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Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

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Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#421

Post by alasdair_ »

bdangubic wrote: post #401
Ancapistani wrote: post #352

Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther than I would have expected. I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four…

that should all run you sub-$200/month (I have 5 phones, 4 watches, 1 tablet - $178/month (which I think it is still to high and am getting ready to call att to negotiate again or switch))

Through who? I'm paying $450 a month for 5 iphones and 4 watches.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#422

Post by inemesitaffia »

realo wrote: post #284
wegwerfbenutzer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BYD+CATL is Android. Tesla is Apple.

I respectfully disagree. Tesla is run by a bigot, far right extremist. I would never send money to them, no matter their offerings. Not so with Apple.

China

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#423

Post by Lammy »

ttepasse wrote: post #186
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh) X11 let them use existing apps outright and made porting easy. What else would they have used at that time and what advantage would it give them?

X11 support was also part of the early Mac OS X – even part of marketing pages, afair.

Barely. It was originally a XFree86 project called XDarwin, adopted by Apple as a beta release for Jagwire in 2002, was an optional install in Panther and Tiger, default install in Leopard~Lion, and then was abandoned again in favor of the community-supported XQuartz after 2011:

https://xonx.sourceforge.net/ “XFree86, a free implementation of the X Window System, has been ported to Darwin and Mac OS X. […] Our work has been included in Apple's X11 for Mac OS X. ”

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/x11-jaguar

https://www.xquartz.org/

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#424

Post by alkonaut »

jandrese wrote: post #365
alkonaut wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephon…

> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. You glossed over the one killer feature of the original iPhone: It had a fully functional web browser and enough compute power to just barely run it. This was the thing that made all previous smartphones instantly obsolete. No goddamn WAP proxy. No needing 3-4 minutes to get Yahoo to render. It didn't completely trash the layo…

As I remember it there was a time before and after 3G for web browsing. The fidelity of the iPhone Safari early on was great, but those early 2 generations didn't really have the bandwidth to do much with it. Still, I agree it was a leap ahead of the rest.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#425

Post by alkonaut »

_fat_santa wrote: post #222
alkonaut wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephon…

> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer. IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.

> you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.

It had the screen and the software do do that but not the bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back then.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#426

Post by yabatopia »

rcarmo wrote: post #398
jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…

I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came out. Nokia never really had a chance--the N-series was a mess of patched software, they had no real Linux alternative, and their supply chain was fragmented six ways from Sun…

That’s how I remember Nokia in the first half of the 2000’s: peak arrogance. Even if Steve Jobs himself would have given them the iPhone for free, they would have rejected it.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#427

Post by gavindean90 »

ndiddy wrote: post #217
smitty1110 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s. Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digi…

The problem was that Kodak essentially was a film chemical production company pretending to be an imaging company. The switch to digital meant they could no longer get the fat recurring profits from selling film that they were used to. Kodak's value peaked at $31 billion in 1996 ($58 billion in 2025 dollars) while the total value of the digital camera industry today is around $8 billion ( https://www.researchandmarke…

Yea, but, like, phones are digital cameras…

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#428

Post by r00fus »

Thoughts:

1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen.

2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates, etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G).

3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the full-featured 3G.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#429

Post by hn_acc1 »

asveikau wrote: post #358
scarface_74 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a popular misconception. The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory. It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen. When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1G…

It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world. I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink…

Oh, the flashbacks.. (pun intended). Same here. Every new flash release, download, extract, rename to have a version number, copy to "folder of last 10-15 released flash .so files", symlink, restart browser and hope it works.

I think it got to be so common that firefox supported reloading the library without restarting the browser if you changed the symlink and opened the "about:plugins" page.

And then they started releasing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions...

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#430

Post by seanc »

PlunderBunny wrote: post #376
seanc wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree. The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies…

Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this would have required a lot of money. Maybe Nokia could have done it?

No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy, it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days one way or another every device passed through a carrier's hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you were stuck.

Unlike RIM or Palm, Apple could realistically choose not to sell their device at all, or at least not sell it for a while, and so they were able to break the carrier oligopsony. It also didn't hurt that Steve Jobs was, well, Steve Jobs. A one-of-one business negotiator.

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