This is excellent, but it it important to see it as more than something that enables you to print your own case.
Think, instead, about the number of times you need some kind of mounting bracket or adapter to connect two pieces of consumer goods to each other. Think about mounting a phone on a car dashboard, or on a bike or motorcycle.
If there are N of the first and M of the second, there's no practical way for any manufacturer to support all MN combinations. As soon as some more companies follow Nokia's lead here, you should be able to combine two models, apply any final tweaks or customizations, and print your own adapter, perhaps even iterating over time as you add subtle new features.
This is the future, and you'd better be ready for it!
My company has a variety of 3D printers and we actually produced several iPhone case/adapters in the past. It's a small company, so we all helped out by testing different case designs.
The first round of testing involved a simple case design utilizing all of the plastics and printers that we have available. Most plastics were too brittle and would crack when you snapped them on the iPhone. In fact, only 1 ABS was usable. The consumer models had a hard time with the curved surfaces and felt much grainier in the hand. But once I tried out the final soft-touch part that was produced using injection modeling, I would never go back to the 3D printed model. The difference it feels in your hand is night and day. Oh, and the mass produced cases cost < $.10 per unit. I think we spend more on packing than parts themselves.
3D printers are great for prototyping and hobbyists doing 1-offs. But the tech has a way to go before being useful to the average consumer.
I have no idea what you tried for your prototype, but I find it kind of interesting that almost nothing ended up with nice parts. They won't always be nice, but if they're designed with the constraints of 3D printing in mind, they can be significantly better than just a generic part without any care in mind for the characteristics of 3D printing.
> Most plastics were too brittle and would crack when you snapped them on the iPhone. In fact, only 1 ABS was usable.
I haven't injection molded anything yet, but I have made some 3D objects with my home made fused deposition printer. This may not hold for other types of printers, but selecting the correct infill orientation, fill percentage, and pattern can drastically change the properties of the final printed part.
> The consumer models had a hard time with the curved surfaces and felt much grainier in the hand.
I'm not sure what kind of printer you have, but if it's correctly calibrated you can print some pretty nice curved surfaces. They'll always feel grainier because the "normal" direction is on the Z axis. With something like injection molding, as you get 'flat' faces everywhere as you have normal surfaces on every part of your mold. SLA does a little better with the layer heights, but the plastic isn't as strong.
> 3D printers are great for prototyping and hobbyists doing 1-offs. But the tech has a way to go before being useful to the average consumer.
That's absolutely what they're for. What if every piece of tech you had came with a CAD drawing that you could load up and make that thing you wanted but can't buy yet? What if you just wanted one, but someone wanted to buy them from you, and would be willing to skip the design step completely by letting you design it, and them buying it from you. Freelance engineering is getting a little closer (instead of having a full blown design studio, you can make the parts you need for a project in the comfort of your home no matter how bizarre they need to be). Nokia isn't trying to get anyone to mass produce cases with their designs (although they could be used that way), they're trying to entice people with access to a 3d printer and their phone to make something cool. Just check out the search for 'iphone' on thingiverse [1]. People are making anything and everything for them that enhances the functionality of the phone. Nokia wants in.
The 41MP camera on the 808 wasn't exciting? Or the floating lens in the 920?
If you think this is more exciting than the technological progress in mobile phone cameras that Nokia's R&D department is making, you need to adjust your sense of perspective.
Unfortunately I agree. It's such a shame to see what was once the most dominant mobile phone company reduced to becoming yet a another Microsoft OEM :(
While the windows phone isn't bad, I think Microsoft made it impossible for Nokia to succeed.
I have a feeling if they had decided to go with android, their phones would have been purchased as a direct competitor with Apple and Samsung, though Samsung may have played a smaller role if Nokia had jumped in sooner.
I may be wrong, however when Nokia entered into agreements with Microsoft it seems to me they had the expectation they would be their flagship phone provider. And yet when Windows 8 phones were made available Nokia was still stuck on the older platform for their most current phones. Exclusivity would have made Nokia the main source for Windows phones. The other companies such as LG and Samsung used both Windows phones and Android phones so they never had this issue.
I think the biggest problem is that they charge for their operating system, which is fine for the Lumia 920, but isn't practical on low end phones where Nokia actually still has some market share. Or at least not practical at the rates Nokia is obliged to pay.
I don't know if I would say impossible to succeed. But by demanding full price for the OS, even on low end phones, it meant that Nokia rolled out far fewer windows phones. I think that was bad for Microsoft and Nokia, and indicative of old school desktop thinking on Microsoft's part.
I'm surprised you didn't mention City Lens. I loved that while I had it. Nokia Music is also really nice. I agree that the Windows Phone 8 OS is quite nice. My problems were as follows:
* the volume wasn't loud enough - I kept missing calls even when the volume was on 30/30. This is just not acceptable and I wasn't going to spend 2 years explaining to my wife why I didn't answer her call. Also, I hate the fact that there was no media volume. If I wanted to watch youtube or listen to Nokia Music the volume that the ringer was at is what the youtube/music was at.
* MMS didn't work. I couldn't send MMS when connected to wifi. I had to go through 4 steps to get it to work. I'm sorry but a brand new phone shouldn't have this issue. That is something that should have been tested and others have had the same issue.
* Call waiting didn't work - I was on the phone with my mom and my wife called. I heard the typical call waiting beep and looked at my screen. There was no notification of an incoming call, which I thought was weird but I just kept on talking with my mom. After I was done talking to her I was going to call my wife to see if she tried calling me, except I couldn't. The call with my mom never ended, it was stuck "ending call". I would click on the "People" tile to call my wife and it would bring me to my stuck ending call. I had to restart the phone and when I did it showed I missed 5 of my wife's calls.
* The OS feels like the Windows 95 of phones - while I liked most of the operating system, it just didn't seem stable. Too many times I had to restart the phone to fix a problem. One of those problems was the call waiting issue I mentioned above. Another was my data just stopped working, even though I had full bars and LTE. A phone shouldn't haven't to be restarted to get things to work, at least in my opinion.
* Voicemail - the voicemail was confusing and there weren't any notifications. I went a week without knowing I had a voicemail. The only reason I found out was because my brother had told me via email he left a voicemail. The voicemail app on the live tiles wasn't for the voicemail, it was for visual voicemail, which isn't free.
Those were my main issues. The fact that I had so many issues in the first 20 days was what made me realize that I had to return it and couldn't spend 2 years with that phone. I switched to the iPhone 5 and am super glad I did! I have had no issues and love the phone.
Nokia are wrong in saying that they are the first to do this. Granted, Apple didn't realese STL files (which are a huge list of coordinates describing the vertices of triangles). But for several years now Apple released very detailed engineering drawings of their products publicly: https://developer.apple.com/resources/cases/. These drawings are actually useful for someone who wants to design and make their own case, whereas Nokia's STL files only let you reproduce whatever Nokia designed for you (modifying STL meshes is possible but the format limits the possibilities).
I also don't understand why Nokia puts a "noncommercial personal use only" license on this. Isn't an accessories ecosystem something they should want? I would have loved to use this design for adding this Nokia phone to an online customization tool for iPhone cases which I run. Thanks to this license my website will stay iPhone4/5 only.
Footnote: One of the Nokia downloads claims to be "mechanical drawings" but it only contains STL files.
Footnote 2: And why on earth do I have to register as a Nokia developer to get this?
Someone capable enough to design STL files from a dimensioned drawing is probably also capable enough to make a dimensioned drawing using calipers and the phone.
I agree that it is a PR thing, but I also see that what they are doing as quite different from Apple. Apple is enabling hardware developers, Nokia is letting people who don't have mechanical skills make the cases. I think what would have been more interesting is if Nokia had released both STL as well as CAD files, which would allow for the modification that you point out.
The last time for me was when they showed off the OIS and low-light capability of the Lumia 920. And the time before that was when they showed off the 41MP camera on the 808 PureView.
Both of which are far more interesting than them throwing up some schematics.
Very exciting concept for Nokia to come up with. Although, I'm not sure it's any more likely to make me buy a Nokia 820 even though I do own a 3D printer.
Microsoft has asserted the authority to decide what you can and cannot do with phones like this one. I harbor a faint hope that 3D printer owners are the type of empowered people who find that unacceptable.
Why the dismissive comment? And how do you justify the blanket statement that cases are useless, given how many are sold all the time?
Your comment tells me you're the type of guy who, if given the chance to print an actual phone, might just comment "Its not like you are printing an iphone/samsung - just a useless nokia". Some people can never be satisfied, I guess.
Think, instead, about the number of times you need some kind of mounting bracket or adapter to connect two pieces of consumer goods to each other. Think about mounting a phone on a car dashboard, or on a bike or motorcycle.
If there are N of the first and M of the second, there's no practical way for any manufacturer to support all MN combinations. As soon as some more companies follow Nokia's lead here, you should be able to combine two models, apply any final tweaks or customizations, and print your own adapter, perhaps even iterating over time as you add subtle new features.
This is the future, and you'd better be ready for it!