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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#261

Post by int_19h »

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 had an S40 phone (Nokia 6300) for several years, and I don't recall anything unpleasant about it.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#262

Post by int_19h »

giantrobot wrote: post #250
beenBoutIT wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their real purpose is to look "premium". How else would you explain the use of glass on the back of the phone? It's certainly not ergonomics - there are materials that are both stronger and grippier. But it's certainly shiny.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#263

Post by int_19h »

LelouBil wrote: post #215
pclmulqdq wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having tried to use the Apple Music app on an iPhone recently, I strongly disagree with this assertion.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#265

Post by guappa »

dylan604 wrote: post #77
lou1306 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think that the average iPhone user (at least in Europe) gets a new device every season. Actually the opposite is true: Apple does gives you the opportunity to stick to your old device, if you want. iOS 15 still gets updates and can run on an iPhone 6S.

I just went from a 6S+ to a 15 Pro, so I'm an example of this. However, there are some apps that just don't work on the older devices. Snapchat would not work on the 6S+ with the latest OS available. Eventually, the camera took enough tumbles that I'm assuming the lenses were no longer aligned as nothing was in focus. Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes than anything Nokia ever released. Someth…

> Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes than anything Nokia ever released.

You never tried symbian I guess.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#266

Post by guappa »

nradov wrote: post #230
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…

A similar type of thing has been happening to fashion wristwatch manufacturers, although at a slower pace. Customers no longer purchase as many wristwatches, and instead purchase a single Apple (or Garmin) a smartwatch plus different straps to change the look. There is a still a strong market for luxury mens' mechanical wristwatches as jewelry. But I expect that will gradually die off as the population of men who gre…

Some people just want a watch that works for 10 years or more with 1 charge. And to not be harassed by notifications.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#267

Post by guappa »

shp0ngle wrote: post #247
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”.

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.

It also didn't support MMS, so you couldn't send your photos. Unlike every other phone with a camera that existed at the time.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#268

Post by guappa »

hasmanean wrote: post #29
Hamuko wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia phones had a one-week battery life if you weren't using them like a smartphone. We had the Nokia 7650 in our family and if you used it as a camera, the battery life would definitely not be a week. The conventional wisdow that had to be abandoned was that a phone was a brick that you had in your pocket and that did text messages and phone calls, instead of it being a computer that you might sometimes use for tex…

So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting. I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants. There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support. Even downloading an a…

On symbian there was an app store before iphones existed.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#270

Post by seba_dos1 »

Eduard wrote: post #221
rcarmo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. And most of the devices that could actually do that properly were Nokias (MIDP was OK, but Nokias outsold MIDP phones ringtone-wise for an order of magnitude).

> Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. I don't remember app stores or game downloads existing up until iPhone and Android, let alone being profitable. There was MIDP and J2ME, but they were so niche, and I'm only aware of them because of an practical course during university, circa 2008. But maybe yo…

They were a big thing you'd see everywhere around you (TV, magazines etc.), except that you probably classified them in your head under a different label because they were mostly about ringtones and wallpapers and accessed via premium SMS services that would respond with "WAP push" SMS with a download URL in it. Games were more expensive and less popular (though I still wouldn't call them "niche") as compatibility was a mess, but they sure were there way before 2008.

My regional context is Poland, but it couldn't have been much different in Germany - otherwise I wouldn't see a service exactly like that being parodied at last Chaos Communication Camp by... actually deploying a working SMS service on the camp's GSM network:)

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