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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#211

Post by reisse »

usr1106 wrote: post #93
killerstorm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian forced people to code in a weird dialect of C++: no exceptions, no RAII, custom stdlib. It didn't have analogs of std::string and std::vector, grow-able containers were considered too complex.

When Symbian, then called EPOC32, was developed there was no C++ standard library and no compiler that could handle exceptions without severe problems. So they had macro kludges. They were so unintuitive that some 75% of their coders could not handle strings without severe errors. It did not help that they hired coders directly out of the university (many without a degree yet) and every good coder was promoted to man…

> When Symbian, then called EPOC32, was developed there was no C++ standard library

There was no standard to begin with (actually the first release of Symbian and the first C++ ISO standard are pretty close on the timeline), but STL and likes existed.

Then again, Symbian was on the market until 2013, but programming for Symbian always sucked. Especially in the later years, when Nokia completely missed the advent of touchscreens, and tried to keep afloat by throwing Symbian on a touchscreen and seeing if it sticks.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#212

Post by krisoft »

mangamadaiyan wrote: post #179
hodgesrm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In comparision a current iphone 15 is IP68 rated. If you would have the same hike with one of those you could expect to be able to call an uber at the end of the day. I think that is quite neat progress.

Basically the definition of indestructible shifted. Back then it was obvious the phone won’t work after such an immersion. And indestructible meant that with proper care it could be restored to working condition. Today it is more of an exception when a phone dies under the same treatment.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#213

Post by vitorgrs »

Nokia made a lot of failures, but having too many phones is not the one that affected them.

Samsung makes like, the same amount. Xiaomi probably even more.

The thing is, if you are in a developed country, you are not seeing half of Samsung phones. They launch a lot of cheaper/middle range phones on emerging market.

If you want to be successful at emerging markets, you basically need a lot of phones. Because you can't put everything on a $180 device. So instead, the company create several $180 devices aimed at different people.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#214

Post by mangamadaiyan »

krisoft wrote: post #212
mangamadaiyan wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In comparision a current iphone 15 is IP68 rated. If you would have the same hike with one of those you could expect to be able to call an uber at the end of the day. I think that is quite neat progress. Basically the definition of indestructible shifted. Back then it was obvious the phone won’t work after such an immersion. And indestructible meant that with proper care it could be restored to working condition. Tod…

I'd agree. I'm not trying to downplay the current state of the art. My gripe is primarily this: the Nokia 3310 had everything I wanted - long battery life, indestructibility, and the ability to make and receive phone calls, and text messages. Today, I cannot find a phone that checks all these boxes.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#215

Post by LelouBil »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #156
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 irony is that Apple today acts kind of like a fashion brand. Nokia was a fashion brand without a clear vision, though.

Apple cares about software too.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#217

Post by tetrisgm »

RandallBrown wrote: post #164
tetrisgm wrote: post #17

Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too. When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks. One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people de…

I remember wanting an NGage so bad . I had a whole plan to get my gameboy and all the games together to trade in so I could get one from GameStop. Then I went and actually tried one. Having to remove the battery to swap out games was too much for me.

It's incomprehensible. I think it came out in 2003. Handheld consoles and their UX were well understood by then. I can't imagine how this device would get greenlit, pass through user testing, and ship. There are so many steps where this product could have been put on hold for revisions. They shipped it regardless. Says a lot about confidence or not listening to feedback.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#218

Post by Steltek »

nikau wrote: post #191
robocat wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The N95 was a god-like phone of the pre-iPhone era.

* 5MP camera with an amazing lens and dedicated shutter button

* 8GB(?) of flash and dedicated music controls

* Internet Hotspot

* Copy and paste (zing!)

I loved it then and yet I was still awful at making use of its potential.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#219

Post by acdha »

usrusr wrote: post #185
bborud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The iPod was key but not for the reason you’re thinking: it wasn’t the device itself as LG and Nokia had devices in 2007 which were pricier (LG’s Prada even beat Apple to the touchscreen market) but rather that the iPod’s dominant status as the prestige music player meant that AT&T wanted the “iPod phone” badly enough that they were willing to give up the control which carrier greed had used to strangle the American smartphone market until that point.

The high price of cellular data plans is the most obvious factor - people used to fear letting an app use more data than they expected and getting hundreds of dollars in overage charges – but the other thing was the lack of AT&T control of the device. The carriers used to put ugly skins, disable features which competed with their paid services, lower call quality to serve more devices per cell tower, or use huge percentages of your device storage for undeletable bundled promos, but worst of all was how apps were sold. You didn’t have standard terms but “call us” agreements negotiated with each carrier, with high entry fees and percentages based on your company’s total revenue. There were exceptions like the Treo and (IIRC) Windows CE devices which allowed arbitrary app installs but a lot of devices were locked down by the carrier, and the combination of market fragmentation, limited access, and expensive data meant that not many people were even attempting to write apps. Even if money was no object there just wasn’t enough of a supply.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#220

Post by acdha »

kipchak wrote: post #199
IshKebab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rapid…

I think the carrier locking was a very significant factor for comparing early phone sales: you were looking at a hefty easily termination to switch and two year contracts were common so the average American was probably looking at a year before they could switch to any carrier’s exclusive device.
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