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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

#131

Post by GeneralKai »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #125
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…

Even if one assumes that Windows Phone was wonderful (and a long WP7 user, I’m sympathetic to this view), it still doesn’t follow that Windows Phone didn’t kill Nokia. - Windows Phone had no brand value. It didn’t add to the Nokia brand. It detracted from it - Windows Phone allowed very minimal UI customization. This meant that Nokia could add little to no Nokia specific functionality - Windows Phone allowed minimal…

[flagged]

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

#132

Post by modo_mario »

pavlov wrote: post #99
msh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.

> still better for them than what ended up happening Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013. There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM. As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones. And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. Th…

But they chose a guy who would leave microsoft, accelerate the rot and set them on the windows phone path before that sale? I don't think it was the best value for those assets. They still were a big phone brand with a ton of consumer attachment prior to that even if on the decline. i wanted to buy their phones.

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

#134

Post by fsflover »

brookst wrote: post #124
ACCount37 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it? A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it. Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users c…

> There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes. Yes, because hardware is sold at or below cost, and giving away a general purpose computer without reaping the long term upside is a recipe for disaster. But look at the prevalence of cheating on PC games versus console and tell me secure boot does nothing for actual security.

> cheating

> security

How are these two connected? Are you talking about security of companies from the users?

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

#135

Post by fsflover »

Cider9986 wrote: post #81
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...

GrapheneOS is fully open source.

Except the proprietary blobs of course.

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

#136

Post by mjg59 »

rickdeckard wrote: post #128
mjg59 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, come on. Yes, compared to any modern device the iPhone was a piece of shit (no cut and paste when shipped? No 3G?), but as someone who owned a high end S60 device at the time, the iPhone was a breath of fresh air - the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it. The problem Nokia and others had is that they were judging potential iPhone buyers against the people buying their smartphones…

> [..] the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it To justify what? What exactly are you defending in such an emotional way...?

The Maps experience on the iPhone was sufficiently better than on any other platform that it was justification in itself for many people to buy one. But you're also massively underselling the media aspect - iTunes integration was compelling enough that Palm implemented iPod imitation in the Pre so it would work with iTunes. Was the iPhone compelling to the niche enthusiast market that was on Symbian or Blackberry? Probably not, but that market was small and already saturated and the idea that the iPhone was unappealing in the market it was actually selling into is ridiculous.

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

#137

Post by regularfry »

tverbeure wrote: post #101
regularfry wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The fanfare over multi-touch in phones is something I've never understood. It's flashy but phone use (certainly my phone use) is optimised for one thumb, not two fingers.

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

#138

Post by ulfw »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #126
ulfw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features but they'd likely compete very well in the shut-out-from-most-competition US market and a good chance to be a secondary player in the European markets. Not a leader anymore but a significant player for sure. Windows Phone was dead on arrival. Throwing yourself behind a losing platform was Nokia's death knell.

> As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features This is completely wrong. The Asian Market is far more diverse than that. The Nokia brand was extremely strong. The Asian market was and is very capable of supporting high end phones. It’s a smaller percentage of the market than in the west, but the entire market is also a lot bigger, so the absolute size of the Asian high end phone…

Funny you assume Nokia would be a high end phone brand and that you assume Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi are not.

Reality of 2026 is that those are by far the best Android brands out there. Oppo Find N6 beats any foldable in screen, build quality, cameras, processor, RAM. Vivo X Fold 6 in battery. Oppo Find X9 Ulta, Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Vivo X300 Ultra beat any Apple or Samsung in cameras and battery etc etc

All I am saying is: the market in Asia is a lot more diverse than the one in Europe and a shit ton more diverse than the US market which is basically a duopoly of Apple and Samsung (with minor market share for everyone else Motorola, Nothing, etc). No Oppo, no Vivo, no Xiaomi, no Honor, no Huawei, soon no Oneplus etc.

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

#140

Post by hedgehog »

xorcist wrote: post #70
hedgehog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity. Edit: And consistent wit…

There was also Tizen, FirefoxOS and a whole slew of others. It was a remarkable time. But it is true that the app-based future, that didn't exist yet, probably came with market dynamics that limits the number of platforms to two or three. It just wasn't clear which those were at the time. What a vanilla Linux-based platform, and Meego, Maemo, Moblin and Mer were just iterations of the same thing, would have had going…

Once native apps became important Microsoft didn't have a chance, the basis for Apple's success was in place back in 2003-2005. Apple had a big head start on what is now the standard phone template (always-on cell data, capacitive touch, etc), and based on the experience and success of the iTunes / iPod platform they found leverage to negotiate a unique deal where they controlled OS updates and the app store (instead of the carriers). They also had a lot of experience with OpenGL composited UI from OS X which translated to a (relatively) good GLES implementation on iPhone even though they didn't originally have any kind of public SDK. Very useful for games. Now I think there are some groups that are hoping LLM-based agents will upset the dominance of the app store model... I'm skeptical but we'll see.
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