Nokia Design Archive (2025)
repo.aalto.fi
repo.aalto.fi
Think about how different the target group for blackberry for example had been, or how little glamour the (mostly) cheap and small nokia phones of the past years had been.
Sorry, what does this mean? Could you explain?
It seemed important. Instead of hiding a technical artefact it was presented to outside world by someone obviously placing a lot of importance on their looks.
I remember specifically being surprised that she didn't put the phone inside the bag.
My guess is they didn't realize what telecom was preparing for and decided a foothold in that industry was an investment in telephone future.
They pushed devices with new telecom features into the market to create the benefit for carriers to buy new infrastructure, e.g. "with this new revision of GSM, devices can negotiate the polling period with the network to double the battery runtime. But only if you have the infra to actually answer the device."
It's often forgotten that Microsoft didn't buy "Nokia", they bought the NMP division, and the Networks bit is alive and kicking to this day.
They built telecom infrastructure already in the 1970s, the Nokia Mobile Phones company was created as an independent arm only in ~1989.
(which by no coincidence is the era the GSM standard was created: A global cellular telephony standard allowing interoperability across countries and suppliers)
Nokia's rise started in 1990 when Ollila, who had been the mobile phone lead, was promoted to CEO. This was still very early on (Nokia's first GSM phone only came out in 1992) and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots.
The point is that Nokia was in the telecom sector for DECADES before the Microsoft acquisition of the Handset Division you mentioned.
> "and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots."
Citation needed. Equally I have no idea what that has to do with my initial point that the device business was used to drive the infrastructure business.
Where do you see the hate? Everyone seems to have fond memories of Nokia, on the HW, camera and especially their adventurous fashion and industrial design side that's sorely missing these days in the boring smartphone world.
They didn't fail because it was hated, they failed because Apple and Android beat them fair and square before they could adapt to the new world driven by taking a 30% cut of sales of high-level apps in walled garden apps-store ecosystems, instead of one driven by sales of embedded hardware in plastic cases with no money on app sales.
Do you have a source for this? I think phone manufacturers prefer whatever sells best, has lowest cost and highest margins, preferably all at once.
And compared to Android, Symbian lagged on all those fronts. At its origins it was still a low-level embedded OS that was forced to mutate into an app-based OS and it showed in UX sluggishness, the convoluted soruce-code, dated build toolchain that took days to compile, and in the lack of cheap and easy ways for indie devs to develop and ship apps to consumers. By the time Symbian opened its source code and app build tools it was too late to compete with Android and iOS.
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.
- 1. Battery runtime - 2. Durability - 3. Tactile user-input
But apparently I am not who the smartphones are made for today. It might be that they were kinda like me.
My memory of Nokia is that the apps and services just didn't work that well.
Just after I got my first iPhone I arranged a meetup with a friend. I used Google Maps on the phone to find my way, and it worked perfectly - almost unthinkable at the time, because we were all still using paper street maps while driving.
She was late because the map on her Nokia phone had gotten very confused and sent her to the wrong location.
The Nokia experience was like that. Before the iPhone I'd had a couple of Communicators. They were incredible in theory, and I sent bad photos in emails from various unlikely locations to prove it.
But they were big, slow, and clunky in practice. The iPhone wasn't.
They tried to persuade us to use Qt to write apps (as alternative to iOS)... and they haven't shipped a single phone with Qt available as toolkit. They told us they might ship an update for N95 and perhaps one other model to pre install the library. At the time when they had literally hundreds of models.
When we finally put an app on their store, they failed to approve it in 6 months (!). Apparently because we chose the whole Europe as launch target so each country's Nokia office had to approve it separately. Silly us.
Afterwards we moved to Android (1.5, with 1.6 coming) and iPhoneOS.
At that time, I genuinely believed that the N9 had the vision and design to beat anything Android was - at that time. Till date, it's still the best UX i experienced in a phone. Even a lot of Nokia managers I talked to called Elop a trojan horse from Microsoft.
But given how Android's source was open while Meego was anything but.. along with the whole Nokia + Microsoft drama... It's just a shame
(We ended up shipping a webapp which was another kind of disaster on their phones).
The first iPhone was the opposite of vertical integration. BOM was the same HW parts Nokia, Ericsson and the rest had access to. Samsung ARM SoC, Qualcomm modem, SK NAND, Sharp LCD, basic stuff. Apple had the OS, UX, SW and stuff like full feature HTML browser down to the T in ways that made Nokia and the rest feel like dinosaurs.
Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.
[0] https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_764fa227-8853-45dd-91...
But it was nothing special. It was Apple building a premium touch screen phone (no apps yet, only iTunes and Browser), struggling alot with the connectivity part of it (barely able to assure a stable cellular modem connection for one carrier, let alone a full region of them). Huge 3.x" display, battery runtime less than 24h (in a world where cellphone standby was still measured in days)
What we didn't know at that time was that Steve Jobs managed to push AT&T into a revenue-share deal along with a mandatory data-flatrate bundle, both ensuring a constant revenue-stream beyond the initial launch which would skew the entire competitive field forever.
Because while everyone else earned money only through sales, Apple had not only its above-average sales-margin and their iTunes revenue, but also an incremental monthly revenue-share from AT&T that grew with each device sold.
Within 6 months AT&T paid Apple a per-device share for a million devices each month. We never got the exact figure they paid per device but it was rumored to be more than 10 USD.
So by end of 2007 Apple had a constant influx of more than 10M USD/month on top of ~600M in HW sales-margin, excluding any additional iTunes-profit they made with that always-online iPod (e.g. the only way to get a custom ringtone was to buy one on iTunes at a hefty premium)
> Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success
> Even though Steve Jobs emphasized iPhone superiority to “Buttons”, it is to be expected that the Consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed
Turn out average people care little about that.
third slide...
All set aside, I did always wonder, why the screen has to fold (be flexible), surely a very thin line between 2 hard screens is very workable, perhaps it is even possible to make it (almost) invisible with some optical tricks at the touching edges.
Another point: It is easy to think of such things, it's the manufacturing and specifically manufacturing at scale that is the real work. That's why I think patents can really hold us back, by blocking the market from trying stuff because a company made some nice drawings (coming from a guy that was in a company that wanted to "blanket some markets" with patents). Perhaps we could have had our flying cars ;)
Btw, that last slide is very much like the communicator from Earth: Final Conflict [0], but then again, what can you make with a rolling screen?
There is also "stulys" (sic), supposedly instead of "stylus". That seems almost deliberate…
Ahead of its time, IMO. I wonder how Jolla is gong these days.
https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2011/12/15/portable-cathed...
I have their latest phone and it's great UX wise. However they simply lack the funds to put in the best cameras and the dev community for native apps is small, be it most of the actively developed native apps are great.
IMO Sailfish has the best gesture-based controls out of any smartphone OS.
they would never have the same kind of focus or philosophy as Apple, nor the willpower to pivot to real smartphones and a proper OS for them
Apple’s focus and philosophy sure gives them an advantage. At the same time users who like e.g. smaller screens have to suffer or go elsewhere.
You mean like Apple today ?
The Apple watch is from 2015.
What new product Apple produced since Tim Cook took over ?
The iPhone Duo ? Ironically it has quite a smell of Nokia N95 all over again.
The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.
The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.
Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750
which makes sense because they had these half button half touchscreen hybrid phones
the internet browsing features were something akin to like paid phone numbers which you'd avoid using because it was like special stuff
it wasn't first class in any way, it was perpetually stuck in the past. and as you can see, their entire business model was based on iterating on the same thing in a million ways, so there's no way they were gonna do something from the ground up to focus on a first class experience for one form factor which could support 3rd party developers etc.
Nokia had at least three tiers of OS: Series 30, Series 40 (which had subseries) and Series 60. It was S60 which was the smartphone Symbian based one which is where they went especially nuts.
S40 was actually really good and solid, and if someone remembers the UI of a Nokia fondly it's almost certainly a S30 or S40 device. A bit basic, but for a feature phone of that era it was great. The reason SonyEricsson started gaining market share was their phones were more like improved S40 devices (like higher fidelity UIs) than Nokia's S60 lines which were . . . not.
But Nokia smartphones were essentially shut out of the US phone market by the toxic carrier-exclusives situation and their corrupt allergy to on-device Wifi (Nokia couldn't get a major carrier to take the E61 until they repackaged it as the E62 without wifi)
instead they're refining their existing products until they can come up with a hit. although I'm not sure the iPhone Duo is gonna be a hit
there's simply not that much innovation going on these days, there was a lot more low-hanging fruit in the early 2000s
Apple watch is also on the list.
To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.
I could be wrong, but I recall an exec at one of their events on stage doubling down and saying they know better than Apple - that people want buttons (or something like that), which basically means their decline was inevitable due to the culture
Nokia, the giant at the time, was designing a better phone. And then a better phone. And another phone after that. Their design and engineering were in no way inferior to Apple's, but they were designing phones, not a personal computer.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...
It had a quite cool launch demo with Asphalt,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YMdIswaW8
Remember that this are PS like graphics on a phone.
Nowadays there are plenty of WebGL games that aren't half as good.
Jobs' genius was in understanding that the customer needed a rope that they couldn't accidentally hang themselves with, not a construction crane with a 800-page manual. He spoke about designing devices that his friends and family could use, and you can very clearly see that reflected in the products of that era.
Despite all the Apple copycats nowadays, few copy that focus on the customer.
You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.
They didn’t sell it for most networks in the USA (because your uncompetitive oligopoly cellphone market had not been shaken up yet and did not have competition rules governing it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61
This thing was in every sense a computer. Good battery life considering its screen, IMAP email, a Webkit web browser with full JS support before Apple released theirs, a music player, fully functional apps and tools to make them, 3G and wifi, office file support, VoIP support, Blackberry support if you wanted it. Great little keyboard.
Excellent device that was vastly more capable for actual work than the first several generations of iPhone (you could select and edit text, copy and paste) and available affordably to consumers in the UK.
Text selection and editing on iOS (and iPadOS!) is still more frustrating than it was on the E61.
The fact that we were already using these sorts of phones for functional work in Europe is a bit of the reason why the early Android phones with their “silly” trackballs that could actually control a text cursor did well compared to the early iPhones, and why interesting niche phones like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (that I subsequently owned, incredible device) did well here.
It took me to the iPhone 5S to even bother looking at iPhones, even though I had been a Mac user for fifteen years by then. Even then I only got it because the light sensor on my Xperia Mini Pro died; I would have carried on using that for years, it was fabulous.
Apple of today gets idolatrised to a point that it never us in the 1990's, when they did enough random shit that they almost went bankrupt.
Also, Nokia Alumni over here, from 2005 - 2010.
They highlight:
- core design team
- start with an idea for an unmet customer need
- drive innovation from imagining user’s experience
- define essentials for “insanely great”
- simplify to great lengths to hide complexity
- grow user involvement through evolution
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_7b149a54-2085-4f7d-9b...
Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.
There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.
The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.
So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.
Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.
And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.
But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.
It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.
It could have gone very differently.
Nokia was into making affordable phones but there was obviously a point where the ARM chips suddenly got a lot better and it was so optimised around squeezing performance from slow chips that it couldn't adapt. The management was aging and had become very hierarchical.
Despite all of this we were beginning to get somewhere at the end - standardising on Qt and my project got the build times under some control. Then Elop f*ked us. It was fine for the shareholders because Microsoft took the big hit for them but it was shitty for us developers who were trying to get things turned around.
Yes? Imagine millions of devices spamming your radio and core network to death?
>because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
? The performance just want not there until 4G LTE came around. You could only push 2G and 3G so much. 2G was built for voice, data was bolt-on. Just physics. If you have another brilliant idea on how to solve that please comment.
When the iPhone originally launched on 2G, it offered access to the "full web" via Safari, bypassing the carrier's proxies. Many carriers setup dedicated GPRS APNs specifically for the iPhone, which (with the exception of Blackberry), was somewhat unprecedented. The iPhone did place massive strain on networks as a consequence.
Then you had companies like Blackberry, who invested significant R&D in minimising radio traffic to play nicely with carriers - and the value of that R&D evaporated because Apple changed the rules.
Carriers were terrified of the iPhone, because it represented a fundamental shift in the dynamic. I was working for a carrier outside the US when the iPhone 3G launched. It was the first model to be available in my country, and carriers were not convinced they would even make it available. The carrier I was working for only made the decision to move forwards in supporting it four weeks before the launch date. Even with 3G (UTMS) being widely available at the time, it still proved problematic.
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
Clusterf...
And then Stephen Flop thought it would be cool to go exclusively with Windows Slown instead of the widely popular Android. (or arguably he was probably paid to decide that, coming directly from MSFT)
I can only imagine how defunct the organization Nokia must have been, with this cornucopia of different phones. Impossible to reform, so the only way for them to go was ... to go.
The number of bugs greatly multiplied by the variety of configurations - dfifferent hardware and just different amounts of RAM forcing dodgy software workarounds to deal with insufficient hardware.
It was a matrix organisation that was optimised on the theory of making many models to fit different price points and that made it extremely difficult to react to the iPhone - of which beat Nokia with 1 model that poor people got into debt to buy.
1. Their design process was incredibly focused, especially as it related to concept exploration and use of colors and materials. 2. Apple started in the US, with one expensive SKU, at one carrier. Nokia had 40% of the global market with a mission to put a mobile phone in every person's hand. This required being in multiple price tiers across multiple markets. I guarantee you Apple was not thinking about farmers in India the way Nokia did. 3. It's hard to believe there was a vision of a proper OS versus Nokia's S60/Symbian and Blackberry. Nokia was already invested in Maemo internally, which was more akin to what you think of as a modern OS. 4. Nokia's financial and operational structure was a bit too baked when the iPhone released, which made it difficult to productize Maemo above existing, more profitable product lines. I'd argue this was OPK's (former CEO) lack of decision-making here. 5. Nokia had huge aspirations software-wise, but it had to compete against telco's competing initiatives, while also depending on those telcos for distribution. The way Apple broke that telco model with their brand still amazes me to this day.
Nokia certainly was not perfect, but it didn't lack focus or willpower for the way it understood the market. Apple just did a great job at breaking down telco walled gardens.
"Image of a man holding a woman and a phone."
> Strategy 3: Media_Passions Scenario’s Behaviour Passion Experience Product categories and communication strategies defined by media passions Behavioral passions: I’m Social and Share – Focus is Sociability I Consume - Immersive consumption I Organize – Media management I Collect and Mix – Low threshold creativity
> Trans_Life is a project sponsored by the Nokia Multimedia Business Group, to investigate the convergence and integration of multi media products, and develop scenarios visualizing new use patterns and new product propositions for the near future
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_3a24c0ae-8f52-4cf4-a7...
But it wasn’t Snapchat that killed them. Less than a year after getting my WP7 device I was told it was end of the line and never getting and upgrade to 8. The maps app was straight up bad. When faced with the decision of paying again for a WP8 device or switching, I switched.
Lacking some of the most popular apps of the zeitgeist at the time made the whole platform effectively a nonstarter.
[1] https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0383
Sadly it's a reflection of why Nokia failed - Mobile Safari on iOS pretty much nailed the coffin for the Nokia approach to mobile browsing.
I think what's interesting is how looking back at the Nokia nostalgia is compelling because iOS and Android have become such overlords over our digital lives.
Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.
Otherwise, extremely interesting materials. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to include later nokia smartphones, like ones with maemo and meego like n900 and n9, even though in my opinion they still very much had something to say and to show with their design, both physically with shape and look of the phones, and with phone interfaces. dare i say, they were quite influential still, and those design sensibilities, at least phone look wise, still echoed for years in later nokia (lumia and even hmd nokia) phones
a lot of funky stuff in presentations, like this one https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_68d7aeff-c4fb-49c0-be... or this one https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_b5225dd0-743a-4b6d-ba...
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_eef40316-aa3b-4fe3-8...
Aalto University web hosting service
nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi
403 Forbidden
Access denied by server configuration and/or resource permissions.
Are you saying we should change the link at the top to https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...? I'm a bit unclear...
Edit: I've changed to that from the submitted url (https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html) for now, since that one was 403ing.
I've seen that before, perhaps it counts as unauthorised because the server is not authorised to send when the quota is breached?. It isn't correct use of 403 (which implies the server knows the identity of the user, 401 is the more general state for unauthorised. Of the standard responses 503 (Service Unavailable) seems most correct.