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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#181

Post by Gare »

HeckFeck wrote: post #76
neom wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right imo. I was a teen during peak Nokia, and I always thought it was very clever how they had a phone for everyone, and more importantly, they really signaled to the consumer via features and marketing. I was in the UK and there was a time for a couple of years when all we talked about was football and Nokia models, we all had phones, some of us had TWO phones because we inherited an old business de…

The closest competitor to Nokias during 2007-2009 I recall was the Sony Ericssons, especially the walkman phones or the slider phones. At least if you were like me and always had to have something different. I still wish I’d kept my W910i. Unreliable software that would reboot randomly, but a surprisingly sturdy piece of kit that survived many drops and skids. And it was the best camera I had for a while, delivering…

I remember SE phones fondly. Motorola was also quite big with their flip phones (Razr), at least in Croatia.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#182

Post by selcuka »

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.

> Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs.

I still think that the wheel (navi-roller) they introduced with 7710 [1] was revolutionary and they should have used it in other phones they made.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7110

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#183

Post by bloopernova »

selcuka wrote: post #182
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.

> Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs. I still think that the wheel (navi-roller) they introduced with 7710 [1] was revolutionary and they should have used it in other phones they made. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7110

I would really like something like that navi-roller below my spacebars on my keyboard, to use as a way to select from drop-downs and push to enter. Unfortunately keyboard navigation of graphical elements is really lacking these days.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#184

Post by kiwijamo »

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?

You got the nicer Androids. Most of the Androids on the market unfourtently aren't very good in terms of using modern hardware, using the latest Android OS (shops continue to sell Android phones running versions of Android several years out of date), receiving security updates, etc. My experience of Android had been incredibly poor until I got my S21. My S21 is the first Android phone I've owned (out of several from different manufacturers) that works on par with (if not better than) Apple in terms of keeping the OS up to date and porting back new features to older models. I now only recommend the Samsung S-series to people considering Android, anything else is just asking for trouble.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#185

Post by usrusr »

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”.

No other brand could have had much reach beyond a tiny luxury niche at the price point required to build the iPhone in 2007. It was the iPod that paved the way in the early aughts, when it was quite literally the only way to liberate ones entire Napster hoard from the confines of the minitower. Had the market not been primed by that freak wave incident, those telco execs' predictions might have well become true.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#186

Post by miki123211 »

Another problem with Nokia was that there was absolutely no logic to the model numbering. You could have an entry-level, 10-year-old handset with a higher model number than the latest and greatest Nokia had to offer. If somebody told you they had a Foo 206 and you had a Bar 398 Classic, you knew nothing about how their phone compared to yours. Not how old it was, not how good it was, nothing whatsoever.

The sheer amount of phones available didn't help either, there were just so many of them you could not remember them all.

Not that other manufacturers are any better than this, Apple is the only one that sort of gets this right, though I wish they used their normal numbering scheme for the SE models.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#187

Post by jakjak123 »

badgersnake wrote: post #80
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…

You’re literally describing the Nokia N900. 1 days battery, many apps. They did everything, which as the article says was part of the problem.

I had the N900, but I think it was only released 2.5 years after the first iPhone.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#188

Post by treprinum »

While HMD learned from this mistake and released only a few phones a year, they stuck with ugly notches at the top of the screen that acted as a customer repellent and now they are dropping NOKIA branding as nobody was buying them. I recently bought a Nokia 7 Plus for my Unitree Go2 robodog controller and I absolutely love the design that complements ZenBook S UX393 I use for developing on Linux.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#189

Post by johnea »

They experimented too much!

Every modern marketeer knows it's all about making 1 thing and convincing the idiot herd that this is _the_ thing.

Twerk tick has been a really big help with that...

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#190

Post by nikau »

A lot of those phones were just a new case with identical pcb or a very minor pcb rework.

There were shops at the time who would change the green led to blue and swap the case to convert a lower end model to a more expensive one.

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