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

311–320 of 337 posts

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#311

Post by giantrobot »

int_19h wrote: post #262
giantrobot wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iPhones are built with super tight tolerances. Using the same (or similar enough) materials on opposing sides means not having to deal with different thermal expansion properties. Glass is also radio transparent which makes the NFC radio and wireless charging much easier. It likely doesn't hurt with cellular and WiFi reception either. It's also not going to interfere with the MagSafe magnets.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#312

Post by fractallyte »

selcuka wrote: post #182
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.

> 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

Interesting... I had a Sony Vaio C1VE laptop, made around the same time, with a similar "jogdial" on the side.

It was an extremely cool input device, particularly for navigation.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#313

Post by atleta »

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #239
atleta wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue they had was Symbian. Period. And not willing to let it go. It was f*&^d up before Elop. Years before him.

If they had concentrated on Series 60 they could easily have fixed Symbian over time. It was highly capable. For example it ran a full Webkit (yes really) browser before Apple shipped their own. That was genuinely useful. It even had code signing for apps in v3 (the version that shipped with the E61)

The problem was still Symbian under S60, if you like. Yes, it had code signing (which seemed like an unnecessary restriction at the time it was introduced) and a decent browser, and email that synced in the background (unlike in iPhone 1!) and background tasks in general, etc.

But developing for Symbian was convoluted, very painful and slow. And it slowed down Nokia itself not to mention the 3rd party/external app developers. There was no reasonable way to fix Symbian as these issues stemmed from the very foundations. One of them being memory management, the other probably cooperative multitasking and callbacks. But the memory management thing was all over the code (think string handling, so everywhere) and it made using existing software hard too. Linux would have been the way to go, one way or another. Sure, they would have to have rebuilt most things for that platform but e.g. webkit would have been a no-brainer and they could have used a lot of existing open source software.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#314

Post by rcarmo »

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…

I was at Vodafone. Pretty sure we had exactly the same service across all of Europe, especially because a good chunk of it was developed in Dusseldorf :)

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#315

Post by scarface_74 »

pjc50 wrote: post #295
scarface_74 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People could care less about the app stores 30% cut. Developers care. Even then 90% of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games and whales buying loot boxes and coins. You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t manage a tear for them.

I can't believe I have to write "developers are people too" on Hacker News.

No one cares about “developers” - I’m one too.

The things that developers want is often orthogonal to what end users want.

1. End users have never said “it would be great to have PWAs so we can have the same lowest common denominator for our phones that we have with electron apps on the desktop”

2. End users have never said “we really want a ‘relationship’ with the developer so they can spam us with related offers”

3. “I feel so bad that Epic and other companies who spam the App Store could get 30% more for selling loot boxes and gems for pay to win games” - this is where 90% of App Store revenue comes from. It came out in the epic trial

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#316

Post by HeckFeck »

neom wrote: post #237
HeckFeck wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have been just across the water in rural Northern Ireland. Argos was very much part of the picture but most phones came from the local O2 shop.

Was just googling around and found this, maybe you would enjoy it also: https://retromash.com/argos/

Thanks mate, I remember Argos had their own website up for a while where every catalogue could be viewed online. Bizarrely, they didn't provide any downloads. So I'm still on the hunt for PDFs of the 2003-2007 catalogues, the ones I'd remember most vividly.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#317

Post by mangamadaiyan »

pmontra wrote: post #249
mangamadaiyan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was sized just right, too. The shape was ergonomic, the keys were tactile, it had a sturdy eyelet for a lanyard ... and who remembers what else. One well-designed phone was what it was.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#318

Post by hodgesrm »

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.

Mine was like the 3310 but had a stubby little antenna at the top. Otherwise it looked pretty much identical.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#319

Post by _thisdot »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #110
serial_dev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they are that similar. There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600, 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique. Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or whatever color each year so that the few people wh…

Apple has 8 different phones you can buy right now counting all the max/plus models (SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro). If you add in the storage differences it is 24 unique circuit boards/phone internals, and colors bring it to over 100 different unique products. From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's actually pretty wild!

Yeah, but from a software perspective, it's just 2-3 form factors to support (Square Screen, Notch, Cutout). Even those are very well defined that those developing software for it doesn't have to bother with it at all. But you're right, the fact that a red iPhone 15 128 GB is one of the over 100 combinations available is wild. It seems like a smaller pool

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#320

Post by TheRealNGenius »

panick21_ wrote: post #35
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”.

This also comes out in the Blackberry story. They were like 'AppStore' the Telcos will never allow that. And Apple just pushed the idea threw and got it done.

[dead]
Post reply on HN