Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.
You were on the other side of the table
That is obvious from my comment.
Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
111–120 of 314 posts
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#112Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). B…
Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing. I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great! I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent cam…
> Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones.
I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now.
More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites for the game files (or pay exorbitant fees through magazines).
There was a certain charm to games back then, too, seeing what people could knock together with Java on such a limited platform. Games like Gravity Defied, Galaxy on Fire or Gish, or even Doom RPG.
I'm kind of nostalgic, admittedly, maybe for a time when not everything was so well optimized towards monetization. And before Wirth's law became so present on our devices.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux and Nokia were at one point the Crown Jewels of Finnish tech. One still remains. Would’ve been a match made in heaven but I believe they needed Microsoft’s cash to keep the company running. I remember testing the N900 at their store and was really impressed but I think it was too little too late
N900 was awesome, but it wasn't what the masses wanted. It had a lot of quirks, like UI freezing when someone calls you so you couldn't answer the call and suffering from slowing down over a relatively short period of time while being price competitive with the other high end phones. N900 was a great beta. We never got a 1.0 though.
The 1.0 was the N9. It had excellent reviews. Sadly it was commercially stillborn - Nokia had already publicly switched to Microsoft's bullshit, so it got no commercial push, and nobody wants to buy a dead phone.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#114The difference is that no "developers are just tools that should be outsourced whenever cheaper" company has a chance against a true software company (which I count Apple towards even though they're more known for the hardware) deciding to enter the competition.
Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first.
The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
You were on the other side of the table
That is obvious from my comment.
What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press.
Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#116I just bought a new Nokia phone. Part from nostalgia since the last one I owned was over 10 years ago, part because it seemed to be good value for its price (300€).
Now, having used it for a while, I wouldn't say I'm impressed - design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead. Yet I don't really have anything to complain about - it does what a modern phone should do. It's pretty big though so it's harder to put into your pocket but I guess that's just how phones are nowadays.
I'll be more interested to see though how long the phone will last, my previous OnePlus endured 5 years before the electronics started to show their age. I hope Nokia still has its built-quality and this one will be rocking way past that with couple of drops to concrete in-between.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#117I liked my Nokia phones - they were ergonomic but not innovative; they were great "just a phone"-type phones. My wife even purchased a re-make of one of their classic phones recently. But I loved my BlackBerries - they were the perfect tool for email/chat/calling and nothing else, the perfect complement to a laptop, whereas iPads partially overlap with both mobile phones AND laptops in terms of functionality, which i…
Agreed on BB. I was interested when they moved to Android, and then they died. There still isn't a good, high-end Android with a keyboard from a company I know I can trust.
I was interested that Blackberry didn't use Android - their QNX based OS had a lot of potential. At the time, my Android phone would get hot and drain the battery whenever a batch process decided to reindex my media.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'll counter with the Nokia N900. I've never understood this about N900 fans. My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity. What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?
The N900 was my favorite phone by far. Most of the reason come as a programmer, not all users might value them. First of all ot was a true Linux phone. Running a derivative of Debian, complete with apt etc. Most of the apps on it, even the app to make a phone call where preexisting open source Linux applications with a nice mobile UI. An UI that was clean and consistent without the need off branding that other platfo…
But all this points also apply to the N9, it was a fully fleshed Linux system and arguably qt for writing apps was significantly more comfortable for developers than the custom framework based on gtk. I even recall that it was quite straight forward to port desktop apps, with very minor adjustments.
On top of that it was actually usable for normal users which the n900 failed at, largely due to not being usable in many networks due to the radio IIRC. The UI of the N9 was also much more polished. So unless you never used an N9 I don't understand how you would prefer the N900 (except for the keyboard).
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is obvious from my comment.
What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press. Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.
I do get it alright.
Some people had a bad experience with a couple of folks and decided to extrapolate to everyone in the company.
Every single company has such pearls. If they don't, they aren't yet big enough.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#120I covered quite a few Nokia reviews back in the day and Nokia was by far the most arrogant company to deal with. Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so. And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding y…
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