Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens.
Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.
The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though.
Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.
> Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.
At an industrial design conference in Gothenburg (spring 2005 iirc) I met a senior designer from Nokia around that time, he had a doctorates in ergonomics and interaction design. He lamented that he was not allowed to so any user interface work, only do the aesthetics. Management from up far had decided that design was only about what it looked like, form was not allowed to work with function.
> Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs.
Yes, for making calls, texting, taking pictures and changing settings, Nokia phones were really nice. The whole games (Java) and apps (WAP) side wasn't the greatest. To be fair, no one had a decent game and app experience until the iPhone and G1 (Android) hit.
I think this reads like a comment from a market where S60 wasn't popular. They had a capable app platform and it wasn't java or wap, but not really in North America. (That's part of the problem... They segmented their potential customers too much. They could have pushed smartphones in North America at the same time as in Europe. At the time I heard they didn't because it would piss off carriers.)
Late J2ME apps were quite good. I remember having Opera Mini (which was a surprisingly good browser), Google Maps, an ebook reader, a GBA emulator, and even a video player which could play down-converted video at reasonable framerates.
This wasn't Nokia, but I believe the experience on their phones was about the same.
Right, and MS didn't invent solitaire but it is a beloved app on win95. If you're selling the OS on built-in ports of older games I think you're reaching.
We are seeing the history backwards, from present day ro past but remember that cellphones were phones with other computing purposes added, not personal computers with phone capabilities as they are today.
I would really like something like that navi-roller below my spacebars on my keyboard, to use as a way to select from drop-downs and push to enter. Unfortunately keyboard navigation of graphical elements is really lacking these days.
I didn't phrase it very well, sorry about that. I meant that display managers, UI toolkits, and browsers don't support the keyboard as much as I'd like.
But still, adding a mouse-contraption below your keyboard could make it feel like you're using the keyboard to run it while your computer recieves your input as mouse signals, so you'll both be happy.
(Some brand names to search for are Rollermouse, Mousetrapper, Optapad, andErgoslider.)
It was super nice to use at the time but it was also completely unsealed against weather so if a bit of snow or water got beneath the wheel, you would get unusable phone quite fast. Happened to mine even though I was super careful, luckily bought it used super cheap. It was also too expensive just because it has WAP and nothing otherwise spectacular.
It might have helped that the Nordics were pretty advanced with developing mobile networks and mobile network technology. There was also SonyEricson in the region and it kind of makes sense that companies making network technology would also make handsets in the early innings and only later would people realise those are actually two different skillsets and market and need different companies.
You mean Ericsson. It only became SonyEricsson after the Ericsson management fucked up handling a fire at their supplier Philips.
The story I heard was that Ericsson had a culture of not handing bad news up the management change unless it was a real problem. Senior management didn't want to be bothered by small details.
By the time they realised it was a massive problem it was too late to buy on the open market and they were forced to spin out the mobile business into a join venture with Sony.
I don't think that was down to "differences in skillsets". It was generic short sighted management that killed Ericsson's handset business and it could just as easily have killed the network infrastructure side of the company if the problem had it happened there first.
If management don't won't accept hearing bad news from their subordinates they won't be told it.
Sure, the classic UI in 3310 etc ("Series 20") was great, and even "Series 30" was okay. But Series 40 and especially Series 60 were distinctly less well received.
I'm a weirdo who has intentionally never owned a smartphone, so "using up" old dumb phones found in our family has been a fun hobby for roughly two decades. Longest streak was using a 3310 for 12-or-so years, starting when I went to gymnasium and letting it go in late 20s when I was about to become a father. Man, that was one hell of a phone (also serving as a beer bottle opener, etc for many students back in the day).
Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading.
But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also.
Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it.
That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet.
Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf!
> I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian
There's no Symbian on that phone. Symbian was pretty much a smartphone OS that didn't really show up on feature phones. It had a full-blown WebKit browser, native apps, multitasking, productivity suites... you could even install Python interpreter and play with writing apps this way on Symbian phones from around that time (which is what I kept borrowing my mom's E65 for). Later versions even had Qt built-in.
Nokia 2600 Classic used one of the iterations of Series 40. Looking at the videos, it indeed appears rather slow on this phone.
My apologies, and thanks very much for the correction. On another note, has there ever been any custom OSes for the late 2000s era Nokia dumb phones, built by some stubborn hackers? Or some modification software to hand-tailor the Series 40 iterations, e.g remove features the user doesn't need. That would make these phones fun to mess with.
The 3310 was the culmination of Nokia's really good UX work. Symbian convoluted all that and made it a big mess. The manuals for symbian phones were thick and heavy and mostly no one except the engineer-natured people could actually use most of the features.
At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.
S30 came years after S40 and only targeted low-end. S40 was a rather well-received UI, but neither it nor S30 were ever used on smartphones. The only UI used with Symbian from what you mentioned was S60 and yes, it didn't have a reputation of being particularly clean.
That said, S40 was being used on feature phones for more than a decade (from Nokia 7110 in 1999 up to Nokia 515 from 2013), so it spanned across multiple UI generations and while it was very successful initially, at the end of its lifespan it didn't do particularly well when put on models with big touchscreens.
I loved my Nokia function phone firstly because it was indestructible. A Jeep Cherokee ran it over after it fell through a hole in my bicycle shirt one day. Big scratches on the back of the case but it still worked.
Secondly that Nokia model was just a nice piece of hardware that was easy to use without unnecessary complexity. Plus if you turned off the ringer it would buzz and hop around on the table like a small but enraged weasel. It was hard not to feel affection for it.
This sounds very much like the Nokia 3310 that I once had. It was indeed indestructible. Mine survived a hike gone wrong, in which it spent a good few hours in the pocket of my shorts, and I was in waist-deep water. Back home, the phone was obviously not working. I cracked it open and laid it out to dry on a newspaper. The next morning, I put it back together with a new battery - and it just worked.
In comparision a current iphone 15 is IP68 rated. If you would have the same hike with one of those you could expect to be able to call an uber at the end of the day. I think that is quite neat progress.
Basically the definition of indestructible shifted. Back then it was obvious the phone won’t work after such an immersion. And indestructible meant that with proper care it could be restored to working condition. Today it is more of an exception when a phone dies under the same treatment.
I'd agree. I'm not trying to downplay the current state of the art. My gripe is primarily this: the Nokia 3310 had everything I wanted - long battery life, indestructibility, and the ability to make and receive phone calls, and text messages. Today, I cannot find a phone that checks all these boxes.
It was also relatively light, 133 grams. It's impossible to find something like that now. My phone is 140 g and most phones are closer to 200 g than to 140.
It was sized just right, too. The shape was ergonomic, the keys were tactile, it had a sturdy eyelet for a lanyard ... and who remembers what else. One well-designed phone was what it was.
some portion of nokia definitely did care about technology, form factors, usability, and all the other things that made phones a tech product. their continual wild experiments prove that.
but they also had their normal phones with broad appeal, and could make a good business out of mood-board variants of them. if they didn't make a business out of selling the 3310 in the current season's fashionable colours, they'd have been doing something wrong.
> Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI.
I think you're suffering from a kind of observation bias specific to forums like HN, which have a disproportionate number of people with a chip on their shoulder about defunct tech products and companies. The people who liked Nokia's UI are loud and visible about it, especially when it lets them gripe about Microsoft/Apple/whatever, while the people who didn't like it don't feel the need to talk about it.
You're hallucinating a narrative about me based on your stereotypes. I think we all can identify people with Stockholm syndrome love, arising from their past technology abusers.
You could be generically correct. However I never bought a Nokia and I haven't used one much. I am not a Nokia apologist.
I lived through the period, and I'm commenting on what I saw at the time. Sometimes there are fans of a product or brand for good reasons.
Perhaps one of Nokia's major skills was familiarity between their models - especially for keeping the same menu structure and keyboard shortcuts. Familiarity is a powerful force. Oh, and they reliably worked - a definite plus!
I did own mobiles from other manufacturers and I have the scars from dealing with their (edit) painful UIs (Sony, Kyocera*, Motorola, Dell). A keypad and small screen (or worse a one-line numeric display) create some difficult constraints.
Cordless and Voip phones proudly continued the tradition of crappy handset UIs well into the age of iPhone.
* I loved my Kyocera Palm Pilot phone - there was even a LISP App that you could program a simple UI in -magic! Although my first love was an Atari Portfolio DOS handheld (not a phone): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio
I remember it also had native SIP support and you could configure an account to connect automatically only when the phone connected to a certain wifi network. So I had my work extension on when I connected to the work wifi. It was really nice
I had an N95 when it first came out. It wasn't the screen so much that lured me to an iPhone but the web browsing experience.
Trying to use the browser on the N95 was difficult it was slow to load pages and the reformatting was barely usable most of the time. Everything was high latency even on wifi.
With the iPhone it didn't really reformat websites so much as allow you to render it normally and then zoom and centre on to the bit you wanted to read. This was pre-responsive web design so everything stayed roughly the same as a desktop screen layout.
That and the multi-touch screen were the bits that made it superior enough for me to swap by the time the iPhone 3G came out.
As I remember it, it was the classic Nokia UI that was loved in comparison to the plethora of awkward intermediate UIs that were attempted by Nokia and others until iPhone/Android emerged. It really did feel like phones were getting worse for a few years for negligible benefits.
> Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.
Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off. Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.
I don't really think that the average iPhone user (at least in Europe) gets a new device every season. Actually the opposite is true: Apple does gives you the opportunity to stick to your old device, if you want. iOS 15 still gets updates and can run on an iPhone 6S.
I switched to Apple specifically because Androids I owned aged quickly and badly. Some people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users they hold.
Interesting. I have 3 years old Pixel 6 Pro I use as a phone, 6 years old Redmi MIUI I use to control my various gizmos and 8 years old Galaxy S6 Edge to do yet another set of gizmos. So far all work like charm.
You got the nicer Androids. Most of the Androids on the market unfourtently aren't very good in terms of using modern hardware, using the latest Android OS (shops continue to sell Android phones running versions of Android several years out of date), receiving security updates, etc. My experience of Android had been incredibly poor until I got my S21. My S21 is the first Android phone I've owned (out of several from different manufacturers) that works on par with (if not better than) Apple in terms of keeping the OS up to date and porting back new features to older models. I now only recommend the Samsung S-series to people considering Android, anything else is just asking for trouble.
None at all. I switched since my personal experiences with Android phones were lackluster, typically the software becoming sluggish and unresponsive, usually within 3 years.
As I read it, "people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users" says not that people who hold the caricature view are kool-aid-drinkers, but that they hold a view of iPhone users as kool-aid-drinkers. So I don't think there was any claim that you drink anything at all. (Though I'm fairly sure you do: At least water, or you'd be dead.)
I just went from a 6S+ to a 15 Pro, so I'm an example of this. However, there are some apps that just don't work on the older devices. Snapchat would not work on the 6S+ with the latest OS available. Eventually, the camera took enough tumbles that I'm assuming the lenses were no longer aligned as nothing was in focus.
Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes than anything Nokia ever released. Something as simple as those devices would be much less noticeable if replaced by mood.
There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600, 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique.
Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or whatever color each year so that the few people who care about showing off their latest model can do so.
Apple has 8 different phones you can buy right now counting all the max/plus models (SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro). If you add in the storage differences it is 24 unique circuit boards/phone internals, and colors bring it to over 100 different unique products.
From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's actually pretty wild!
Yeah, but they only release like 4 or so new models a year, excluding storage/color differences, which are relatively trivial, despite making many billions of dollars.
Apple made almost $200B from iPhone in 2023, for example; per model, even including the older ones, that's an insane revenue per model. Not sure I can think of any other product at that level.
This more analogous to different model years of a car, rather than entirely different car models.
The customer immediately and intuitively understands 14 is better than 13, 15 is better than 14, etc.
The main thing clear to me is that the "mental flow chart" involved in selecting an Apple phone is much, much clearer than it would be for selecting a Nokia.
Yeah, but from a software perspective, it's just 2-3 form factors to support (Square Screen, Notch, Cutout). Even those are very well defined that those developing software for it doesn't have to bother with it at all. But you're right, the fact that a red iPhone 15 128 GB is one of the over 100 combinations available is wild. It seems like a smaller pool
Maybe it's a matter of doing things in order ? Nokia had no strong image, they were well established but not like Apple, and also iPhones are flagships with a lot of advanced capabilities.. nokia lineups at the time were very much mainstream/average (the notion of advanced device was also limited at the time).
When you're on top of the industry, you may have a shot at selling lifestyle.
Any other company, if they had the iPhone, would have failed selling it in numbers. Because only at Apple it was preceded by the iPod that set a unique precedent in how much more expensive than all competitors a device could be. And that shift in price perception was deeply connected to the brand. It's easy to forget just how much more expensive the iPhone was than other phones that reached a meaningfully wide audience (or would have, in absence of the iPhone).
Not indulging in the fancy moodboard stuff wouldn't have helped Nokia the tiniest bit.
The success of the iPhone was not due to a price anchoring effect. Sure, if you just wanted to make calls the iPhone was (is) rather expensive. But they were really selling a computer in your pocket, which among other things could browse the web like a computer, display maps from pretty much any location on earth, and replace those bulky Franklin Planners. Not to mention take phone calls. There was nothing like it for multiple years.
I am a pretty late adopter, but I bought the original iPhone. Totally worth it. Two years later when everyone's phone contract was up, they all got iPhones.
Not sure if it's a difference to era, or a just a earlier stage for Apple in the same cycle. Apple made good phones that work and last well, then 'fashionedised' them with different colours leaning into the newest model as a status symbol.
But arguably Nokia did the same, at the time Nokia was a decent phone even if they had no standards between models - no one else did either. Blackberry found more consistency then lent into the status symbol approach.
I suspect that there's probably a common pattern with brands building a decent product, becoming renowned for that, then becoming more fashion like to play up their new status. Eventually someone else able focusing on the product features over the name steals the market.
I’d heavily dispute that - I’m not an Apple fanboy, and also not sure where the Apple regular replacement fallacy comes from.
Back in the day, phones would be sold on 12mo contracts. Now, I’m surrounded by people (who are of very sound means) rocking iPhones from 5+ years ago, which are able to function in the tasks most adult phone users care about just as well as a recent model. Friends are passing old iPads down to kids instead of binning.
Unlike Apple Nokia built their devices to resist breaking and be 100% serviceable down to the smallest parts.
Apple uses metal because it's significantly heavier than plastic and makes phones heavy enough to shatter glass screens and damage their internals when dropped.
Any iPhone could replace its metal housing with an equally strong polymer and become exponentially more difficult to break.
The 3210 era devices had easily replaceable polymer covers; they definitely did break and scratch, but these operated as disposable ablative shielding for the phone itself. Which also had a much smaller screen that was away from the corners of the device. So what people do nowadays on all of these devices is add third party cases to absorb the everyday wear .. but you can always take the case off for a "dress" phone, which like party or formalwear trades durability for looking good.
The Nokia 1040 (Windows, glass screen) was also pretty good at damage resistance. My wife stuck with hers until the Flash started wearing out round about five years in.
> Metal is of course more shatter resistant than polymer.
Yeah, but that doesn't help when the phone lands with the glass hitting something. And a heavier metal phone will have accumulated more kinetic energy during the fall than a lighter plastic one, so have a greater probability of shattering the glass.
Ah, the strong load bearing case and impact resistant glass are just a clever rouse! Their real purpose is to...break more easily! It makes so much more sense now.
Their real purpose is to look "premium". How else would you explain the use of glass on the back of the phone? It's certainly not ergonomics - there are materials that are both stronger and grippier. But it's certainly shiny.
iPhones are built with super tight tolerances. Using the same (or similar enough) materials on opposing sides means not having to deal with different thermal expansion properties. Glass is also radio transparent which makes the NFC radio and wireless charging much easier. It likely doesn't hurt with cellular and WiFi reception either. It's also not going to interfere with the MagSafe magnets.
Somehow Android phones manage to do NFC and wireless charging just fine without glass back panels. And tighter tolerances are exactly that - "premium look".
Tight tolerances are premium construction. Loose fitting parts are cheap and easy. They also lead to increased wear and decreased durability. Dismiss everything as "looks" if you want.
Yes this I think is the core issue: while Nokia phones were all a bit different, they were different in superficial and frankly, low-effort ways.
Form that did not follow function, phones that looked liked some flashy "original-but-not-really-original" design study straight out of a bachelor's Product Design class.
They could never have invented the iPhone, even if they were organised differently. The culture just wasn't there. The herculean drive to simplify, beautify and improve and NOT ACCEPT HALF-BAKED CRAP that propels Apple is impossible to replicate if it is not part of your DNA and vigorously enforced from the very top.
Nokia wanted to "segment markets", Apple wanted to build the perfect phone.
That’s basically it. Instead of the perfect phone, most of Nokia wanted to build the phone that makes you want to buy another phone soon.
I made them a cappuccino-themed pinball game. The underlying idea was that when the customer is bored with the autumn colors and fabric edges and whatever, they’re buying the next Nokia for the new experience.
Apple made a phone whose physical form was adaptable to any software experience. They didn’t need to put in a cappuccino pinball on the device because users could get that, and a million other experiences, from the app store, and mold their own experience.
Some parts of Nokia understood this — Symbian was actually a capable smartphone OS under the clunky UI — but the company DNA kept thinking of smartphones as just another feature column for the plastic fantastic market segment games.
I had a crash course on Symbian at school by a Nokia engineer. Decided to do my all not to have to work with that POS ever. I succeeded.
I know first hand multiple people (some of them my classmates) who decided otherwise and either burned out or quit. The ecosystem was just _horrible_ from the start. The amount of different phone form factors didn't help in the least.
Symbian forced people to code in a weird dialect of C++: no exceptions, no RAII, custom stdlib. It didn't have analogs of std::string and std::vector, grow-able containers were considered too complex.
When Symbian, then called EPOC32, was developed there was no C++ standard library and no compiler that could handle exceptions without severe problems. So they had macro kludges.
They were so unintuitive that some 75% of their coders could not handle strings without severe errors. It did not help that they hired coders directly out of the university (many without a degree yet) and every good coder was promoted to management tasks.
> When Symbian, then called EPOC32, was developed there was no C++ standard library
There was no standard to begin with (actually the first release of Symbian and the first C++ ISO standard are pretty close on the timeline), but STL and likes existed.
Then again, Symbian was on the market until 2013, but programming for Symbian always sucked. Especially in the later years, when Nokia completely missed the advent of touchscreens, and tried to keep afloat by throwing Symbian on a touchscreen and seeing if it sticks.
Qt was always a bad strategy. Sure, in some aspects it was better than anything native Symbian could provide, but in general it was many years behind iOS and Android UI frameworks.
For example, one of the most frequent patterns in touchscreen UI design is an infinite list of views with dynamic data loading and filtering. A lot of use cases fit into this abstraction - social media feeds, storefronts, messaging apps, dictionaries, streaming music players, etc. Android supported this pattern in UI framework from the very beginning and continiously improved it, while Qt's answer at the time was "oh, just write it from scratch".
And the fact that Qt uses highly specific dialect of C++ doesn't really help adoption.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? Or maybe you were using a very ancient version of Qt. Today's Qt C++ and QML are extremely capable. And I'm building one of those "long lists" (ListView) in my block editor[1] that was straightforward to implement in Qt.
In case you've missed, we're talking about an operating system whose last release was twelve years ago.
The first Qt version for Symbian was around 4.6, and IIRC QML didn't even exist then. The latest was around 4.8, and it did have QML and Qt Quick, but it was too little, too late.
I would like to mention here though that Apple eventually introduced a fair amount of things that Nokia did first with the Nokia N9 (especially once they went buttonless with the iPhone X). Once Nokia had Apple's example to work from, they actually kind of leapt ahead of them for a brief moment, then immediately gave up.
I had a buddy with a Nokia Lumia Windows phone. The hardware and OS was on par or better than the most of the contemporary phones, but it suffered from a lack of third party apps. The Lumia was a pretty kickass phone stuck in a dead ecosystem.
I worked for a research firm that did research for Nokia Design, large scale immersion sessions in exotic locations. One project the deliverable was a set of cards 11" x 8" in a custom box. Each card depicted an insight from the research. I think Nokia Design were charged 25k for the production of these cards. For me this was peak-insanity and two years later Nokia imploded.
Was this the different coloured cases campaign? - I remember it being a little before 2003, but I was working at a company doing work where we had frequent contact with Nokia product managers talking about shipping a news/financial data HDML/WAP app, they didn't partner with us eventually because they needed to concentrate on delivering different coloured removable back case panels - both with the phone and after sale extra packs, so teenagers could choose their phone style.
For Symbian phones Nokia was designing different icons for every phone model. When times started to go bad for them, they introduced common icons for new models and hailed that as a big design innovation.
A similar type of thing has been happening to fashion wristwatch manufacturers, although at a slower pace. Customers no longer purchase as many wristwatches, and instead purchase a single Apple (or Garmin) a smartwatch plus different straps to change the look.
There is a still a strong market for luxury mens' mechanical wristwatches as jewelry. But I expect that will gradually die off as the population of men who grew up wanting a Rolex dies off.
Not really. In fact, its the opposite. The board broad in Elop because they wanted to be taken. Its not so much a hostile takeover but a 'invitation' of takeover.
The oh-so-"intuitive" iOS, with all it's fucking impossible-to-remember swiping gestures this way and that. Aaaargh! Unfortunately Android has been going the same way for the last half a decade or so. :-(
(And Sailfish -- or whatever it's called nowadays -- looked like a contender at first, but then it swiftly marched into the swipey bog.)
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.
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”.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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).
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...).
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.
> Not only the variety of devices was creating an incoherent user experience, but it also made it almost impossible to create an app market.
I'm not sure I agree with this take - it seems to be based on the idea of comparing Nokia phones to something like the iPhone. But at the time these phones were all made, the experience of using a phone was:
- Answer or reject incoming calls with the "answer/decline" button
- Read and send messages using the screen and keyboard
- That's basically it
Nokia created so many freaky looking phones, in part at least, because they were just phones, and the narrowness of their use meant the novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility. I don't see any evidence that they (or anyone other than apple) even considered the possibility of an "app ecosystem" - so criticising them for not making one viable seems a little leftfield.
Take something like the iPhone - all of the sudden you're not looking at a phone but instead a touch screen computer someone can use for banking, messaging, browsing, shopping etc. Supporting all those different use cases provides way more contraints on Apple's design than Nokia ever needed to consider.
Which is a really long way of saying, Nokia phones where just a different category of things to iPhones, and we shouldn't compare them.
Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. And most of the devices that could actually do that properly were Nokias (MIDP was OK, but Nokias outsold MIDP phones ringtone-wise for an order of magnitude).
> Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads.
I don't remember app stores or game downloads existing up until iPhone and Android, let alone being profitable.
There was MIDP and J2ME, but they were so niche, and I'm only aware of them because of an practical course during university, circa 2008.
But maybe your regional context is different from mine (Germany).
They were definitely a thing, pushed heavily by carriers ("Vodafone live!" etc) with dedicated buttons on the devices that people would mostly press by accident. I don't think they were ever very popular with consumers but I bought a copy of Tetris and an offline travel guide from the Sony Ericsson store. Then you bought a new phone, nothing transferred over or could be redownloaded, and you said F this what a ripoff.
> pushed heavily by carriers ("Vodafone live!" etc) with dedicated buttons on the devices that people would mostly press by accident.
Like that fucking "Amazon Prime" (or something) button on my TV remote control, which does absolutely nothing except every now and then, when I press it by mistake, send me into an app I've never used and will in all probability never use.
They were a big thing you'd see everywhere around you (TV, magazines etc.), except that you probably classified them in your head under a different label because they were mostly about ringtones and wallpapers and accessed via premium SMS services that would respond with "WAP push" SMS with a download URL in it. Games were more expensive and less popular (though I still wouldn't call them "niche") as compatibility was a mess, but they sure were there way before 2008.
My regional context is Poland, but it couldn't have been much different in Germany - otherwise I wouldn't see a service exactly like that being parodied at last Chaos Communication Camp by... actually deploying a working SMS service on the camp's GSM network:)
I was at Vodafone. Pretty sure we had exactly the same service across all of Europe, especially because a good chunk of it was developed in Dusseldorf :)
> Which is a really long way of saying, Nokia phones where just a different category of things to iPhones, and we shouldn't compare them.
Except they weren't and we should.
Nokia had very popular feature phones with S40 and that's what most people likely remember about it, but it was also a huge player on the smartphone market with Symbian - and those smartphones were proper pocket computers with native apps, web browser, multitasking, messaging etc. years before iPhone. As a teenager I have myself played with Python on a Nokia E65 months before the first iPhone was released.
Pretty much the only thing they lacked compared to the first iPhone was a touchscreen (even though Nokia made some attempts years before as well, see Nokia 7710 for example). iPhones didn't even let you install apps at that point (that ability only came in 2nd gen), and let's not even talk about multitasking. Nokia smartphones were doing that for years at that point.
Also, let's not forget that Nokia N800 with Maemo was initially supposed to be a smartphone, and that was already before the iPhone as well. It ended up not being one because of internal politics between Maemo and Symbian teams, so the first actual Maemo phone (rather than merely an "Internet Tablet") was N900 two years later. As a "touch screen computer", iPhone was laughable compared to Maemo.
Nokia lost to Android, not Apple. iPhone merely acted as a catalyst, and certainly did not define a new "device category" in any technical sense. It accelerated trends that caused regular people to start moving from feature phones to smartphones (a market segment that was previously reserved to high-end and business-class models), at which point Nokia was already left behind by Android.
If anything, iPhones harmed Nokia indirectly by making Google redesign Android's UI before it first shipped, while Nokia was too busy enjoying its market leader position and in-fighting to notice what was going on around them.
>novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility.
In my case, I got the weird Nokia (3650?) with the round, rotary phone-layout of the numbers because it would reliably sync contacts with my Mac at the time and could be used as a cellular modem.
The novelty design was... not great. But the usability was exactly what I needed.
Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too many, but 10 or 20 was reasonable and still is - plenty of successful Android OEMs have ranges like that.
The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and keys there was less to design anyway.
Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.
Personally, I think Nokia didn't really think anything. The management was just incompetent and they didn't have any real strategy. They had 100 teams of engineers each doing their own phone model, and were just too lazy to fire unnecessary teams and focus. Somewhere deep down they knew, that it is stupid way to do things. However the money kept flowing in, so who cares.
It was also slow and bloated... and china happened. Nokia guys would start making a mockup and a powerpoint for a new product, meetings, comittees, etc., and in that same time, the chinese would start selling the actual phone.
This was it for me. I gave up on Nokia when everybody around was using their Android messaging apps while I had no apps for my Nokia, or they were a lesser version (like whatsapp).
Then, if I recall correctly, they went with Windows, so every move was forcing their users into a lonely corner.
Samsung is successfully using this car company strategy and they have a phone in almost every price band. Just look at sheer number different SKUs they have: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung-phones-9.php
It is easy to find such reasons now that Nokia has failed. But they ruled for a decade in part because of too many phones. They had phone at each budget range and demographic.
What they missed was a move from hardware centric world to software centic. The attempts with Linux etc were too little too late.
This is exactly right imo. I was a teen during peak Nokia, and I always thought it was very clever how they had a phone for everyone, and more importantly, they really signaled to the consumer via features and marketing. I was in the UK and there was a time for a couple of years when all we talked about was football and Nokia models, we all had phones, some of us had TWO phones because we inherited an old business device from a parent etc. It was a super fun time from what I recall!
The closest competitor to Nokias during 2007-2009 I recall was the Sony Ericssons, especially the walkman phones or the slider phones. At least if you were like me and always had to have something different.
I still wish I’d kept my W910i. Unreliable software that would reboot randomly, but a surprisingly sturdy piece of kit that survived many drops and skids. And it was the best camera I had for a while, delivering a wonderful 2MP.
The best phones I have ever owned were Sony Ericssons. How I yearn for a slightly modernised phone from them! My favourite was one that had a slide-out play station controller. That thing was awesome for wasting time on.
Yep, k700i, k750i, w902 — all superb phones, sometimes I even miss them a bit.
Funny that a few years before that I was a big Palm/Clie enthousiaste, so the idea of "all screen no keyboard" wasn't new to me. Yet I gave up after Tungsten T5 and stayed with just Sony Ericssons for several years with no desire to but a PDA or smartphone.
I had all those phones! And also the "cool" white matrix-style slide-out one. They were really great, except the joystick/navigation thing always failed. Even when you cleaned them out, so annoying.
I miss the jog-dial ones. At least, I remember it very fondly but I would probably hate it now.
That's right, I forgot about Sony Ericsson but you're correct, very much less common among my friend group, I only recall older people having them...Was Sony Ericsson considered a more premium device?
That's interesting, I mostly remember old folks sticking to flip phones. The SEs were all that could be found among my peers. We would've been in our mid teens at the time.
Then they were supplanted by early non-Android Samsung phones with the bad touchscreens, then by 2012 everyone had either an iPhone or Android.
It was only the space of a few years but seemed much longer back then!
Thanks mate, I remember Argos had their own website up for a while where every catalogue could be viewed online. Bizarrely, they didn't provide any downloads. So I'm still on the hunt for PDFs of the 2003-2007 catalogues, the ones I'd remember most vividly.
Yes - iphone came out 2007 and Nokia was still the leading mobile phone company by sales in 2010, and Symbian had the largest OS share to 2012.
In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone.
Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular OS to being the secondary manufacturer for the third best supported OS. And not trusted by users to provide any continuity.
HW is hw and sw is SW…and never the twain shall meet.
Hardware problems are low dimensional ones…”optimize this variable (usually clock speed), make this block functionally correct.”
Software problems are high dimensional ones, especially the problem of designing an API the community will adopt. “What set of functions can I provide that will do X…and a subset of X…and a potential superset of X, on hardware generation H and H+1 and so on…all while taking security and OS privilege levels into account…” Oh and we must bow to aesthetics and programmer fashion as well as getting stuff into their hands as fast as possible…plus tools and documentation…plus outcompete everybody else in the world trying to steal the same devs as us.
Sw is what it is because it has so many degrees of freedom.
This just feels like ex-post rationalization. It's easy to come up with a story why something failed after the fact, but that doesn't mean the theory has any weight. If you want this to be interesting, put some skin in the game and make a prediction about currently successful companies based on your theory. Otherwise, I'll have to assume that what you'd have written in 2005 was how Nokia's approach was superior to eg Palm's (fyi, dominant in the 'handheld' market in the 90's, in steady decline throughout the 00's, already had an app ecosystem of sorts).
"Great at hardware, rubbish at software" was a very common refrain even at the time, and that was a manifestation of the same internal dysfunction. What wasn't clear was whether anyone could come along and fill the gap, or when they might.
Because so much is software-based now, my counter would be that most companies that would have died because they failed to get their software operation in order have already done so.
According to that theory, we should have expected Windows Phone to be a success, no? Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. If anything, your argument makes me even less convinced that we have any good explanation for Nokia's failure.
MS was also internally dysfunctional, but focused on the business market for phones, and at the time of the iPhone was being roundly laughed at for the Zune. It was just different market segmentation. I'm not saying that all you need for success is competent software delivery, but lacking it in this sort of arena was definitely harmful.
And I'd also question the "killing it at software" statement: remember that Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone, you've got to go to the product iteration before to make the dates line up) was catastrophically hamstrung by an inability to ship anything decent. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device myself, and it was rubbish. They were so focused on making it so you could run a spreadsheet on your phone that they forgot the thing had to be usable. The OS wasn't actually much good until post 6.5, well after the iPhone launch, and they never got to release the iteration that would have brought it up to scratch. They realised very late that they needed to focus on consumers, not businesses, because they could see that businesses would and did buy consumer devices if they were good enough, but the reverse would almost never happen. Once the iPhone was released and they realised how wrong they'd been they made a hard pivot to get Metro out, but they were starting from a very long way behind.
More evidence against "killing it at software": this was the Windows Longhorn/Vista era. We all know how that went. Microsoft managed to survive for a long time on desktop and office suite monopoly momentum without being able to stick the landing on very many releases at all, compared to how much activity was going on. Even though the launches would go OK they'd often get killed later by internal politics. That was actually the era that got me to swear off the Windows ecosystem: you'd learn enough of an exciting new product to be useful, only for it to get sidelined with no updates a couple of months later. It was just exhausting. Half of me thinks that MS was lucky to survive Ballmer at all.
I actually share the sentiment about Ballmer, but then the actually shared characteristic is poor management, no? MS just happened to have enough legs to limp out of a bad management episode on.
Microsoft is successful when they are early at something. Coming many years after iOS and Android.
Microsoft now is successful because of cloud and working with cooperations. Not because they made the best OS. Their Microsoft Mobile wasn't very impressive. And their second attempt was ok, but very late.
The were gifted a monopoly by IBM so they constant fuckups that cost them many millions or billions of $ couldn't kill them off like it could other companies.
Taking full advantage of a monopoly isn't the same as being actually good. The beat their office competitors by leveraging their OS monopoly with very cheap bundling deals. They spun the OS monopoly into a 3D interface near-monopoly that made games only work on their platform. The list goes on.
Microsoft was still struggling with the fallout from Vista. Microsoft scrambling for that Vista SP1 and you would think they have time for Windows Mobile. Not to mention they were missing earnings and revenues going into 2008.
>Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS.
What? Blue screens of death. Malware. ctrl shift del being known by lay people. People being able to use the excuse that their Windows computer is randomly updating as a reason they cannot do the work they want to do. Not being able to create/edit/sign pdfs without downloading sketchy 3rd party programs.
Amount of time spent being tech support for family members when they were all using Windows computers was magnitudes more than the amount of time spent being tech support for family members after they switched to MacBook Airs (10+ years ago).
I am not saying Microsoft is bad at software, but certainly would not claim they kill it at consumer facing OS.
Nokia made a lot of failures, but having too many phones is not the one that affected them.
Samsung makes like, the same amount. Xiaomi probably even more.
The thing is, if you are in a developed country, you are not seeing half of Samsung phones. They launch a lot of cheaper/middle range phones on emerging market.
If you want to be successful at emerging markets, you basically need a lot of phones. Because you can't put everything on a $180 device. So instead, the company create several $180 devices aimed at different people.
Apple is the odd one in terms of how narrow their product lineup is. Every other electronics company have market-segmented their product into 100s of devices.
I have always wondered how a large company like Apple, with 161,000 employees operating in basically every market in the world, can maintain that level of focus.
not entirely correct. since iphone 7/8, they started having 3 or more new SKU per year.
more importantly, now they treat older models as the lower segment SKU that they continue selling for many years to come. not to forget the even older SKUs that resellers offer in developing countries that come from somewhere. so realistically they got 8-10 SKU actively sold in their own stores, before you consider special "red" editions etc.
to me this is not much different from the developing countries getting some budget SKU from the likes of Samsung and even Nokia in their heyday.
I once had to deal with supporting a barely functional version of samsung internet browser so international users could access the product. Samsung internet's market share of the targeted international audience was mind boggling. It makes total sense for the reason you highlighted. Samsung knew their target markets for sure.
> It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97.
Well, here is one take;
> Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on. [1]
Well, the Linux based Maemo OS I had in 2005 0r 2006 on my Nokia 770 was already promising, although the hardware was quite slow and limited, but it was an open system one would have root access to out of the box. Then it evolved into Meego, which was even better and was then employed by the Nokia N9. Nokia already had the OS to transition to from the old Symbian, but after the Microsoft deal, they scrapped it to adopt Windows Mobile, and the rest is history.
Maemo and MeeGo and other Nokia OSs were more coherent than Microsoft's phone OSs at the time, and Symbian would have had a long life on cheap devices. Smartphones were expensive back then.
In the UK there was a brief period from 2009-2011 where everyone seemed to replace their Nokia with a Blackberry before iPhones became common (BBM was a big thing)
I can remember one Christmas, perhaps 2010, where my Facebook feed was just folks posting their BBM pins. Ah, what a throwback.
In retrospect, a better idea than giving out your phone number as WhatsApp requires. And indeed, people were more willing to share BBM pins than phone numbers.
In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile). Japan always had a different market though.
Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.
Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities.
Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.
Nokia was globally dominant until 2010, when Android started rapidly eating its market share.
Japan and the US were both countries with their own weird mobile phone markets. The US market was not as relevant in the 2000s as it should have been. Mobile phone adoption was lower than in Europe and the plans were ridiculously expensive, mostly because of the dominant business model. The plan was the primary product and the phone was a generic device locked to the plan, making the market uninteresting for phone manufacturers.
I don't know if I've ever seen a Blackberry phone knowing that it's a Blackberry phone. Blackberries always sounded like the Atari ST: a device you constantly heard about but never saw in the real world. And when I saw some statistics much later, I was surprised how popular it had been in the US.
Not really. It was the Nokia board that wanted to be taken over. They were looking for a mark, and Microsoft walked right into it. Nokia dropped the phone division on Microsoft and Microsoft then had to write it down.
Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too.
When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks.
One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people dev.
They were also the biggest player in Finland. The best logistics. The most market share. They had so many devs in their rollodex. Clearly, they could ship an iPhone killer. Clearly they understood everything about mobile and knew everyone. They even had a cloud project (Ovi) that predated iCloud.
I remember meeting them back in the NGage days and thinking who are these clowns making a portrait screen for games, with no dpad, and a phone you hold sideways. No focus on apps (Palm and other handheld had plenty of homebrew and emulators).
The company was a juggernaut that could ship the old Nokia bricks, but never adapt to be good at software, or have a good mobile OS.
It's a shame, because honestly the best industrial design and UX people I've seen were there.
Do you have an example of Nokia UX you feel was better than the alternatives at the time? I was a long time Nokia user (ex telco / mobile messaging) and I don’t recall anything cutting edge on the UI/UX front. Their industrial design was good though (mostly).
The obligatory, insanely funny, almost unbelievable story behind the design of the ngage. Can't be unseen, you have been warned: https://i.imgur.com/VXgGvQQ.jpg
I remember wanting an NGage so bad. I had a whole plan to get my gameboy and all the games together to trade in so I could get one from GameStop. Then I went and actually tried one.
Having to remove the battery to swap out games was too much for me.
It's incomprehensible. I think it came out in 2003. Handheld consoles and their UX were well understood by then. I can't imagine how this device would get greenlit, pass through user testing, and ship. There are so many steps where this product could have been put on hold for revisions. They shipped it regardless. Says a lot about confidence or not listening to feedback.
I can confirm this as I worked at Nokia in the Helsinki head office in 2006 and they made so many phones, which were not tested properly and were just thrown out to different market segments. It was obvious at the time that they had no passion or craftsmanship for their products anymore (as a company, as there were still some brilliant individuals)
It's interesting. I was exposed in a low level kind of way to Nokia technology around 2002, working for a former subsidiary of Nokia that had been sold. Then it seemed there was a legacy of technical excellence - Nokia pcbs were instantly recognisable for their neatness and having all the components on one side. Did that get lost at some point or did I have a flawed impression?
I don’t know what happened at Nokia as I was only there for a year, but nice to hear that they had nicely laid out PCBs in 2002. Shows me that someone had pride in their work
This is debatable for a couple reasons: First, it is similar to saying Toyota makes too many cars. Nokia, like Toyota, made phones that fit a wide range of markets, and in each Nokia series, the insides and software were the same. Second, Nokia's problems crescendoed with Stephen Elop and the not-ready-for-prime-time Windows phone OSs that Elop insisted replace viable alternatives Nokia developed in-house. In light of the outcome, one could say Nokia made too few phones by not shipping more than one smartphone OS.
Elop was invited by the board. The Nokia board saw the end of the phones and wanted to dump the whole thing, and Microsoft was their mark. This wasn't a hostile takeover, rather a invited takeover.
While I love the N9, by that point it would have been hard to compete with Android. Just as it was hard for Microsoft.
This whole article is a single cause fallacy. There are many reasons Nokia failed in the smartphone market. This is one of them, but it is not the sole reason.
Exactly, I worked in Nokia Research around the time the iphone rumors were starting to circulate; just after Google bought an obscure company that made something called Android.
Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones.
Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke phone products based on several internal platforms. They were doing dozens a year. S30 (not Symbian) for their still popular simple phones. S40 (also not Symbian) for their flip phones and other multi media phones. S60 (that one was Symbian) for their consumer oriented smart phones. S80 (also Symbian) for their business phones. Later, S80 and S60 kind of merged and they did a range of phones clearly intended to compete with the black berry. Meanwhile they were making unreasonable amounts of money with S40 covering a wide range of form factors as well as weird luxury phones intended for billionaires.
And then they had a few experimental things. Notably a thing called Maemo that shipped in 2006 (2 years before the iphone, and even longer before Android and the ipad) that was a Debian Linux based touch screen tablet running a modern browser (mozilla) that you could update via apt-get. Amazing stuff. Except (on purpose) it lacked phone hardware so as to not piss off the operators. Those absolutely hated phones they could not control and bastardize and they would frustrate attempts to get new firmware approved.
That's the platform they messed up. Because management thought the future was all the other stuff they were selling by the bucket loads. As it turned out, Motorola flip phone clones were not the future and blackberry did not make it either. And S60 once it pivoted back to touch screen phones (they killed S90 which was supposed to do that) proved to be simply inadequate. So, they dragged their heels on Maemo and declined to ship anything resembling a competitive phone based on it until after the damage had been done by Apple and Google. This was not because of technical limitations but because of indecisiveness, lack of vision, and misguided ideas about how to compete.
The mistake Nokia made was having management without any clue whatsoever about software development while the market was pivoting towards generic rectangular slabs dominated by their software experience. They were hardware and radio specialists headed by a CEO who was a glorified bean counter without a clue.
Early Android and Iphone devices weren't much to look at in terms of hardware. And they were so fragile, you'd cover them up in some fugly cover anyway. Very different than Nokia devices which proved highly resilient against daily abuse. I never broke a phone before I got a Nexus. And then I broke 3 in a row. It was the software that made the difference and the mistake Nokia made was being perpetually indifferent about the software they had. They'd happily ship unfinished or broken software. Or outdated forks of software they had improved for other models with serious bugs and regressions. And without OTA, updating was hard.
Android borrowed heavily from Maemo. Same kernel. Early test devices were Nokia N800s. Nokia was fixing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem to make these devices run efficient. Unlike Nokia, Google was laser focused on getting Android done. That was when they could still get things done. Arguably, they've lost that ability. Nokia could have had an Android killer in the market years before Google got around to shipping Android; before the iphone launched. Declining to do that was what killed Nokia. It had everything needed to do this. Except leadership that understood it needed doing.
It is quite ironic. Because I have a Sony with sailfish on it. If Nokia had gotten their act together sooner the market could have looked very differently. It is just an old story repeating itself, IBM was once a behemoth in the personal computer industry as well, both hardware and software wise. And much like Nokia they failed to adapt to a changing market.
Nokia never understood the less-is-more thing that Apple are so good at. Hundreds of phones and an overcomplicated OS wuth political and technical problems - Symbian - were the result, not the cause, of a company that lacked focus and direction.
It's interesting that Microsoft never succeeded with a smartphone, given that their other hardware products enjoy a decent reputation (keyboards, mice, tablets); I suspect it's because of the software side - stuck with the desktop metaphor and windows, which makes no sense on smartphones.
The last version, the one on the Lumias, was actually quite OK on a phone from all I've heard -- and living in Finland, I knew more than a few people who used those back in the day.
That's preciely why Windows 8 sucked so much on the desktop; it was intended to have as much as possible of the look-and-feel of Windows Phone. Windows 8 sucked on computers; apparently not so much on phones.
At the time, Microsoft's software development was a bit of mess. But Windows Phone didn't have a desktop metaphor. Recently I had the opportunity to try one that was sitting in desk for a few years and it was pretty interesting and snappy. But they redesigned their mobile OS so many times, had no good developer experience, and came in late enough that it was all doomed.
A different POV, I'm bored of today's uniform, do-it-all smartphones and I enjoy using limited-purpose ergonomic devices with character. I often carry a dedicated camera, an e-ink reader, or a handheld console. I liked the colorful iPhone 5C, or smartphones with hardware keyboard - I miss this sometimes.
As a fresh-out-of-university engineer in the earlier 2000s, I had a ton of fun working at Nokia and the sheer number of devices was actually part of that. It was a blast having a stack of all of the weird and whacky devices on your desk at any time. I remember visiting some sort of internal museum in Finland at some point where you could basically see all of the devices they'd ever made. Mind blowing.
Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually run on the things was a different matter...
I’m very suspicious of some post-hoc generalization that rhymes a little too conveniently with modern fads.
Nokia made great phones during the mid/late 2000s. The N9 was a piece of beauty that continued to have a more cohesive and thought out experience than Android (and even iOS, in some ways) well into the mid 2010s. It was simply a joy to use.
Why Nokia then fell apart might have a little something to do with Stephen Elop and Microsoft, I suspect.
The N9 was too little, too late. Microsoft didn't destroy Nokia, they failed to rescue it. I think maybe the only company that could have saved Nokia was Google, and they weren't about to compete with their huge network of Android VARs.
Why Nokia fell apart is because they didn't take the iPhone or Android seriously, repeatedly would say things like "nobody is going to spend $400 on a phone after subsidy", and had tremendous infighting over Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows - tons of engineers and management absolutely didn't want to learn the new thing.
And then, Microsoft, not wanting to pour billions of dollars into what was already becoming a bitter duopoly fight, gave up.
I have an N9 and an labeled windows phone dev kit from post-nokia on my shelf, both devices I used for a year+. They were fantastic.
By the time Nokia N9 came out Android was the dominant smartphone OS. Nokia even cancelled releasing N9 in select markets due to this. Not to mention the api’s were severely lacking compared to Android. Maybe if they released it in 2008-2009, there might have been a chance. So the choice was either to go Android or Windows and Microsoft paid them 1billion to be stay Windows Phone exclusive.
S60 5th edition was a disaster for Symbian's and Nokia's reputation, especially the N97 incarnation. Its main issue was a lack of GPU acceleration for the GUI which wasn't really resolved until the Belle era, by which point it was far too late to resurrect.
Nokia could not stick with a single platform, once their heirloom Symbian became inadequate they caved. Like the absolute majority of corporations, they did not understand platforms. Platforms require decade-long thinking, instead of "Q4 this year".
N900 with its Maemo was pretty good phone. Too bad Nokia could not develop on the success. Then they have MeeGo and then the disastrous Windows Phone. MS had the same problem with Windows Mobile - Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8.
15 years later, the Debian + Firefox + APT platform on which N900 was based is still alive and requires surprisingly few maintenance. If they went with it they will have a solid, hassle-free platform which could compete with early Android, especially as they could easily make it run Android apps as well.
This reminds me of Dell (are they still around? :-) with a million different indistinguishable SKUs. And when you went to the web site you had to categorize yourself by their criteria before you could even look at the offerings, which always made me feel that I was going to be ripped off. How do I know if I am a small business or medium business or whatever?
Such a silly pattern. I wonder how many people just bailed out on Dell, at the very top of the sales funnel, just because those stupid segmentation questions.
Customer: I have $1,000 burning a hole in my pocket and want to buy your laptop right now!
Dell: Whoooa there, buddy, hold on. First tell me if you're a Small Business so I know what site to send you to...
I had never heard of Vertu. They still exist today in some form, hawking some real pricey crap: https://vertu.com/
Looking at the Nokia-era models, none of them support LTE so they're basically worthless these days. People are still trying to sell them on eBay for 100s, though. What a waste.
Perhaps compared with today, but these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally.
Global network technology wasn't as homogenous as now. Phones were usually sold by the phone networks who had specific requirements - technical and marketing. Different phones were also used to price phones differently around the world - from rural Africa to the rich west.
> these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally
Yeah, they had like 4 "established" operating systems and on top of that some experimental OSes that only came out on a model or two and changed every year.
Can't make a smart platform with apps when you have 7 current platforms.
Maybe! But here's another take: everyone else makes too few phones, nowadays. Exactly one, that is. Well, maybe two, if you count folding phones. After Palm and then HP failed with webOS, it's now all the same.
How come this is the future? It's freaking boring.
Yes, Nokia made too many phones, and that was not a bad thing. Other phone manufacturers made some wild concept models too, sometimes. Phone design in general was much more diverse in the 00s. I actually enjoyed flipping through phone catalogs and reading reviews.
Compare that to today, when every single phone out there is an awkwardly huge glass slab with minor design variations on the back side.
> it also made it almost impossible to create an app market.
All those Nokia phones form two categories in terms of the software they ran: the firmware that was basically the same across all Nokia non-smart phones (S40 it was called IIRC?), and Symbian. Both were capable of running J2ME apps, and Symbian also supported native ones.
It's disputable whether Nokia was a master in logistics, in fashion/design or in RF-technology or all of them.
However, it's undisputed that they did not master software. Management had no idea about software development, the tooling was awkward. Well, and for OSes, Symbian was from another decade, Linux too little, introduced too slowly because management believed in Symbian being the cash cow.
It worked as long as phones were manufactured in their own factories with high margins. Once manufacturing was outsourced to low cost countries and software became more important, they were lost.
Disclaimer: I was a software developer there for 10 years, but understood to leave well before the bitter end.
Another problem with Nokia was that there was absolutely no logic to the model numbering. You could have an entry-level, 10-year-old handset with a higher model number than the latest and greatest Nokia had to offer. If somebody told you they had a Foo 206 and you had a Bar 398 Classic, you knew nothing about how their phone compared to yours. Not how old it was, not how good it was, nothing whatsoever.
The sheer amount of phones available didn't help either, there were just so many of them you could not remember them all.
Not that other manufacturers are any better than this, Apple is the only one that sort of gets this right, though I wish they used their normal numbering scheme for the SE models.
Honestly I never understand why so many corporations do exactly that error with their naming schemes. Sony does it for everything too, even though it's gotten better. It's just such a self own marketing wise, even if it makes it easier to differentiate between different variants of the same product.
Samsung does the same for their TVs and appliances but at least they got it right with their phones: there's a "public" model name (for example, the Galaxy S23 Ultra) that is sequential and gives you a good idea of where exactly the phone sits in their line up.
And then a model name that encodes the region specific variant (for example, SM-S912W for my S23U).
Samsung gets it right, but only as long as you stay inside the same "model family". For example, "how does the S23 compare to the A53" isn't a question you can answer by looking at the model numbers alone. They could have used something like "S2X basic", or even keep the A/J/S distinction but make the numbering consistent.
Nokia could both make too many phones and fail for other reasons. The article doesn’t say Nokia failed because it made too many phones.
However, I do remember the first time my wife got an iPhone. Her Nokia was breaking down and she was trying to decide which Nokia would replace it. She spent a week comparing models. In the end she said “fuck this” and got an iPhone.
What’s really funny was that Malcolm Gladwell did a TED talk about the importance of segmenting the shit out of markets - just as the market pushed back and demonstrated he was talking nonsense.
Its funny they made to many phones but once they had the N900 they didn't make enough. And didn't care about the platform. And then didn't make another one for many more years, until the platform was dead anyway.
What warzone had she been to? I remember dropping my old Nokia down a stairwell once. When I fetched it there was a crack - in the tile floor!
Of course this was one of the older models, I think the marketing material included the phrase "supports SMS!" or something to that effect.. Good times!
I think it was the Nokia N70. The keyboard got dicky over time, the slide was rough and the camera had stopped working. Not all Nokia phones were built like tanks.
My phone of choice in those days were the tiny Sony-Ericsson phones. I really liked the K750i and before that the T610. Not as rugged as the Nokias, but smaller and nicer.
Oh yeah, that was after the "tank era" of Nokia phones. I think the last real Nokia tank was the 3310, or maybe it was just such a success that all tanks after it have been forgotten (by me at least)
I'm struggling to remember the model name of the absolute unit of a phone I dropped down that stairwell, but it was older than the 3310 at least(I later replaced it with the smaller and lighter 3310)
The comparison to Apple is strange - Apple is literally only serving one phone and that's their brand's stand-out thing. Competitors like Xiaomi, Motorola, etc, all make different models. Of course 57 models a year is too much but few other companies make only one phone with minor variations. Nokia was working in a market with fast changing technology and higher number of competitors, they had to keep innovating and marketing new stuff.
Nokia was a formidable logistics machine. As a smartphone product manager back in the 3G days, they never ceased to amaze me, because they would ship logo and firmware variants of the same device to different customers, at what I already knew to be a fairly high factory customization cost.
They paid the price for part of that (the Symbian platform was never really unified so much as it was shared to smithereens), but they were notable in what they did.
While HMD learned from this mistake and released only a few phones a year, they stuck with ugly notches at the top of the screen that acted as a customer repellent and now they are dropping NOKIA branding as nobody was buying them. I recently bought a Nokia 7 Plus for my Unitree Go2 robodog controller and I absolutely love the design that complements ZenBook S UX393 I use for developing on Linux.
The main issue they had was fragmented Symbian versions. Oh that and they allowed themselves to listen to Stephen Elop.
I admire their hardware innovation and I think it’s sad we lost it.
My Nokia E61 is still one of my favourite past handsets (Sony’s second version of the Xperia Mini Pro, the iPhone X and the stunning Siemens S35 are the others). And now I probably gave away who I am to at least one person who knows me here.
If they had concentrated on Series 60 they could easily have fixed Symbian over time. It was highly capable. For example it ran a full Webkit (yes really) browser before Apple shipped their own. That was genuinely useful. It even had code signing for apps in v3 (the version that shipped with the E61)
The problem was still Symbian under S60, if you like. Yes, it had code signing (which seemed like an unnecessary restriction at the time it was introduced) and a decent browser, and email that synced in the background (unlike in iPhone 1!) and background tasks in general, etc.
But developing for Symbian was convoluted, very painful and slow. And it slowed down Nokia itself not to mention the 3rd party/external app developers. There was no reasonable way to fix Symbian as these issues stemmed from the very foundations. One of them being memory management, the other probably cooperative multitasking and callbacks. But the memory management thing was all over the code (think string handling, so everywhere) and it made using existing software hard too. Linux would have been the way to go, one way or another. Sure, they would have to have rebuilt most things for that platform but e.g. webkit would have been a no-brainer and they could have used a lot of existing open source software.
This is a proven method of market discovery used by companies like Sony. If you watch Sony in early market entry they make a lot of different models. Then they let the market tell them which features sell. Then they collapse the models. Yes, it's expensive. It's also incredibly effective.
There is a very interesting documentary on Nokia on YouTube. I can't remember if it was already suggested here on HN in a previous thread. Here's the link:
Jobs made great lemonade out of Apple's slimmed down line in his famous 2x2 matrix ({consumer,pro}x{desktop, portable}). Who cared that they also had the mac mini that didn't fit in? Everybody understood it (and it encouraged people to upsell themselves to "pro").
I remember somewhere in the late 00s/early 10s a blog post that was saying exactly the same thing, putting the blame on a market segmentation that was too agressive (and contrasting with Apple's direction, ofc)
bollocks. it was a new area ripe for experimentation. this always happens when a new market is created. now we're in a phase where there is no innovation and there hasn't beem for some time
For the reference of "business units" rather than functions in the comparison to Apple — can someone elaborate here on what a "functional" organization would look like?
Too many for what? Would you really want the history of mobile phones to be merely the antiseptic aesthetic and walled garden of the iPhone? Why do you think people are buying folding phones, flip phones, phones with screens on the front and the back.
So they ultimately failed, so what? The vast majority of companies of all sizes fail after some time.
I'm not sure that was a problem. Let's not forget that smartphones, as we know them, weren't really invented yet back then. So there wasn't really a common form factor and feature package that every customer was looking for.
Sure, there were Symbian phones that could functionally do almost anything smartphones can do now (and do more than the first iPhone) but those weren't for everyone and those didn't use touch screens so there were multiple form factors. Like the full keyboard communicators (9210, 9300/9500), the Blackberry clone (E61, I think), the slide keyboard (7650?) and then all the non-Symbian phones (S40 OS, IIRC). And, of course cameras were new and shitty so not every phone had them.
Now this could have caused a problem in itself and what the article says about the organization could also cause problems but (I keep saying this when this topic comes up) the real problem was that the Nokia management was too convenient/coward and didn't dare to switch away from Symbian. Especially since they have bought out Erinsson and Sony (again, IIRC), their former partners in the Symbian consortium in ~2004/5.
There were eperiments with a linux based phone OS around that time. They created the Nokia 770 "internet tablet" [1] which was this PDA-like touch screen device with a landscape screen layout, a pen, and a removable front cover. Obviously it was an experiment (and later followed by the 810 then the 900, the latter being a phone). However no one in the management was brave enough to give a linux phone a go. Especially not committing to a strategy to switch over to linux. Symbian phones were selling great, Nokia was the market leader and you can't really do better than that...
I remember, at one point, one team in the Helsinki office of NRC (Nokia Research Center) was coming up with the idea of creating a "unified architecture" (called the "Grand Unified Architecture") where they would create a uniform platform around the 3 operating systems: a linux based one, Symbian S60 and the (non-Symbian) S40. The genius idea was that they'd create a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) then above that would be one of the 3 OSs and above those would be a uniform API that could be used by all app developers. This would have been a great strategy to side-step an actual decision but other than that didn't make any sense, really. (Maybe you could argue back then that the S40 hardware was not capable of running linux, but there was no excuse for trying to keep both Symbian and linux while hiding them below a uniform API.) So the switch to linux never happened and Symbian was a pain in the ass to develop for. Just concatenating two strings took several lines of code in their C++-based API that hasn't even looked like actual C++. And this made developing in-house software slow and made 3rd party software pretty scarce.
Nokia also had an aversion towards touch screens. One of the reasons must have been that back then only resistive touch screens were available (I think the oroginal iPhone was the first phone with a capacitive one, i.e. one that was an actual touch screen and not a press/push screen). The other reason must have been Symbian (and the S60 skin) that was really not designed for touch screen and was hard to develop.
So Nokia just continued to enjoy being the market leader with the management not taking the risk to try to switch direction. And then the iPhone came and then Android came (who, after seeing an iPhone demo, very quickly changed direction because at first they thought they were competing with Blackberry, so their UI was similar to that and maybe Symbian).
All large phone companies make too many phones from the consumer point of view (consumers just don't know it apparently)... It's just a marketing strategy.
Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.
The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though.
Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.