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Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

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Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#101

Post by tverbeure »

regularfry wrote: post #89
mjg59 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N900 shipped two years after the iPhone while still having a resistive touchscreen. In the story of Nokia resisting Apple and Android it's basically irrelevant - it's part of the history that led to the N9, but it's not until we get to the N9 that there's a meaningful response to the market shift they represented.

Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism but even back then that was partly down to Apple propaganda which caught on because people were used to cheap screens with rubbish resistive sensors. The touchscreen on the N900 was good : high resolution, rigid, fast, accurate, sensitive enough for fingertip use.

Did it have multi-touch?

Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.

(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#102

Post by m4rtink »

PopePompus wrote: post #51
RiverCrochet wrote: post #6

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…

I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do to make that line of phones a mass-market success. Users of the N900 had root privilege. Can you imagine a support nightmare that would have been for T-Mobile et al.? To sell Linux phones to the general public, I think they would have had to…

Got forbid the user of a device they have bought is in control!

That woul be the end of the world, you could not push downgrades, like Samsung remotely disabling bootloader unlock or Bamboolab forcing all your 3D models through their cloud service.

The horror! They could even remove all your unskippable adds and disable all the spying, gross!

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#103

Post by ZuLuuuuuu »

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone.

Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!

What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#104

Post by m4rtink »

jcsager wrote: post #91
afavour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft. Sadly, I strong suspect it would have gone nowhere. Apps became the name of the game and iOS and Android built up strong app libraries quickly. If Microsoft failed to compete I don't think a Nokia Linux phone would have stood a chance at all. Maybe if it added Android compatibility but that would…

Assuming that a plain Linux phone had succeeded early on, once banks, retailers and media companies refused to provide apps because of security concerns, then either the phone would die in the marketplace or it would have developed security solutions similar to those provided by iOS and Android today and no longer be a 'plain Linux phone'.

[dead]

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#106

Post by markb139 »

Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much worked was done producing a touch based UI (I worked on a few of the apps). We had a customisable Home Screen with drag&drop icons. Multitasking with inter app communication.

Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#107

Post by rickdeckard »

“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.”

In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.

--

Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market.

Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS (the iPhone wasn't a Smartphone yet), expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device.

But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this.

For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#108

Post by inigyou »

no_time wrote: post #68
purpleidea wrote: post #66

What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. We're still waiting to solve that problem...

>Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.

IIRC tivoizing GPLv2 software is illegal in some countries such as Germany. See Steck vs AVM

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#109

Post by anonymars »

toast0 wrote: post #33
rbanffy wrote: post #2

I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.

I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobile 10 had continued that trend and delivered on the promise of all WP8 phones being upgradable to WM10, things would be different now. Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE…

Not only that, but developing for Windows Phone 8 required using Windows 8 (which was a flop)

That being said I don't know that there was a path to success. I don't think it was as much about the little apps as the big ones: Instagram, YouTube, Pokemon Go... Google in particular got to play the role of anti-competitive

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#110

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #103

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Win…

This was such a short sighted move - with a phone platform and HoloLens they could have built their version of meta glasses and been able to capture all that real world vision for building ai models.
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