Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by roundabout-host » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:22 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #46

And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market. Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late…

You should not want a third platform which is as locked as Android/iOS, but the option to have platform-agnostic banking, for example, with the WWW, combined with unlocked bootloaders, so that you can use anything you want.

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

#172

Post by seba_dos1 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

roundabout-host wrote: post #166

seba_dos1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. We had that and we still do. Back in 2008 I was wondering whether I should spend my first-earned money on the first Android phone (HTC Dream, aka T1) or a "plain Linux phone" (Neo Freerunner) and I've chosen the latter. Ultimately it was a good choice, as Android quickly turned out to be not what I wanted and only got worse over time, while the other path had m…

Also, I do not see any confirmation of the N9 running standard GNU/Linux apps like the N900. But if the N900 continued, it would have been entirely different.

N9's Harmattan still used a regular X11 environment on a Debian-based system, just like N900's Fremantle (though it was supposed to be a stop-gap as MeeGo proper wasn't Debian-based anymore). However, aside of Aegis being a PITA, its portrait form-factor with a capacitive touchscreen and lack of physical keyboard simply wasn't providing a comfortable experience with "standard GNU/Linux apps" that N900 did.

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

#173

Post by let_rec » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 9:18 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #45

fineIllregister wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.

Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited. I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones…

> Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited.

WhatsApp was on Windows Phone though.

Instagram was not on Windows Phone, which hurt it, but there is no indication it would have come to MeeGo either.