I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate. Sure, they made mistakes, but it wasn't entirely unfeasible to assume that the mobile phone market had matured in terms of features, and the next big thing was going to be "phones as fashion statements." When you think about it, prior to the phone, everything people carried on them everyday was some sort of fashion statement. Clothes, glasses, jewllery, watches, handbags, backpacks etc. I think they assumed that the phone was like the watch; peaked functionally, but room to grow in terms of form.
>I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate.
Where do you see the hate? Everyone seems to have fond memories of Nokia, on the HW, camera and especially their adventurous fashion and industrial design side that's sorely missing these days in the boring smartphone world.
They didn't fail because it was hated, they failed because Apple and Android beat them fair and square before they could adapt to the new world driven by taking a 30% cut of sales of high-level apps in walled garden apps-store ecosystems, instead of one driven by sales of embedded hardware in plastic cases with no money on app sales.
Nokia didn't adapt because of cost cutting. Their engineers wanted to get into smartphones asap. Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred, but it was led by nokia and it was fragile
>Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred
Do you have a source for this? I think phone manufacturers prefer whatever sells best, has lowest cost and highest margins, preferably all at once.
And compared to Android, Symbian lagged on all those fronts. At its origins it was still a low-level embedded OS that was forced to mutate into an app-based OS and it showed in UX sluggishness, the convoluted soruce-code, dated build toolchain that took days to compile, and in the lack of cheap and easy ways for indie devs to develop and ship apps to consumers. By the time Symbian opened its source code and app build tools it was too late to compete with Android and iOS.
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
The 5800/5230/5530 were probably the best value touchscreen phones of the time, considering that their screens had higher DPI than the first three iPhones and they all had similar web browsers.
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.
For better or worse charging a phone every night wasn't that much of a downside in practice. And most users were happy to trade off tactility for touch screens.
My memory of Nokia is that the apps and services just didn't work that well.
Just after I got my first iPhone I arranged a meetup with a friend. I used Google Maps on the phone to find my way, and it worked perfectly - almost unthinkable at the time, because we were all still using paper street maps while driving.
She was late because the map on her Nokia phone had gotten very confused and sent her to the wrong location.
The Nokia experience was like that. Before the iPhone I'd had a couple of Communicators. They were incredible in theory, and I sent bad photos in emails from various unlikely locations to prove it.
But they were big, slow, and clunky in practice. The iPhone wasn't.
I dunno, I was a mobile developer at that time and moved from Symbian to Android/iOS and I didn't have a feeling Nokia engineering leads had any idea what they're doing either.
They tried to persuade us to use Qt to write apps (as alternative to iOS)... and they haven't shipped a single phone with Qt available as toolkit. They told us they might ship an update for N95 and perhaps one other model to pre install the library. At the time when they had literally hundreds of models.
When we finally put an app on their store, they failed to approve it in 6 months (!). Apparently because we chose the whole Europe as launch target so each country's Nokia office had to approve it separately. Silly us.
Afterwards we moved to Android (1.5, with 1.6 coming) and iPhoneOS.
Their Qt story was mostly geared towards their Linux phones. N900, N9 were the last of the kind. They killed the N9 before even it was launched. (The infamous Burning platform memo).
At that time, I genuinely believed that the N9 had the vision and design to beat anything Android was - at that time. Till date, it's still the best UX i experienced in a phone. Even a lot of Nokia managers I talked to called Elop a trojan horse from Microsoft.
But given how Android's source was open while Meego was anything but.. along with the whole Nokia + Microsoft drama... It's just a shame
They burned out a lot of solid programmers rushing Qt for S60. Nothing much came out of it, but the management vision was to have QML apps on S60 compete with iPhones.
Did they want to get into smartphones? I worked for Nokia somewhere in 2004-2006, designing music software for their latest prototypes. I don't remember anyone I spoke to at Nokia seeing the iPhone coming. There were other things that did bits of the iPhone, but nothing as slick and finished. Nokia were bad at software, honestly. They were outsourcing all their "1st party" apps to random dev shops who didn't get enough support and technical docs from the mothership to really make their apps work well. And every dev outfit had their own design ideas and design language. Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.
> Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.
The first iPhone was the opposite of vertical integration. BOM was the same HW parts Nokia, Ericsson and the rest had access to. Samsung ARM SoC, Qualcomm modem, SK NAND, Sharp LCD, basic stuff. Apple had the OS, UX, SW and stuff like full feature HTML browser down to the T in ways that made Nokia and the rest feel like dinosaurs.
Yes and no, I mean many of the parts were off the shelf and the vertical integration did slowly happen over time, but on the other hand iPhones never used off-the-shelf processor silicon. While they were Arm-designed CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores at that stage (Apple would switch to designing their custom designed Arm-compatible cores with the A6 in 2012 and their own GPU design with the A11 Bionic in 2017), the SoC of the first few iPhones and iPod Touches were custom designed for them by Samsung.
Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.
I remember this somewhat differently. I'm still grateful for my time at Nokia at that I had the chance to work in the vicinity of one their 3 (if I remember correctly) design centers. I was young and reckless and on one occasion I started to taunt one of the industrial designers who I was sitting at the next desk. I was telling them, hogy NTT Docomo is already pushing out mobile phones with color screens, polyphonic ringtones and Nokia is just doing n+1 iteration on low-res monochrome displays and beepers. The guy didn't say a word, reached for a key, opened one of the closed drawers and pulled out a Japanese phone. "Who do you think this was designed by?" Turned out that the same guys were doing the design for Nokia's Japanese phones, even for Docomo, under the "NO" moniker. (Docomo enforced a two letter + 3 digits model naming scheme)
Nokia for a long time (as other manufacturers as well) thought that there is no interest in such devices in the US and European markets. The pricier phones targeted business users with a more reserved design. This wasn't (yet) cost cutting, more like how they have read the market.
As for Symbian, others has already explained its shortcomings. There was an internal debate how it would be able to take Nokia to the next generation of smartphones and they have been working on the Linux based Maemo operating system. There were internal prototypes and maybe there was a limited run on N900 released. However, moving to a completely new platform seemed risky. I think ~2-3 years before the iPhone the decision was to try fixing Symbian instead of moving every service and partner to a yet unproven new platform. It was more of a "we have invested in it too much, we can't write it off" case.
haritha-j · · focus · HN ↗
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
Where do you see the hate? Everyone seems to have fond memories of Nokia, on the HW, camera and especially their adventurous fashion and industrial design side that's sorely missing these days in the boring smartphone world.
They didn't fail because it was hated, they failed because Apple and Android beat them fair and square before they could adapt to the new world driven by taking a 30% cut of sales of high-level apps in walled garden apps-store ecosystems, instead of one driven by sales of embedded hardware in plastic cases with no money on app sales.
alightsoul · · focus · HN ↗
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
Do you have a source for this? I think phone manufacturers prefer whatever sells best, has lowest cost and highest margins, preferably all at once.
And compared to Android, Symbian lagged on all those fronts. At its origins it was still a low-level embedded OS that was forced to mutate into an app-based OS and it showed in UX sluggishness, the convoluted soruce-code, dated build toolchain that took days to compile, and in the lack of cheap and easy ways for indie devs to develop and ship apps to consumers. By the time Symbian opened its source code and app build tools it was too late to compete with Android and iOS.
rickdeckard · · focus · HN ↗
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
Paianni · · focus · HN ↗
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
- 1. Battery runtime - 2. Durability - 3. Tactile user-input
But apparently I am not who the smartphones are made for today. It might be that they were kinda like me.
TheOtherHobbes · · focus · HN ↗
My memory of Nokia is that the apps and services just didn't work that well.
Just after I got my first iPhone I arranged a meetup with a friend. I used Google Maps on the phone to find my way, and it worked perfectly - almost unthinkable at the time, because we were all still using paper street maps while driving.
She was late because the map on her Nokia phone had gotten very confused and sent her to the wrong location.
The Nokia experience was like that. Before the iPhone I'd had a couple of Communicators. They were incredible in theory, and I sent bad photos in emails from various unlikely locations to prove it.
But they were big, slow, and clunky in practice. The iPhone wasn't.
izacus · · focus · HN ↗
They tried to persuade us to use Qt to write apps (as alternative to iOS)... and they haven't shipped a single phone with Qt available as toolkit. They told us they might ship an update for N95 and perhaps one other model to pre install the library. At the time when they had literally hundreds of models.
When we finally put an app on their store, they failed to approve it in 6 months (!). Apparently because we chose the whole Europe as launch target so each country's Nokia office had to approve it separately. Silly us.
Afterwards we moved to Android (1.5, with 1.6 coming) and iPhoneOS.
saidinesh5 · · focus · HN ↗
At that time, I genuinely believed that the N9 had the vision and design to beat anything Android was - at that time. Till date, it's still the best UX i experienced in a phone. Even a lot of Nokia managers I talked to called Elop a trojan horse from Microsoft.
But given how Android's source was open while Meego was anything but.. along with the whole Nokia + Microsoft drama... It's just a shame
izacus · · focus · HN ↗
(We ended up shipping a webapp which was another kind of disaster on their phones).
nikanj · · focus · HN ↗
qingcharles · · focus · HN ↗
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
The first iPhone was the opposite of vertical integration. BOM was the same HW parts Nokia, Ericsson and the rest had access to. Samsung ARM SoC, Qualcomm modem, SK NAND, Sharp LCD, basic stuff. Apple had the OS, UX, SW and stuff like full feature HTML browser down to the T in ways that made Nokia and the rest feel like dinosaurs.
stephen_g · · focus · HN ↗
Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.
gregkb · · focus · HN ↗