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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#151

Post by radomir_cernoch »

hgomersall wrote: post #95
zubairq wrote: post #89

I can confirm this as I worked at Nokia in the Helsinki head office in 2006 and they made so many phones, which were not tested properly and were just thrown out to different market segments. It was obvious at the time that they had no passion or craftsmanship for their products anymore (as a company, as there were still some brilliant individuals)

It's interesting. I was exposed in a low level kind of way to Nokia technology around 2002, working for a former subsidiary of Nokia that had been sold. Then it seemed there was a legacy of technical excellence - Nokia pcbs were instantly recognisable for their neatness and having all the components on one side. Did that get lost at some point or did I have a flawed impression?

I was only a user of Nokia 6150 and subsequent phones. Around me, they were considered as technically perfect devices.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#152

Post by tonyhart7 »

earnesti wrote: post #129
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.

I think its fine, the problem is they are too late to use Android OS which is favour their own OS like Symbian or whatever their PDA use at the time

if only they can copy iphone fast enough they would be a "samsung" what is today

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#153

Post by zokier »

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.

Sure, the classic UI in 3310 etc ("Series 20") was great, and even "Series 30" was okay. But Series 40 and especially Series 60 were distinctly less well received.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#154

Post by parl_match »

ssivark wrote: post #49

I’m very suspicious of some post-hoc generalization that rhymes a little too conveniently with modern fads. Nokia made great phones during the mid/late 2000s. The N9 was a piece of beauty that continued to have a more cohesive and thought out experience than Android (and even iOS, in some ways) well into the mid 2010s. It was simply a joy to use. Why Nokia then fell apart might have a little something to do with Step…

The N9 was too little, too late. Microsoft didn't destroy Nokia, they failed to rescue it. I think maybe the only company that could have saved Nokia was Google, and they weren't about to compete with their huge network of Android VARs.

Why Nokia fell apart is because they didn't take the iPhone or Android seriously, repeatedly would say things like "nobody is going to spend $400 on a phone after subsidy", and had tremendous infighting over Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows - tons of engineers and management absolutely didn't want to learn the new thing.

And then, Microsoft, not wanting to pour billions of dollars into what was already becoming a bitter duopoly fight, gave up.

I have an N9 and an labeled windows phone dev kit from post-nokia on my shelf, both devices I used for a year+. They were fantastic.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#155

Post by RandallBrown »

magnuspaaske wrote: post #121
bborud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I remember when the iPhone came out there were hundreds of articles about how the iPhone was specifically not a smartphone.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#156

Post by pclmulqdq »

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 irony is that Apple today acts kind of like a fashion brand. Nokia was a fashion brand without a clear vision, though.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#157

Post by usrusr »

diggan wrote: post #28
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…

> Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next. Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was s…

Any other company, if they had the iPhone, would have failed selling it in numbers. Because only at Apple it was preceded by the iPod that set a unique precedent in how much more expensive than all competitors a device could be. And that shift in price perception was deeply connected to the brand. It's easy to forget just how much more expensive the iPhone was than other phones that reached a meaningfully wide audience (or would have, in absence of the iPhone).

Not indulging in the fancy moodboard stuff wouldn't have helped Nokia the tiniest bit.

(edit: reply might have better fit GP directly)

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#158

Post by robocat »

Analemma_ wrote: post #133
robocat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. I think you're suffering from a kind of observation bias specific to forums like HN, which have a disproportionate number of people with a chip on their shoulder about defunct tech products and companies. The people who liked Nokia's UI are loud and visible about it, especially when it lets them gripe about Microsoft/Apple/whatever, while the people who didn't…

You're hallucinating a narrative about me based on your stereotypes. I think we all can identify people with Stockholm syndrome love, arising from their past technology abusers.

You could be generically correct. However I never bought a Nokia and I haven't used one much. I am not a Nokia apologist.

I lived through the period, and I'm commenting on what I saw at the time. Sometimes there are fans of a product or brand for good reasons.

Perhaps one of Nokia's major skills was familiarity between their models - especially for keeping the same menu structure and keyboard shortcuts. Familiarity is a powerful force. Oh, and they reliably worked - a definite plus!

I did own mobiles from other manufacturers and I have the scars from dealing with their (edit) painful UIs (Sony, Kyocera*, Motorola, Dell). A keypad and small screen (or worse a one-line numeric display) create some difficult constraints.

Cordless and Voip phones proudly continued the tradition of crappy handset UIs well into the age of iPhone.

* I loved my Kyocera Palm Pilot phone - there was even a LISP App that you could program a simple UI in -magic! Although my first love was an Atari Portfolio DOS handheld (not a phone): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#159

Post by grishka »

Yes, Nokia made too many phones, and that was not a bad thing. Other phone manufacturers made some wild concept models too, sometimes. Phone design in general was much more diverse in the 00s. I actually enjoyed flipping through phone catalogs and reading reviews.

Compare that to today, when every single phone out there is an awkwardly huge glass slab with minor design variations on the back side.

> it also made it almost impossible to create an app market.

All those Nokia phones form two categories in terms of the software they ran: the firmware that was basically the same across all Nokia non-smart phones (S40 it was called IIRC?), and Symbian. Both were capable of running J2ME apps, and Symbian also supported native ones.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#160

Post by fuzzy2 »

Maybe! But here's another take: everyone else makes too few phones, nowadays. Exactly one, that is. Well, maybe two, if you count folding phones. After Palm and then HP failed with webOS, it's now all the same.

How come this is the future? It's freaking boring.

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