Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 173 posts

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

#141

Post by rickdeckard »

mjg59 wrote: post #136
rickdeckard wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [..] 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? Pr…

I don't know why you're coming to the rescue of the iPhone here. Everyone knows it was a successful product, no one said that the iPhone was "unappealing in the market".

Quite the opposite, the demand was so high that Apple could set requirements to carriers that were impossible before AND after...

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

#142

Post by seba_dos1 »

mjg59 wrote: post #85
seba_dos1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of…

GTK wasn't a first class citizen in Meego.

Never claimed it was.

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

#143

Post by jakubmazanec »

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…

Yes, I had really cheap Windows Phone, and prior to Windows 10 Mobile, Windows were super fast and the phone was really fun to use. After Win 10 release, it become unusable - slow, rendering issues, etc.

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

#144

Post by alfiedotwtf »

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...

N900. So say we all.

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

#145

Post by uecker »

"But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. "

I think it would have. The N9 was killed before it came to market. It was never sold in any of the major markets, the platform was declared dead as the switch to Windows Phone was already announced. But the N9 was technically a very good phone and I do not think it came too late. At that time Nokia was still strong with Symbian and the iPhone was not strong in Europe. The move to Windows Phone (even if you think it would be a good platform) delayed things further. Declaring all your existing products a dead end before having an alternative on the market was a really bad idea.

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

#146

Post by mjg59 »

rickdeckard wrote: post #141
mjg59 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Pr…

I don't know why you're coming to the rescue of the iPhone here. Everyone knows it was a successful product, no one said that the iPhone was "unappealing in the market". Quite the opposite, the demand was so high that Apple could set requirements to carriers that were impossible before AND after...

"The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers" is very easy to read as people buying iPhones because of hype and not because they were meaningfully better than the competition in ways that many people valued. Is that not what you meant?

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

#147

Post by ufmace »

mjg59 wrote: post #76
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...

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.

I agree, and add that the N900 shipping 2 years later is another piece of proof that Nokia was doomed long-term. It was way too little, way too late. Nokia was never anywhere near the expertise they needed to be a first-class mobile OS platform developer. Apple and Google started executing on features and platform capabilities 10x faster than Nokia ever did, and they never even really tried to figure out how to fix that.

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

#149

Post by seba_dos1 »

mjg59 wrote: post #148
seba_dos1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never claimed it was.

Nor was it in the final versions of Maemo, if you want to be pedantic.

Nor was Qt in its first versions, but how is this adding value to the conversation? Both of them were first-class in Maemo 5 and that's when the developers were clearly being attracted to the platform which is what I was talking about above. Harmattan was already DoA.

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

#150

Post by pornel »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #11

My recollection of the mid-2000s is that Nokia simply had no idea how to be a platform provider. They had 2 or 3 main operating systems, but within each of those there were numerous different versions. Most handsets didn't get updated, so you had to download a zillion different SDKs just to do basic testing. And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.

I don't remember the details of Symbian any more, other than it was some ancient fork of C++ and clunky cooperative multitasking.
Post reply on HN