Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

osnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 182 posts

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#91

Post by butokai »

rixrax wrote: post #56
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #5

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990…

There was no shock when iPhone was launched. Nokia had tried touch display phones already by that time and they had gone the way of N900 and deemed unviable. Disarray yes, but not because of iPhone. Of course there were people that appreciated the threat that iPhone might become, but if anything it was laughed at and ridiculed. I mean come on - no 3G and no QWERTY keyboard. Who in the world would use that! ;)

The N900 came two years after the iPhone, and Nokia's first touchscreen phone (the 5800) one year after the iPhone, though

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#92

Post by lenkite »

pjmlp wrote: post #82
lenkite wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Nokia board had not hired Elop or had fired him in time, Maemo would have been a third mobile platform alternative today - one likely far more open than Android. Elop was a truly successful Nokia saboteur. An illustrative case study of how a single CEO can destroy a company for his self-profit and go out laughing with no legal repercussions.

WRONG! Elop did exactly what the Nokia board asked him to do. All anti-Elop bashers should read about what happened before spreading this content.

Yes, please do your own research and read on how the Nokia's board of Directors saw the memo as an act of misjudgement and how Chairman Jorma Ollila gave bitter feedback for it at a board meeting.

During Elop's tenure, Nokia's stock price dropped 62%, their mobile phone market share was halved, their smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the company suffered a cumulative €4.9 billion loss

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#93

Post by Gravityloss »

toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open source software etc..

Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#94

Post by pjmlp »

lenkite wrote: post #92
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WRONG! Elop did exactly what the Nokia board asked him to do. All anti-Elop bashers should read about what happened before spreading this content.

Yes, please do your own research and read on how the Nokia's board of Directors saw the memo as an act of misjudgement and how Chairman Jorma Ollila gave bitter feedback for it at a board meeting. During Elop's tenure, Nokia's stock price dropped 62%, their mobile phone market share was halved, their smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the company suffered a cumulative €4.9 billion loss

Former employee.

I happened to be in Espoo office during the week the memo came out, to give a training on NetAct related technologies.

No research needed.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#95

Post by Spooky23 »

getlawgdon wrote: post #62
Spooky23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verizon was pretty hilarious with denial early on. I recall them coming to talk about what a piece of garbage the iPhone was to our CIO, and how BlackBerry would bury them, etc. Then the CIO pulls out his iPhone and demos it. Lol. One of the reps flipped to AT&T a few weeks later. It’s really a shame actually, the BB was a great device and had an unbeatable security model for enterprises for a long time. iPhone is ju…

iphone is magical; yet I'm replying on pixel3 right now despite recently moving to 12 max pro. I'm now carrying 2 phones around. the iPhone for the camera and the pixel for the superior usability. magical I tell you.

Fifteen years later everyone has evolved.

At the time though, the iPhone was questionable for a business user on paper. Weird touch keyboard, poor security (its active sync client lied about encryption), etc.

But in the flesh, it was magical.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#96

Post by whereistimbo »

Gravityloss wrote: post #93
toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open source software etc.. Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.

Was Aalto University where Linus graduated and Linux originated?

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#97

Post by Gravityloss »

whereistimbo wrote: post #96
Gravityloss wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open source software etc.. Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.

Was Aalto University where Linus graduated and Linux originated?

No, he's from University of Helsinki.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#98

Post by toyg »

Gravityloss wrote: post #93
toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open source software etc.. Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.

Yes, sorry, last night I was a bit flippant and this issue remains a bit of a thorn in my geek heart. I was trying to convey how this guy, flown out by Nokia HQ, felt and sounded like coming from a parallel dimension where developers really wanted to use Symbian in 2008/2009.

I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds' homeland.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#99

Post by pessimizer »

toopok4k3 wrote: post #51
pessimizer wrote: post #28

> the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.

Are you still stuck in 2008? Perhaps worked at Nokia? I heard this a lot back then. Even believed it myself because how could 1000s of engineers be wrong... Ohh how nice those screens felt! Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. Even the first crappy android phones with capacitive touchscreens was enough to show this.

> Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is.

I'm going to have to call this subjective, because, surprisingly, I've also used capacitive screens.

I could use the N900 wet and in gloves, and it was pressure sensitive. Also, I once dropped it so hard that it broke a tiny piece of the sidewalk off (I tried to catch it while it was falling, and instead batted it and added velocity to the fall.) The screen was fine. I've never seen a cracked N900 screen.

The only time it required a stylus is when I was using a desktop UI on it, making everything microscopic. If you did that with a capacitive screen it would require a special stylus, whereas with my N900, a toothpick would do.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#100

Post by pessimizer »

tom_mellior wrote: post #90
pessimizer wrote: post #28

> the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.

I wouldn't say "every way", but the lack of multi-touch was sometimes an advantage. I loved the swirl-to-zoom gesture on the N900, pinch-to-zoom on multi-touch screens always feels clunky in comparison. If I wanted to zoom in or out on the N900, I just used the thumb that was already hovering over the screen, of the hand holding a phone. Pinching to zoom needs two hands , one to hold the phone, the other to perform t…

Amen. I absolutely hate pinch to zoom. Screw to zoom is better, and actually educational. Teaches righty-tighty lefty-loosey.

IIRC lack of multitouch was a software problem. The N900 was rife with software problems. If they had just kept the Linux orthodox and left out the binary blobs, they would have been able to go back to the platform after the MS disaster with the OS looking and working 10x better than where they left it.

Post reply on HN