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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#131

Post by jbverschoor »

secondcoming wrote: post #18
jbverschoor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia was long gone when they were acquired. They were beaten by RIM/BB They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)

Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.

In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile). Japan always had a different market though.

Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.

Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities.

Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#132

Post by roneythomas6 »

t_mann wrote: post #57
regularfry wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Great at hardware, rubbish at software" was a very common refrain even at the time, and that was a manifestation of the same internal dysfunction. What wasn't clear was whether anyone could come along and fill the gap, or when they might. Because so much is software-based now, my counter would be that most companies that would have died because they failed to get their software operation in order have already done s…

According to that theory, we should have expected Windows Phone to be a success, no? Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. If anything, your argument makes me even less convinced that we have any good explanation for Nokia's failure.

Microsoft was still struggling with the fallout from Vista. Microsoft scrambling for that Vista SP1 and you would think they have time for Windows Mobile. Not to mention they were missing earnings and revenues going into 2008.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#133

Post by Analemma_ »

robocat wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #19

Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100…

> The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs. Somebody at Nokia got something right somewhere along the way? Maybe the engineers? After all presumably the engineers were eating their dogfood.

> Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI.

I think you're suffering from a kind of observation bias specific to forums like HN, which have a disproportionate number of people with a chip on their shoulder about defunct tech products and companies. The people who liked Nokia's UI are loud and visible about it, especially when it lets them gripe about Microsoft/Apple/whatever, while the people who didn't like it don't feel the need to talk about it.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#134

Post by treflop »

robocat wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #19

Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100…

> The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs. Somebody at Nokia got something right somewhere along the way? Maybe the engineers? After all presumably the engineers were eating their dogfood.

You’re both right. Nokia nailed it.

But then someone else invented the steam engine. Hard to go back to horses.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#135

Post by Y-bar »

pavlov wrote: post #19

Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100…

> Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.

At an industrial design conference in Gothenburg (spring 2005 iirc) I met a senior designer from Nokia around that time, he had a doctorates in ergonomics and interaction design. He lamented that he was not allowed to so any user interface work, only do the aesthetics. Management from up far had decided that design was only about what it looked like, form was not allowed to work with function.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#136

Post by neom »

HeckFeck wrote: post #119
neom wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, I forgot about Sony Ericsson but you're correct, very much less common among my friend group, I only recall older people having them...Was Sony Ericsson considered a more premium device?

That's interesting, I mostly remember old folks sticking to flip phones. The SEs were all that could be found among my peers. We would've been in our mid teens at the time. Then they were supplanted by early non-Android Samsung phones with the bad touchscreens, then by 2012 everyone had either an iPhone or Android. It was only the space of a few years but seemed much longer back then!

Where in the world were you located at that time? We'd be around the same age I think, I was in Scotland and bought everything from Argos.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#137

Post by kevsim »

As a fresh-out-of-university engineer in the earlier 2000s, I had a ton of fun working at Nokia and the sheer number of devices was actually part of that. It was a blast having a stack of all of the weird and whacky devices on your desk at any time. I remember visiting some sort of internal museum in Finland at some point where you could basically see all of the devices they'd ever made. Mind blowing.

Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually run on the things was a different matter...

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#138

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #91
t_mann wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to that theory, we should have expected Windows Phone to be a success, no? Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. If anything, your argument makes me even less convinced that we have any good explanation for Nokia's failure.

>Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. What? Blue screens of death. Malware. ctrl shift del being known by lay people. People being able to use the excuse that their Windows computer is randomly updating as a reason they cannot do the work they want to do. Not being able to create/edit/sign pdfs without downloading sketchy 3rd party programs. Amount of time spent being tech sup…

[deleted]

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#139

Post by neuralRiot »

robocat wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #19

Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100…

> The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs. Somebody at Nokia got something right somewhere along the way? Maybe the engineers? After all presumably the engineers were eating their dogfood.

We are seeing the history backwards, from present day ro past but remember that cellphones were phones with other computing purposes added, not personal computers with phone capabilities as they are today.
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