Nokia made too many phones • Hacker News Board

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#121

Post by magnuspaaske » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

bborud wrote: post #23

hasmanean wrote: post #13

There was also conventional wisdom which had to be abandoned before the iPhone came out. Nokia phones had 1 week battery life. They were extending it to one month. The iPhone had a given the app experience available on the iPhone they could live with that. This was a bet Nokia would have never made—-they were not in the user interface business. The fact that Apple—who was not in the phone business—-entered their mark…

I think Apple succeeded because they were outsiders. I worked for a telco 2 years after the iPhone came out and for years I met a lot of people who denied what was happening while it was happening. Because “we know how this works”. 15 years ago a lot of telco execs thought smart phones would be a small niche for the next 10 years. And would play only a minuscule role in “emerging markets”.

The beautiful thing with the iPhone was that it wasn't a "smartphone" per se, but rather just a beautiful new kind of device and then people would get used to the smart features later. I had a PDA a couple of years before the iPhone and while it was certainly novel to have a digital planner as a teenager the "electronic calendar" or "email on the go" use cases just weren't really big. Listening to music and reading news on the go were great use cases though

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#122

Post by ascagnel_ » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:37 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #41

hasmanean wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting. I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants. There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support. Even downloading an a…

> So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house. > Even downloading an app or ringtone requir…

> Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.

The now-hotly-debated 30% cut was seen as a reprieve from telco distribution and brick-and-mortar, where the retailer was taking 60-70% of the purchase price.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#123

Post by magnuspaaske » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:39 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #100

pavlov wrote: post #19

Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100…

> The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs. Somebody at Nokia got something right somewhere along the way? Maybe the engineers? After all presumably the engineers were eating their dogfood.

It might have helped that the Nordics were pretty advanced with developing mobile networks and mobile network technology. There was also SonyEricson in the region and it kind of makes sense that companies making network technology would also make handsets in the early innings and only later would people realise those are actually two different skillsets and market and need different companies.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#124

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:40 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #110

serial_dev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they are that similar. There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600, 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique. Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or whatever color each year so that the few people wh…

Apple has 8 different phones you can buy right now counting all the max/plus models (SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro). If you add in the storage differences it is 24 unique circuit boards/phone internals, and colors bring it to over 100 different unique products. From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's actually pretty wild!

Maybe it's a matter of doing things in order ? Nokia had no strong image, they were well established but not like Apple, and also iPhones are flagships with a lot of advanced capabilities.. nokia lineups at the time were very much mainstream/average (the notion of advanced device was also limited at the time).

When you're on top of the industry, you may have a shot at selling lifestyle.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#125

Post by deltarholamda » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:48 PM UTC

benrutter wrote: post #53

> Not only the variety of devices was creating an incoherent user experience, but it also made it almost impossible to create an app market. I'm not sure I agree with this take - it seems to be based on the idea of comparing Nokia phones to something like the iPhone. But at the time these phones were all made, the experience of using a phone was: - Answer or reject incoming calls with the "answer/decline" button - Re…

>novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility.

In my case, I got the weird Nokia (3650?) with the round, rotary phone-layout of the numbers because it would reliably sync contacts with my Mac at the time and could be used as a cellular modem.

The novelty design was... not great. But the usability was exactly what I needed.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#126

Post by roneythomas6 » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:48 PM UTC

twelvechairs wrote: post #58

blackoil wrote: post #30

It is easy to find such reasons now that Nokia has failed. But they ruled for a decade in part because of too many phones. They had phone at each budget range and demographic. What they missed was a move from hardware centric world to software centic. The attempts with Linux etc were too little too late.

Yes - iphone came out 2007 and Nokia was still the leading mobile phone company by sales in 2010, and Symbian had the largest OS share to 2012. In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone. Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular…

Android overtook Symbian globally in early 2011. In major markets Android overtook Symbian sometime in late 2009-2010.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#127

Post by benedictevans » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:49 PM UTC

Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too many, but 10 or 20 was reasonable and still is - plenty of successful Android OEMs have ranges like that.

The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and keys there was less to design anyway.

Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#128

Post by DanAtC » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

I had never heard of Vertu. They still exist today in some form, hawking some real pricey crap: https://vertu.com/

Looking at the Nokia-era models, none of them support LTE so they're basically worthless these days. People are still trying to sell them on eBay for 100s, though. What a waste.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#129

Post by earnesti » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

benedictevans wrote: post #127

Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too many, but 10 or 20 was reasonabl…

Personally, I think Nokia didn't really think anything. The management was just incompetent and they didn't have any real strategy. They had 100 teams of engineers each doing their own phone model, and were just too lazy to fire unnecessary teams and focus. Somewhere deep down they knew, that it is stupid way to do things. However the money kept flowing in, so who cares.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#130

Post by nwiswell » Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #110

serial_dev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they are that similar. There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600, 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique. Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or whatever color each year so that the few people wh…

Apple has 8 different phones you can buy right now counting all the max/plus models (SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro). If you add in the storage differences it is 24 unique circuit boards/phone internals, and colors bring it to over 100 different unique products. From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's actually pretty wild!

> SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro

This more analogous to different model years of a car, rather than entirely different car models.

The customer immediately and intuitively understands 14 is better than 13, 15 is better than 14, etc.

The main thing clear to me is that the "mental flow chart" involved in selecting an Apple phone is much, much clearer than it would be for selecting a Nokia.