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Comment by tegeek | Hacker News Reader

It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.

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.

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I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.

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.

I remember having to buy another Nokia (maybe a C something?) to get the E61. It was only available in a forced bundle deal, because refusing to sell your wares is always a solid market strategy

If that was in the USA, it might have been the only way Nokia could get the carriers to sell the E61. It's hard to believe now but US carriers were aggressively against phones having wifi. It eventually arrived on major carriers as the E62 — without the wifi (and with out the VoIP if I remember correctly, though I may be misremembering)

Communicator devices with Symbian were pretty clear personal computers.

You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60

Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...

N95 was the first Nokia model where OpenGL ES was fully hardware accelerated and not using software rendering, by the way.

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.

The number of buttons on N95 is a hint to why it didn't see as wide adoption as the iPhone. My elderly relatives would be intimidated by that alone, afraid to press the wrong one and break something. A single-button iPhone with a touch screen that showed applications in a simple grid format fit them much better.

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.

I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.

I don't know. At least when I was hired Nokia was 110% into making music their main priority. They bought LoudEye/OD2 because they want to get really deep into the music biz. They saw iPod as their main competitor, but didn't see iPhone coming at all. I don't remember Rokr came out, but Nokia were sure that a good music experience where you could download or stream music direct to your phone was the winning strategy. And they were partially right, but that was only a piece of the puzzle. Their handsets were just janky compared to the slick iPhone, and they had no universal design language. I worked on their software and not once did anyone at Nokia HQ say "You should make your buttons like this, or use these colors, or these widgets." It was anything goes. Every app on the phone developed by different teams who only talked to each other when something was broken.

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