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

151–160 of 173 posts

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

#151

Post by uecker »

mjg59 wrote: post #84
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…

The N9 shipped when it did because the teams working on the successor project had been pulled back to support the N9, and Elop arrived to find a company betting its future on a new platform that had almost no existing third party support and which wouldn't have any follow-up hardware for another 2 years. Google has no incentive to work with Nokia rather than the existing vendors who'd staked themselves to Android, th…

The better choice would have been to double down on N9 and successors. This was my opinion at that time and still is. You may be right about all the internal problems that delayed thing, but the Windows Phone decision was bad and poorly executed.

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

#153

Post by tverbeure »

regularfry wrote: post #137
tverbeure wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a difference between "optimized for" and "it's the only thing you need".

I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.

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

#154

Post by hyperhello »

regularfry wrote: post #137
tverbeure wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can do things with your hands (fingers) This gives many people an enormously satisfying feeling.

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

#155

Post by toast0 »

anonymars wrote: post #109
toast0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Word on the street was Google didn't want to bother with WP because they worked so hard on WinCE apps and all of that was thrown away. Probably not the whole reason, but they did make an exchange connector available for gmail on wp, so it's not like they didn't support the platform at all..

YouTube in the browser would have been fine if the browser wasn't terrible.

I definitely felt the lack of Pokemon Go ... but given it released in mid 2016, it's pretty clear why it didn't show up on Windows Phone / Windows Mobile... the writing was already on the wall by then and Windows development would have likely trailed anyway. WP8.1 came out in April 2014; it was an improvement, but you really wanted a follow up release. WM10 came out November 2015 and wasn't very good unless you had the flagship phones, which nobody would buy; I did end up running one of the last builds of WM10 and it actually got pretty good (other than Edge still had terrible UX)... too bad it happened so late. Windows Phone's strength was at the bottom of the market --- cheap phones that were usable, but cheap phones didn't run WM10 well, so the huge global market of people who wanted a smart phone but only had $100 to spend was left for Android.

If you look at sales numbers [1], things were going ok until about q3 2015. A dip in Q3 is kind of expected, because WM10 was coming soon, so people are likely to wait ... but then WM10 is crap and people buy an Android or iPhone and there you go.

[1] https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-...

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

#156

Post by brookst »

fsflover wrote: post #134
brookst wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes? And users from each other?

If you’re so far into the “I buy it, nobody can tell me what to do with it” camp that you think it’s unethical for companies to try to stop cheating in multiplayer games… well, we don’t have much in common.

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

#157

Post by edude03 »

fsflover wrote: post #134
brookst wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If phones didn't have secure boot nowadays inevitably little Johnny would (unknowingly) install a rootkit on his mom's phone for the promise of free vbucks or some see through walls app.

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

#158

Post by justsomehnguy »

regularfry wrote: post #137
tverbeure wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If somehow you could have the same phone but with a resistive, single-touch screen and use it just like you use it now, then you would learn what:

a resistive screens do actually need to be pressed instead of just touched, if you never get a literal sore thumb from a touch screen usage - well you don't miss anything but it's quite painful after a while and adds to a carpal tunnel syndrome

a multi-touch sensor greatly helps when you need to discern and filter out the false positives

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

#159

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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…

We had Linux phones. I learnt Python+Qt coding on a Nokia N900 (the N9's predecessor). I must emphasise on the "coding on" part. I would ssh into the phone and use it as a regular Linux box.

Something which the article omits is that Nokia changed it CEO to an ex-boardmember of MSFT. Comments in Slashdot that week were "this guy's gonna tank Nokia, kill their Linux research and sell out to MS". They were 100% accurate.

Make no mistake, Nokia didn't make "a mistake" or a simple bad call. Someone was placed at the top to sabotage and destroy it.

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

#160

Post by theshrike79 »

routamind wrote: post #123
mjg59 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N9 shipped when it did because the teams working on the successor project had been pulled back to support the N9, and Elop arrived to find a company betting its future on a new platform that had almost no existing third party support and which wouldn't have any follow-up hardware for another 2 years. Google has no incentive to work with Nokia rather than the existing vendors who'd staked themselves to Android, th…

Nokia Mobile Phones, with all its divisions, was a bloated organization with so much organizational friction that it created enough fire to burn any "platform" and its neighbor too. Proven by Jolla, which with just 50–100 people created so much with a fraction of the headcount that MeeGo had. Nokia's thinking of the time was to see each phone as a product. The big reset button pressed after release, separating each d…

There was an internal mandate that MeeGo couldn't release any features before the Symbian side had them too. 100% internal politics.

And as anyone who has worked with Symbian knows, it was a gigantic pile of shit to work with and work on. Everything was massively complex and slow.

So the Linux team had to wait on releases. slowing them down.

Post reply on HN