not for the reason you’re thinking: it wasn’t the device itself as LG and Nokia had devices in 2007 which were pricier (LG’s Prada even beat Apple to the touchscreen market) but rather that the iPod’s dominant status as the prestige music player meant that AT&T wanted the “iPod phone” badly enough that they were willing to give up the control which carrier greed had used to strangle the American smartphone market until that point.

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.

Right, there was a lot of bending over carrier side riding on the waning but still strong "white earbud cables" ad image. Carriers were still dreaming of being able to recreate the glory days of paid SMS I guess. The project that got us from zero cameras in phones to zero phones without cameras in what felt like weeks, MMS, was still pretending to not be quite dead yet.

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.

Thing that people forget is iPhone was not an instant success - the first gen was expensive (for the time, for a phone), it had no app store, no 3G so the internet was slow.

For a time dumbphones were still overselling smartphones.

It got better as mobile internet got quicker and people got used to the shorter batteries.

It also didn't support MMS, so you couldn't send your photos. Unlike every other phone with a camera that existed at the time.

hacker news was already around back then.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1187049600&dateRange=custom&...

funny to read today

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394

Odd that people were concerned about typing in phone numbers.

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.

Apple didn’t make (or design) much of the silicon in the original iPhones, I think?

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).

Nokia phones had a one-week battery life if you weren't using them like a smartphone. We had the Nokia 7650 in our family and if you used it as a camera, the battery life would definitely not be a week.

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.

So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting.

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.

> So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…?

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.

> 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.

Not just 60+% of the price but also upfront access fees for the privilege of being listed. I worked for projects with some decent sized companies and they were interested in phone apps right up until what they saw as a proof of concept project was getting offered terms like $50-80k per carrier just for the privilege of being in the carrier’s store.

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!

BREW. A pox on that pile of crap. Thanks for reminding me about all that, including the Verizon “Get It Now” store. It does actually make me feel less bitter at the somewhat-less-cynical Apple Way that we have now.

People could care less about the app stores 30% cut. Developers care. Even then 90% of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games and whales buying loot boxes and coins.

You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t manage a tear for them.

I can't believe I have to write "developers are people too" on Hacker News.

No one cares about “developers” - I’m one too.

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

On symbian there was an app store before iphones existed.

I agree the user interface was a huge difference, but Nokia did have high spec-ed and priced battery burners like the N95. They even sold quite well, for example over their lifetimes there were 10 million N95s sold and 6 million iPhone 1s.

I mean, presumably because it was the last smartphone Nokia made and Nokia was an established name, whereas the iPhone was new and the iPhone 3G was released after only a year.

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.

iPhone was also only available in the US and only on one carrier (and not the largest one).

N95 was worldwide.

Nokia kept making smartphones after the N95 in the "nseries", such as for example the N900 in 2009. I just mean to say there was appetite for 1 day devices with lots of apps and features before the iPhone came around - keep in mind the iOS appstore was released a year after the iPhone's launch, initially "apps" was a feature on the N95s side.[1]

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/

I think the carrier locking was a very significant factor for comparing early phone sales: you were looking at a hefty easily termination to switch and two year contracts were common so the average American was probably looking at a year before they could switch to any carrier’s exclusive device.

What? Nokia continued to make smartphones.

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...).

The N95 was super awkward to use. It had all the bells and whistles that you could cram into a phone at that point and it all was in small menus under menus under menus etc.

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.

I think that was largely a Symbian thing - having used the Symbian phones before the N95, it felt sensible (and more akin to a desktop OS, with context menus etc)

Nokia had multiple internet tablets running Linux. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet This was developed to a phone os. Nokia didn't do great choices but the criticism could be historical...

You’re literally describing the Nokia N900. 1 days battery, many apps. They did everything, which as the article says was part of the problem.

Mine lasted close to a week on a charge. It was a great device.

Mine still lasts 4 days or so.

That’s impressive. Mine barely lasted a day. Perhaps I had a duff battery.

I had the N900, but I think it was only released 2.5 years after the first iPhone.

I remember this transition and funnily enough, the shorter battery life actually made for better user experience. Before, your battery would run out at some point. It was always kind of unexpected and then you couldn't use your phone. With smartphones, it became easier, because you could (and needed to) just charge it every night and you would be fine. It allowed you to set up a routine.

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