41–50 of 173 posts
IMHO they should cosnider re-releasing the 3310. It might sell similar to vinyl. Maybe update the games section to have some more games.
They have, multiple times. Granted, it isn't the original 3310. They've always been modernised in some way, and I suspect creating the original wouldn't be very feasible today
This seems a little misleading. From what I remember, and from what Wikipedia says, Elop had already announced the deal with Microsoft long before announcing the N9, so Nokia was in essence already dead when it launched.
IMHO they should cosnider re-releasing the 3310. It might sell similar to vinyl. Maybe update the games section to have some more games.
They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggrega…
A few days after iPhone was launched in June 2007 I heard an exec of a technical team defending the by then fairly obvious "ownage" by claiming that Apple had "cheated" by putting 1 GB of RAM into the device (which would be insanely expensive). Of course it was 128 MB. Nokia-adjacent company. He had misunderstood 1 Gbit from some teardown. That was the level of competency.
The software sophistication just really wasn't there at that level. (It was there at an IC/architect level though.) Apple raised the bar quite considerably.
Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?
It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.
I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8)
[2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...
Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late.
Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it.
But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise.
Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?
From the article: "Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget. But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of…
Discussed in HN many times, but worth restating once more. The N9 was fantastic. A joy to use, and in many ways the best design, both hardware and software, I've ever handled. Everything had been designed with care and some UI elements remain unmatched. I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discussed in HN many times, but worth restating once more. The N9 was fantastic. A joy to use, and in many ways the best design, both hardware and software, I've ever handled. Everything had been designed with care and some UI elements remain unmatched. I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto some…
To add to that: Elop announced the end of N9 weeks before it's release and more then a year before the first Lumina was available. Dead on arrival not even shipped in major markets. Yet the N9 was years ahead any competition of that time.
It was Kafkaesque, discontinuing a product before release.
And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market. Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late…
Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.
The predecessor of the N9, the Nokia N900, with Maemo, is not even mentioned in the article, and it caused a buzz at least in the circles I were back then. And it had one of the best physical keyboards for a smartphone back then. The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS. There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just on…