Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it

#21

Post by daghamm »

immibis wrote: post #14
doublerabbit wrote: post #7

Sigh, now we've stuck in a world of Google or Apple. I recall a world where each phone had itself own OS, or firmware. Every phone was different. I miss my Lumia and my Sony Ericsson k700i and just the simplicity of texting.

Android phones are already like that. Samsung phones will keep pestering you to enable Samsung-specific features and the UI has been rewritten by Samsung.

Is it really a bad thing? I really like the Samsung UI and their included features are mostly useful.

And the world would be a very boring place if everything everywhere looked identical

Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it

#22

Post by shrubble »

The real issue is that Microsoft's "engineering culture" looked down on the use of co-processor chips and wanted to do everything on a big CPU.

Even in 2012 with the Pureview 808, Nokia had a pixel processing chip that could handle 1 billion pixel a second, with low power usage. Microsoft's inept driver architecture made it difficult to use, so later Microsoft versions of the Lumia phones actually had lower specs and power usage issues.

Elop was very likely Rick Belluzzo of SGI writ large; a mediocre thinker, a big-company bureaucrat who never cared about tech...

Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it

#24

Post by pjmlp »

chiph wrote: post #2

I miss Windows Phone. It was fast, did what I needed, and was easy to use one-handed. The Nokia hardware was good (especially the camera, for the time), except the plastic case & screen collected scratches like crazy. I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.

At the time with .NET Native and C+×/CX, with Visual Studio, it was the best development experience among all mobile platforms.

Then after killing the mobile platform, they messed up the desktop experience as well, killing the goodwill among the strongest advocates of the WinRT platform.

Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it

#25

Post by mydogmuppet »

I had two Nokia 1020s. Yes Windows 8 was a nightmare. The 38Mpix camera sensor at 1/1.5 inches, Zeiss lens, OIS coupled with Pureview software rendered stunning images. Especially low light. 9 years on I've never quite got the same joy out of Pixel Pro or IOS images.
Post reply on HN