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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#171

Post by justsomehnguy »

mikko-apo wrote: post #15
Erratic6576 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...

Nokia's then CEO's Elop's "burning platform" memo leak in 2011 seemed to hurt Nokia a lot by painting their existing and upcoming phones as inferior. > I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform. https://www.engadget.com/2011-02-08-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-r...

By the time of Elop's memo Nokia was already in the death spiral: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35030334

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#172

Post by Zigurd »

This is debatable for a couple reasons: First, it is similar to saying Toyota makes too many cars. Nokia, like Toyota, made phones that fit a wide range of markets, and in each Nokia series, the insides and software were the same. Second, Nokia's problems crescendoed with Stephen Elop and the not-ready-for-prime-time Windows phone OSs that Elop insisted replace viable alternatives Nokia developed in-house. In light of the outcome, one could say Nokia made too few phones by not shipping more than one smartphone OS.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#173

Post by Zigurd »

squarefoot wrote: post #51
Erratic6576 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...

Well, the Linux based Maemo OS I had in 2005 0r 2006 on my Nokia 770 was already promising, although the hardware was quite slow and limited, but it was an open system one would have root access to out of the box. Then it evolved into Meego, which was even better and was then employed by the Nokia N9. Nokia already had the OS to transition to from the old Symbian, but after the Microsoft deal, they scrapped it to ado…

Maemo and MeeGo and other Nokia OSs were more coherent than Microsoft's phone OSs at the time, and Symbian would have had a long life on cheap devices. Smartphones were expensive back then.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#174

Post by seba_dos1 »

tekla wrote: post #84
seba_dos1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I'd call a phone that served me well for a decade a "letdown". There were hardly any phones around worth switching to from N900 for this whole time.

The N900 and Maemo was almost immediately abandoned following launch (<2 Years). Not even Nokia cared

...which didn't matter at all because the community has been doing a pretty good job with CSSU and it was only several years later when it started to truly show its age.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#175

Post by HeckFeck »

neom wrote: post #136
HeckFeck wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, I mostly remember old folks sticking to flip phones. The SEs were all that could be found among my peers. We would've been in our mid teens at the time. Then they were supplanted by early non-Android Samsung phones with the bad touchscreens, then by 2012 everyone had either an iPhone or Android. It was only the space of a few years but seemed much longer back then!

Where in the world were you located at that time? We'd be around the same age I think, I was in Scotland and bought everything from Argos.

I'd have been just across the water in rural Northern Ireland. Argos was very much part of the picture but most phones came from the local O2 shop.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#176

Post by IshKebab »

kipchak wrote: post #97
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 agree the user interface was a huge difference, but Nokia did have high spec-ed and priced battery burners like the N95. They even sold quite well, for example over their lifetimes there were 10 million N95s sold and 6 million iPhone 1s.

I mean, presumably because it was the last smartphone Nokia made and Nokia was an established name, whereas the iPhone was new and the iPhone 3G was released after only a year.

In other words, it didn't sell more because it was actually viable competition. It sold more because of brand momentum and because it was on sale for longer.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#178

Post by lamp_book »

FpUser wrote: post #168
lamp_book wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

None at all. I switched since my personal experiences with Android phones were lackluster, typically the software becoming sluggish and unresponsive, usually within 3 years.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#179

Post by mangamadaiyan »

hodgesrm wrote: post #165
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.

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 bu…

This sounds very much like the Nokia 3310 that I once had. It was indeed indestructible. Mine survived a hike gone wrong, in which it spent a good few hours in the pocket of my shorts, and I was in waist-deep water. Back home, the phone was obviously not working. I cracked it open and laid it out to dry on a newspaper. The next morning, I put it back together with a new battery - and it just worked.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#180

Post by plussed_reader »

monknomo wrote: post #147
indymike wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, for making calls, texting, taking pictures and changing settings, Nokia phones were really nice. The whole games (Java) and apps (WAP) side wasn't the greatest. To be fair, no one had a decent game and app experience until the iPhone and G1 (Android) hit.

snake was fine

Snake predates Nokia mobile phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)
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