Nokia made too many phones

The main issue they had was fragmented Symbian versions. Oh that and they allowed themselves to listen to Stephen Elop.

I admire their hardware innovation and I think it’s sad we lost it.

My Nokia E61 is still one of my favourite past handsets (Sony’s second version of the Xperia Mini Pro, the iPhone X and the stunning Siemens S35 are the others). And now I probably gave away who I am to at least one person who knows me here.

>One comment I remember (but don't remember when/where I read it) was that the best camera was the one you already had with you.

This is something I’ve heard (and said) a lot. Probably why you don’t remember exactly where you heard it. I’m guessing it’s a pretty old adage.

The camera phone, and more so the smartphone, really changed photography.

One of my favorite pictures is one I took on a crap flip phone, it’s 352x288. It’s a garbage quality shot, and I wish it was better, but in an age before camera phones, it wouldn’t have existed at all. Getting it off the phone also required deliberate effort, where it’s now just a couple taps to send it out to the whole world.

They were definitely a thing, pushed heavily by carriers ("Vodafone live!" etc) with dedicated buttons on the devices that people would mostly press by accident. I don't think they were ever very popular with consumers but I bought a copy of Tetris and an offline travel guide from the Sony Ericsson store. Then you bought a new phone, nothing transferred over or could be redownloaded, and you said F this what a ripoff.

I'm not sure that was a problem. Let's not forget that smartphones, as we know them, weren't really invented yet back then. So there wasn't really a common form factor and feature package that every customer was looking for.

Sure, there were Symbian phones that could functionally do almost anything smartphones can do now (and do more than the first iPhone) but those weren't for everyone and those didn't use touch screens so there were multiple form factors. Like the full keyboard communicators (9210, 9300/9500), the Blackberry clone (E61, I think), the slide keyboard (7650?) and then all the non-Symbian phones (S40 OS, IIRC). And, of course cameras were new and shitty so not every phone had them.

Now this could have caused a problem in itself and what the article says about the organization could also cause problems but (I keep saying this when this topic comes up) the real problem was that the Nokia management was too convenient/coward and didn't dare to switch away from Symbian. Especially since they have bought out Erinsson and Sony (again, IIRC), their former partners in the Symbian consortium in ~2004/5.

There were eperiments with a linux based phone OS around that time. They created the Nokia 770 "internet tablet" [1] which was this PDA-like touch screen device with a landscape screen layout, a pen, and a removable front cover. Obviously it was an experiment (and later followed by the 810 then the 900, the latter being a phone). However no one in the management was brave enough to give a linux phone a go. Especially not committing to a strategy to switch over to linux. Symbian phones were selling great, Nokia was the market leader and you can't really do better than that...

I remember, at one point, one team in the Helsinki office of NRC (Nokia Research Center) was coming up with the idea of creating a "unified architecture" (called the "Grand Unified Architecture") where they would create a uniform platform around the 3 operating systems: a linux based one, Symbian S60 and the (non-Symbian) S40. The genius idea was that they'd create a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) then above that would be one of the 3 OSs and above those would be a uniform API that could be used by all app developers. This would have been a great strategy to side-step an actual decision but other than that didn't make any sense, really. (Maybe you could argue back then that the S40 hardware was not capable of running linux, but there was no excuse for trying to keep both Symbian and linux while hiding them below a uniform API.) So the switch to linux never happened and Symbian was a pain in the ass to develop for. Just concatenating two strings took several lines of code in their C++-based API that hasn't even looked like actual C++. And this made developing in-house software slow and made 3rd party software pretty scarce.

Nokia also had an aversion towards touch screens. One of the reasons must have been that back then only resistive touch screens were available (I think the oroginal iPhone was the first phone with a capacitive one, i.e. one that was an actual touch screen and not a press/push screen). The other reason must have been Symbian (and the S60 skin) that was really not designed for touch screen and was hard to develop.

So Nokia just continued to enjoy being the market leader with the management not taking the risk to try to switch direction. And then the iPhone came and then Android came (who, after seeing an iPhone demo, very quickly changed direction because at first they thought they were competing with Blackberry, so their UI was similar to that and maybe Symbian).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

bollocks. it was a new area ripe for experimentation. this always happens when a new market is created. now we're in a phase where there is no innovation and there hasn't beem for some time