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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

I bought my dad a Nokia phone in 2008. A dumb phone, with just texting and calling features. It continues to work to this day, so, 17 years (the markings on the buttons are fully erased now, other than that it works). It outlived him. I don't know how they managed to build stuff like that. I would expect some electronic part to fail sometime along the way.

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Well, I can tell you how: rigorous testing.

I worked for Nokia (briefly, just before Eloppification) and I remember being told that when the iPhone launched everyone laughed because there was no way that the battery could last more than a day, there was no app store back then, no flash, no high-speed data (2G) and it failed every single one of the internal tests that Nokia had.

Yet, people didn’t care, obviously - and the iPhone is the model for nearly all phones today.

I get bent out of shape about this, the same way I get bent out of shape about the death of small phones and modular laptops; but people vote with their wallets and if the market was large enough for both to exist then there would be better options; yet it seems like there’s not.

People seem to care much more about capacitive touch screens, large displays, hungry CPUs, incredible post-processing of cameras (and great camera sensors) than they do about being drop proof, having stable software or battery life.

Features > Stability ; to most people. (and, how do you put stability on a spec sheet for tech youtubers to care about or savvy consumers trying to buy the best “value” they can; build quality doesn’t fit onto a spec sheet).

> People seem to care much more about...

One cannot conclude this from what the market does. Single individuals might want wildly different things than what the combined economy serves them.

I was there, too. Not at Nokia, but in the ecosystem of these companies.

People wanted iPhone over Nokia, not due to its specs but due to its usability and presentation.

Let's be honest, both Symbian and Maemo/Meego were abject messes in both of these categories.

They were really trying with MeeGo, we used to joke that we had the most expensive clock app in the world because it had been remade so many times. People forget that R&D can be super expensive. Apple definitely cooked there.

Symbian though, I mean, considering the hardware constraints was crazy!

The smartphone variant of Symbian needed 2MiB of Memory and supported Qt... madness.

We need a Symbian/Nokia movie to accompany the "Blackberry" movie, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXL_HDzBQsM

  Mike, are you familiar with the saying, "Perfect is the enemy of Good"?

  Well, "good enough" is the enemy of humanity.

Meego’s N9 had in some areas better usability than the iPhone and was overall competitive.

Tap to wake, slide to homescreen, the control center were introduced by the N9.

having stable software - yeah that wasn't my experience. I used early and late Series 40 phones and they had plenty of problems. Mostly minor but not clearly getting better. And then it got worse. My N97 mini was a good phone with pretty terrible software. It was bad. And then it didn't matter anymore.

I'm not excited about the current duopoly, but a decent mid-range phone from either is better now that in was five years ago.

I once supported an expensive application for Symbian OS and the customers had plenty of problems with Nokia smartphones. Not dumb phones, but smartphones. HW keyboards failed constantly, wi-fi quality fluctuated randomly from piece to piece, displays developed weird errors, loudspeakers developed tin sound etc.

Oh, and my favorite, problems with microUSB charging ports were eternal.

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