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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#161

Post by beenBoutIT »

hasmanean wrote: post #40
diggan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.

Unlike Apple Nokia built their devices to resist breaking and be 100% serviceable down to the smallest parts. Apple uses metal because it's significantly heavier than plastic and makes phones heavy enough to shatter glass screens and damage their internals when dropped.

Any iPhone could replace its metal housing with an equally strong polymer and become exponentially more difficult to break.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#162

Post by al_borland »

rvense wrote: post #117
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”.

I grew up on the internet in the late 90's and I have to admit I really underestimated how big of an appetite "normies" would develop for being constantly bombarded with "content".

Facebook played a huge role in that. The growth of Facebook happened at the perfect time with the iPhone, where I think they really helped each other grow.

Zuckerberg said Photos was the killer app inside of Facebook that really made it blow up. Smart phones are the perfect device to feed photo sharing sites.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#163

Post by simonh »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #160

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.

The phone should be boring and consistent. It’s just a platform for the software. That’s what should be interesting.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#164

Post by RandallBrown »

tetrisgm wrote: post #17

Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too. When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks. One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people de…

I remember wanting an NGage so bad. I had a whole plan to get my gameboy and all the games together to trade in so I could get one from GameStop. Then I went and actually tried one.

Having to remove the battery to swap out games was too much for me.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#165

Post by hodgesrm »

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.

I loved my Nokia function phone firstly because it was indestructible. A Jeep Cherokee ran it over after it fell through a hole in my bicycle shirt one day. Big scratches on the back of the case but it still worked.

Secondly that Nokia model was just a nice piece of hardware that was easy to use without unnecessary complexity. Plus if you turned off the ringer it would buzz and hop around on the table like a small but enraged weasel. It was hard not to feel affection for it.

Edit: typo

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#166

Post by notatoad »

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.

some portion of nokia definitely did care about technology, form factors, usability, and all the other things that made phones a tech product. their continual wild experiments prove that.

but they also had their normal phones with broad appeal, and could make a good business out of mood-board variants of them. if they didn't make a business out of selling the 3310 in the current season's fashionable colours, they'd have been doing something wrong.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#167

Post by rxyz »

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…

Of course it wasn't a smartphone before the App Store update.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#168

Post by FpUser »

lamp_book wrote: post #142
lou1306 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think that the average iPhone user (at least in Europe) gets a new device every season. Actually the opposite is true: Apple does gives you the opportunity to stick to your old device, if you want. iOS 15 still gets updates and can run on an iPhone 6S.

I switched to Apple specifically because Androids I owned aged quickly and badly. Some people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users they hold.

Interesting. I have 3 years old Pixel 6 Pro I use as a phone, 6 years old Redmi MIUI I use to control my various gizmos and 8 years old Galaxy S6 Edge to do yet another set of gizmos. So far all work like charm.

Do tell me what kool aid did I drink?

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#169

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#170

Post by otherme123 »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #152
earnesti wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This was it for me. I gave up on Nokia when everybody around was using their Android messaging apps while I had no apps for my Nokia, or they were a lesser version (like whatsapp).

Then, if I recall correctly, they went with Windows, so every move was forcing their users into a lonely corner.

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