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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#191

Post by nikau »

robocat wrote: post #158
Analemma_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The Nokia n95 was way more advanced than the original iPhone except for the screen.

It's just that consumers wanted the big screen over everything else.

N95 photos still look decent even by today's standards, the original iPhone was a potato in comparison.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#192

Post by mardifoufs »

miki123211 wrote: post #186

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 amo…

Honestly I never understand why so many corporations do exactly that error with their naming schemes. Sony does it for everything too, even though it's gotten better. It's just such a self own marketing wise, even if it makes it easier to differentiate between different variants of the same product.

Samsung does the same for their TVs and appliances but at least they got it right with their phones: there's a "public" model name (for example, the Galaxy S23 Ultra) that is sequential and gives you a good idea of where exactly the phone sits in their line up. And then a model name that encodes the region specific variant (for example, SM-S912W for my S23U).

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#193

Post by nikau »

kiwijamo wrote: post #184
FpUser wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah the old compare expensive iPhone to bare bones android comparison

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#194

Post by jakjak123 »

t_mann wrote: post #16

This just feels like ex-post rationalization. It's easy to come up with a story why something failed after the fact, but that doesn't mean the theory has any weight. If you want this to be interesting, put some skin in the game and make a prediction about currently successful companies based on your theory. Otherwise, I'll have to assume that what you'd have written in 2005 was how Nokia's approach was superior to eg…

Exactly my feel as well.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#195

Post by baybal2 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#196

Post by fckgw »

IshKebab wrote: post #176
kipchak wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iPhone was also only available in the US and only on one carrier (and not the largest one).

N95 was worldwide.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#197

Post by fckgw »

Zigurd wrote: post #172

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 o…

If Toyota had 57 different models we would all be saying Toyota has too many cars.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#198

Post by jltsiren »

jbverschoor wrote: post #131
secondcoming wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.

In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile). Japan always had a different market though. Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground. Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities. Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.

Nokia was globally dominant until 2010, when Android started rapidly eating its market share.

Japan and the US were both countries with their own weird mobile phone markets. The US market was not as relevant in the 2000s as it should have been. Mobile phone adoption was lower than in Europe and the plans were ridiculously expensive, mostly because of the dominant business model. The plan was the primary product and the phone was a generic device locked to the plan, making the market uninteresting for phone manufacturers.

I don't know if I've ever seen a Blackberry phone knowing that it's a Blackberry phone. Blackberries always sounded like the Atari ST: a device you constantly heard about but never saw in the real world. And when I saw some statistics much later, I was surprised how popular it had been in the US.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#199

Post by kipchak »

IshKebab wrote: post #176
kipchak wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nokia kept making smartphones after the N95 in the "nseries", such as for example the N900 in 2009. I just mean to say there was appetite for 1 day devices with lots of apps and features before the iPhone came around - keep in mind the iOS appstore was released a year after the iPhone's launch, initially "apps" was a feature on the N95s side.[1]

Also while the N95 stuck around for a while, the N95 did sell more rapidly than the first iPhone. Assuming the dates Wikipedia uses are accurate the N95 reached 7 million units at the end of 2007 after being released in March of that year, and then 10 million by end of Q1 2008. The iPhone was released June 2007 and discontinued July 2008 and sold 6.1 million units. That being said availability of the first iPhone was limited outside the US and it was limited to Cingular, and the N95 wasn't sold via carriers in the US.

[1]https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-iphone-vs-nokia-n95/

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#200

Post by NicoJuicy »

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…

My dad ( 73 ) still bought a fake Nokia until 2 months ago.

Nokia 3310 was great for it's use case.

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