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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer.

It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.

Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.

The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere.

It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.

True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.

Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X

Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.

Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.

Maemo was an actual GNU/Linux, not just kernel with custom userland. Logging into a cluster from my N900 and having plots just appear on screen thanks to X network transparency is still one of the most futuristic things I have ever seen a computer do.

Symbian did have some touch models in the end but they were very poor because they still used resistive touch and the UI was not well laid out for it.

X does not support touch natively. What it does support is mouse emulation from the touch input. This also greatly limits how good you can make it.

Symbian didn't use X in any way. That was Maemo, used on the 770. But there were also some Symbian-based touch devices like the 5800 XpressMusic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5800_XpressMusic

But Symbian didn't have any roots in Linux. It came from the Psion organiser line originally (and specifically the 5/7 series, not the earlier 3's).

I got to briefly try a N900 back in the day. When it powered on you would briefly see the raw X background stipple and the x-shaped cursor before the window manager loaded. I liked the nerd factor of it but I knew at that point the company was in the weeds.

If the 770 was anything like the N900 then the screen was resistive and the stylus was passive. So you could use your fingers but in my experience, for any finer task, you needed the stylus.

Damn, I really miss the N900. I was seriously using it as recently as about 4-5 years ago.

They also threw away Meego, which was praised for UI and design.. and it was Linux.. not often heard in the same phrase. Build with Qt.

I have an n9 that I turn on once in a blue moon.

Even today it looks better than any of the major mobile OSs, is more responsive and just _feels_ better to hold and use.

The road not taken.

I loved my N9, truly one of the best experiences i've had with a mobile phone. I've watched Sailfish from a distance but their very limited choice of phones have always been off-putting.

It is just an urband legend that Apple caused Nokia to fail. Apple didn't even compete in the price range where Nokia sold most of their smartphones.

When you look at where most Nokia customers defected to, it is Samsung and Android.

I feel like Nokia would still be a notable smartphone company albeit not on the scale of apple (as the single alternative to the android ecosystem) if not for Microsoft and it's plant delivering the actual blow.

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