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Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

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Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#141

Post by molofaha »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #126
afavour wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are Android keyboards that replicate it. I tried a few but for whatever reason they still couldn't replicate the experience. I suspect it's the lack of hard buttons - I could type out an entire message without looking at the screen with a T9 keypad. I've ended up switching to a swipe keyboard which I find efficient but it in an entirely different way to T9.

For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to be going backwards.

The Microsoft-Nokia didn't want to maintain the old OSs so went with a licensed clone of Series 30, and then post-Microsoft went with KaiOS (though newer ones seem to be back on the Series 30 clone, which is frankly a better experience than KaiOS was). Like, I was never a big fan of Series 30 or 40 but they had an awful lot of iterative improvement over the years and they just pissed that all away.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#142

Post by bserge »

908B64B197 wrote: post #140
bserge wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not the iPhone, but Apple's marketing. We had everything the iPhone did with Windows Mobile. Hell, even Symbian did fine. They were just aimed at "professionals" and completely ignored consumers.

No apps.

You can't be serious... Do you think they just had a preset number of programs and that's it?

Windows Mobile (and even fking Pocket PC) had text editors, browsers, music and video players, file management and transfer tools, GPS software, painting tools, etc.

Granted, you needed three cells in your brain to, gasp, install apps yourself, but they were available.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#143

Post by bserge »

toast0 wrote: post #136
bserge wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not the iPhone, but Apple's marketing. We had everything the iPhone did with Windows Mobile. Hell, even Symbian did fine. They were just aimed at "professionals" and completely ignored consumers.

Did Windows Mobile have firmware updates independent of carriers? AFAIK, Symbian didn't. Getting updates on the regular changed the world (not always for the better)

Both of them did. You updated it yourself. Ffs

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#144

Post by webmobdev »

senko wrote: post #87
rcarmo wrote: post #75

I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of every single model of those, and they were some of the best hardware I ever used. The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functional…

Maemo wasn't the problem, and in fact N900 had a dedicated cult following for years after. Nokia spectaculary blew its own foot with deprecating Maemo after only a few months - either the stupidest move in history or result of internal power struggles - and force-marrying it with Intel's Moblin (itself a decent mobile OS) to create unholy mess that was Meego. The book (btw awesome find, gonna read it at the first cha…

Coincidentally, I was just reading something related to this debacle here - https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/177611 - too. And I do wonder how Nokia's future would have been different if they had fully focused on Meego / Sailfish OS instead of adopting Windows Mobile Platform. (Sailfish OS was developed by ex-Nokia developers).

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#145

Post by gpas »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #6
pedrocr wrote: post #2

Was the Communicator ever really influential? I was in a Nokia dominated market at the time and pagers and then blackberrys seemed to be what actually drove that side of the market. The Communicator was seen as a curiosity.

Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).

Val Kilmer in The Saint used the first gen Nokia Communicator. Loved everything about that movie when I was a kid.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#146

Post by FridayoLeary »

molofaha wrote: post #141
FridayoLeary wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to be going backwards.

The Microsoft-Nokia didn't want to maintain the old OSs so went with a licensed clone of Series 30, and then post-Microsoft went with KaiOS (though newer ones seem to be back on the Series 30 clone, which is frankly a better experience than KaiOS was). Like, I was never a big fan of Series 30 or 40 but they had an awful lot of iterative improvement over the years and they just pissed that all away.

KaiOS (if that's what it's called) is crap and almost unusable. The Symbian series and more basic OSs were pretty complete and nice to use. Nokia no longer make good phones, or even mediocre phones.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#147

Post by jareklupinski »

908B64B197 wrote: post #138
jareklupinski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm... At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".

The Storm is quite infamous because it launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G. Curious why you bought it instead of the iPhone.

family plan was on verizon :(
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