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

Nokia made too many phones

textquery.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 337 posts

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#241

Post by phowat »

Steltek wrote: post #218
nikau wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember it also had native SIP support and you could configure an account to connect automatically only when the phone connected to a certain wifi network. So I had my work extension on when I connected to the work wifi. It was really nice

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#242

Post by alexey-salmin »

magnetowasright wrote: post #229
HeckFeck wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The best phones I have ever owned were Sony Ericssons. How I yearn for a slightly modernised phone from them! My favourite was one that had a slide-out play station controller. That thing was awesome for wasting time on.

Yep, k700i, k750i, w902 — all superb phones, sometimes I even miss them a bit.

Funny that a few years before that I was a big Palm/Clie enthousiaste, so the idea of "all screen no keyboard" wasn't new to me. Yet I gave up after Tungsten T5 and stayed with just Sony Ericssons for several years with no desire to but a PDA or smartphone.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#243

Post by mjcohen »

bloopernova wrote: post #183
selcuka wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A google search for "keyboard with roller" brings up a lot of options.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#244

Post by marttt »

zokier wrote: post #153
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.

Sure, the classic UI in 3310 etc ("Series 20") was great, and even "Series 30" was okay. But Series 40 and especially Series 60 were distinctly less well received.

I'm a weirdo who has intentionally never owned a smartphone, so "using up" old dumb phones found in our family has been a fun hobby for roughly two decades. Longest streak was using a 3310 for 12-or-so years, starting when I went to gymnasium and letting it go in late 20s when I was about to become a father. Man, that was one hell of a phone (also serving as a beer bottle opener, etc for many students back in the day).

Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading.

But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also.

Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it.

That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet.

Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic

2: https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#246

Post by jnsaff2 »

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…

The obligatory, insanely funny, almost unbelievable story behind the design of the ngage. Can't be unseen, you have been warned: https://i.imgur.com/VXgGvQQ.jpg

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#247

Post by shp0ngle »

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”.

Thing that people forget is iPhone was not an instant success - the first gen was expensive (for the time, for a phone), it had no app store, no 3G so the internet was slow.

For a time dumbphones were still overselling smartphones.

It got better as mobile internet got quicker and people got used to the shorter batteries.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#248

Post by JayPalm »

yen223 wrote: post #228
vitorgrs wrote: post #213

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…

Apple is the odd one in terms of how narrow their product lineup is. Every other electronics company have market-segmented their product into 100s of devices. I have always wondered how a large company like Apple, with 161,000 employees operating in basically every market in the world, can maintain that level of focus.

Good management and a functional structure?

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#249

Post by pmontra »

mangamadaiyan wrote: post #214
krisoft wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was also relatively light, 133 grams. It's impossible to find something like that now. My phone is 140 g and most phones are closer to 200 g than to 140.

https://m.gsmarena.com/nokia_3310-192.php

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#250

Post by giantrobot »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #161
hasmanean wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.

Unlike Apple Nokia built their devices to resist breaking and be 100% serviceable down to the smallest parts. Apple uses metal because it's significantly heavier than plastic and makes phones heavy enough to shatter glass screens and damage their internals when dropped. Any iPhone could replace its metal housing with an equally strong polymer and become exponentially more difficult to break.

Ah, the strong load bearing case and impact resistant glass are just a clever rouse! Their real purpose is to...break more easily! It makes so much more sense now.
Post reply on HN