16 ms·

Beyond Nokia: A love story

110 points by tellarin 10y ago

usaphp 10y ago
I remember working all summer when I was a teenager to be able to purchase a phone, I bought Nokia 7210 and my friends who worked with me got the Samsung c100. While the polyphony on their phone was better, mine lasted much longer even tho I treated it badly, both of their phones dies within 2 years, my Nokia is still in my drawer and is even turning on :))
whowalrus 10y ago
A nice little article. I have fond memories of Nokia too: - Nokia 1100 was my first mobile phone (the days when you would need to charge a mobile phone once a week!) - The Nokia Lumia 620 was the first smartphone I immediately fell in love with, both for the OS and the industrial design (it felt so good to hold in my hands!)
- sjnair96 10y ago
  Yes, Nokia's Symbian (my first smartphone the 5530, little brother to the 5800) and Maemo OS (N900!) were great, and I somewhat miss that era.
  - jdright 10y ago
    Maemo was simple genius. Way better than anything even today.
    - shmerl 10y ago
      It's a pity Elop killed it, and then sabotaged Nokia with move to Windows Phone. They should have never hired him to begin with. But Nokia's problems started before him. They were torn by internal politics. Instead of pouring all resources into Maemo / Meego, teams were bickering about whether Symbian should get precedence and so on. That was the root of their problems.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        It was classic "innovators dilemma". The leadership knew Symbian was getting frazzled around the edges, and was Maemo was their experiment with an alternative (the first Maemo interface was effectively their S90 interface ported to GTK), but they didn't want to sink Symbian before they knew they could transition their revenue over. Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop. Between that and how HP pretty much installed a revolving door on the CEO office, i wonder if boardroom meddling is a massive curse on tech companies. This because a board will focus on quarterly increases in profits, even if the company is solvent and likely to remain so for a decade or more. Consider Dell taking his namesake company private again so that he could enact long term goals without the board constantly interfering.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        > Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop. With a mandate to sell the company, which many seem to be unaware of. http://bgr.com/2013/09/24/nokia-ceo-elop-contract-details/ http://bgr.com/2013/09/24/nokia-ceo-elop-contract-details/
        digi_owl 10y ago
        Likely because it emerged after people had washed their hands of the whole mess.
    - cheiVia0 10y ago
      Maemo lives on in https://neo900.org/ https://neo900.org/
      - eriknstr 10y ago
        The Neo900 project posted two days ago that they would like peer review for their prototype #2. http://neo900.org/news/2016-week-47 http://neo900.org/news/2016-week-47 This link was apparently posted to HN two days ago when it was published but with the boring title "Neo900 2016 Week 47". I think there is probably someone on HN interested in looking over it, so I posted it to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613 with a better title hoping someone who should see it sees it, though the time of day might be bad and even though I tried to use a better title it might still be too vague to attract any attention. I looked over the schematics myself but I don't have any input for the Neo900 guys, being just a second year EE student (also, though I'm interested in electronics and microelectronics I'm still going to go the path of the power subdisipline as has been my plan since before I started).
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Sadly not really the Maemo i came to love on my N800.
      - moyta 10y ago
        I heard about this way back in 2014, why hasn't neo900 progressed much? It seems like Xunlong is able to turn out new boards based on the A20, H3 and H5 in a matter of weeks at a price point of $7 to $35, with the Linux sunxi community building a fully free stack for them in rapid order. Why has it taken so long, and additionally cost so much to produce a single board? I feel like a project like this needs to just partner with a Chinese business like Xunlong and specify what they want & with what chipset, like how the OrangePi Plus 2E was built.
        digi_owl 10y ago
        Likely the Xunlong boards are made in quantities that are 100x that of Neo900, and are easier to offload and thus have better ROI.
    - masklinn 10y ago
      > Maemo was simple genius. The soft spot in my heart for "simple genius" remains WebOS. Palm WebOS prefigured pretty much the last 5 years of "innovations" in both android and ios. In a way, WebOS was reminiscent of Smalltalk or Lisp Machines, it was the future of software hampered by hardware.
    - memsom 10y ago
      Maemo was nice, but setting up the SDK was a nightmare. That coupled with the breaking changes between each major version saw the app pool get smaller and smaller. I left the scene around the time the N810 was about 1 year old as the N900 was going to make all prior hardware obsolete- literally, as in the OS was not targeting it. I still have an N810 in storage somewhere. It was shockingly underpowered when I last used it. This was a repeating theme in Nokia - get a good technology and fumble it. They did something similar with a cloud enabled RFID based application my company at the time was planning to use. They EOL'd it suddenly just as we'd had all the training and were doing initial R&D to bring it up in our product.
      - zelos 10y ago
        The Qt based stack they had working when I was developing for the N900 was actually pretty nice. The platform-specific documentation was generally horrible, and queries to Nokia tended to be answered with "it's on the wiki somewhere", but overall it was fairly developer-friendly. As you say, of course, the fact that I was working on rewriting the original Gtk version of the app was a pretty big warning sign.
- cannam 10y ago
  Agreed on the Lumia 620, which despite its cheap materials was a lovely design. Perfect size, nice to hold, and the dual-layer back covers were fab.
bikamonki 10y ago
Well, maybe they can collaborate remotely, form a descentralized corporation and make a new phone :)
- Nition 10y ago
  Some of them sort of did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla
  - krige 10y ago
    "out of stock" - oh god dammit
    - Nition 10y ago
      Jolla's had a fair bit of financial trouble so unfortunately they've stopped making their own hardware for the moment. Instead they've been concentrating on the OS and trying to get third parties interested (the Intex Aqua Fish is one third party phone running Sailfish). However they have recently released just a few units of a new phone called the Jolla C. So they're not totally out of the hardware arena. It'll be interesting to see how they go and if they manage to hang on. I had a Nokia N9 and then a Jolla (which is still my phone now), and I do really like the interface. Although the slightly curved screen on the N9 worked beautifully with the swipe-based Meego interface and the flat screen on the Jolla isn't quite the same.
    - gulpahum 10y ago
      You should be able to get Intex Aqua Fish phone (a manufacturer in India). It runs Sailfish 2.0 created by Jolla. (I haven't actually ordered Aqua Fish, so I can't say much about it). Here's one seller in eBay: http://www.ebay.in/itm/Intex-Aqua-Fish-4G-LTE-with-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-5-2GB-RAM-16-GB-8MP-/282098603976 http://www.ebay.in/itm/Intex-Aqua-Fish-4G-LTE-with-Qualcomm-...
      - Nition 10y ago
        The original Jolla phone still runs the latest Sailfish versions as well so it's another option. But the hardware is pretty dated compared to new phones.
hourislate 10y ago
Nokia was an amazing company. The corporate culture was first class. They had some of the most intelligent and hard working people I ever met. The Finns are incredibly talented. There were many folks in the Americas that were absolutely amazing. What a shame things worked out the way they did.
- nextos 10y ago
  It's a shame. Maemo was amazing. Their cheap phones like 1100 were also a pleasure to use. I wish they hadn't hired Elop and done the bizarre bet-it-all to Windows thing.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    There's one time, the Nokia C5, a 'feature phone' iirc, the UI was abysmally Bad. 4 nested layers of generic metacategories, until you reach something too cramped to read. Made me feel physically angry.
- aikah 10y ago
  You can thank Elop and his pals who ruined to company, the same way he ruined Macromedia before that.
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. I think Elop saw the writing on the wall re: Android. If their Windows phones had done well he'd look like a genius. If their Android phones had done well... they'd have scraped a few percentage points of profit off the market at best? It is doubtful they could have given Samsung a run for their money but assuming they did their profits would have been gutted by cheap Chinese competitors. I'm not sure why anyone signed up to make Android phones. I can only assume it was panic about how far ahead the iPhone was when it was introduced. Microsoft and Intel made all the profits in the PC industry, the manufacturers fought over table scraps. The survivors like Dell quickly moved into enterprise services where they could make actual money. The cell phone suckers signed up for the same thing in mobile: Let Google and the carriers make all the money while they duke it out gladiator-style to eek out a meager profit. In that situation you're left without the R&D budget to compete with the likes of Apple (who takes most of the profit in cell phones) or Samsung (who has a massive conglomerate including chip fabs, a battery business, and a display business!). So the tl;dr is that Nokia making Android phones would have been, at best, a shadow of its former self. It was institutionally incapable of making that transition because it wanted to protect its former business. They also believed their carrier relationships would save them (aka the Carrier is the real customer for phones, not the end-user... end-users will take what the carrier offers and like it.) Nokia was also incapable of creating their own platform. The number of surviving companies who have successful done that can be counted with your fingers and all of them are based on the US west coast. It takes a software-is-king culture that neither Nokia nor Blackberry ever had. The only way Blackberry or Nokia survive is to immediately pivot the day the iPhone is announced, open huge software engineering offices in the Bay Area, and start developing their own platforms ASAP. Act as if you're going out of business immediately. There is also a cautionary tale for startups: By the time you realize your competitor is going to eat your lunch it may be too late to do anything about it. You can't wait until you are losing 20% of your customers to react because it will take you 3-12 months to turn the ship and catch up, then at least as long again to mature features, inform customers, and hit purchasing windows. That can be up to two years you've been focused on catching up while your competitor was free to keep innovating. By the time you get it all sorted out you'll be losing 80-90% of your customers, only now the market is bigger and network effects are even stronger so you'll have to work twice as hard to get back to where you were.
pksadiq 10y ago
My first phone was Nokia 1100. The first time I used internet was in Nokia 3100 (which I love the most). And what helped me learn programming was Nokia N70 (which I still own). I still remember the (g)olden days of pys60. :)
- _andromeda_ 10y ago
  My first was Nokia 1110 and I also had the N70. I thought N70 was the coolest device ever.
plainOldText 10y ago
I recently bought a Nokia 6310i. I simply wanted to own one, as when I was a teenager I had always looked up to the business people that had one. Back in those days this phone even came as an accessory with certain cars, such as Mercedes-Benz. However, placing it next to my iPhone made me appreciate our progress and the possibilities we've opened up by adopting the new smartphones and the whole app ecosystem.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  I spent months reviewing this phone back then. Hesitating to buy a pro plan. I understand the feeling.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well you are comparing S40 with iOS, so that should not be surprising. But if you did a comparison with Symbian or Windows PocketPC the difference is basically skin deep. The most interesting to come out in a decade seems to be Project Tango.
Abishek_Muthian 10y ago
I wonder how many of the Ex. Nokia employees joined the HMD (The JV between Nokia and Foxconn) which would be making the new android powered smartphones. Btw, India was the last market in which Nokia had a decent grip before eventually loosing to Samsung & Micromax. Nokia still sells it's feature phones here & if it could make it's android phones affordable , then it has a good chance of making a come back at-least in India.
- pekk 10y ago
  The list of competitors in Android is long. They would already be competing on cost, even more so in India. What would be the point of Nokia making hardware for Google's OS when there are already so many others at every market segment?
  - bergie 10y ago
    I've seen people from Kenya refer to their smartphones (of any manufacturer) as "my Nokia". So the brand seems to have some value still...
agumonkey 10y ago
Funny I was just reading the history of most sold cellphones, and how high and long was Nokia's reign. How quick its fall too. 400M #1 to nothing in two years.
vtuulos 10y ago
In 2006-2007, just before iPhone was released, we tried to pitch Nokia to adopt Python as the main language for mobile application development. We even wrote a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-applications-platform/dp/0470515058 https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-application... Python for Symbian (S60) was amazing - arguably the best way to develop smartphone apps at the time. It made you orders of magnitude more productive than native, convoluted version of C++. It came with bindings to camera, accelerometer etc. The underlying vision was to enable large masses of people to develop mobile apps quickly and thus unlock Nokia's capable hardware that was buried under a clunky OS. A Python-based user-driven app ecosystem might not have killed iPhone but it might have filled some of the vacuum that gave rise to Android. Nokia was way ahead of its time with many ideas.
- skykooler 10y ago
  Interestingly, the Jolla phone - arguably the descendant of Nokia's smartphone programs - uses Python as one of the native app languages. So it finally made it, albeit outside of Nokia's ecosystem.
- asmosoinio 10y ago
  You were working on that? I was using that for a prototype app and REALLY liked the productivity after a few years of S60 "C++" programming. So: Thanks! But I think it was kinda hard to get installation instructions clear enough for our partners to install the Python app. Not that I really remember anymore what the installation steps were...
- limmeau 10y ago
  I got that book. It helped me deduplicate the address book of my E72 from within an interactive Python session. Oh, those times.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I was an employee on those days and Symbian C++ really required an extra dose of love, even PIPS didn't make it much better. Symbian architecture was quite interesting but the tooling was horrendous, first the Codewarrior IDE, then the two iterations of Eclipse based tooling, all having a pile of Perl and Bash scripts underneath. This one reason why external developers went to more pleasant pastures, where programming didn't meant a daily fight with the tools.
krige 10y ago
Most of the phones I have ever owned were Nokias (the 3100, a brief stint on horrible Ericsson k310i, the 6131, and the Lumia 635). I have always found them to be very sturdy, ergonomic, and responsive. The 635 in particular I liked so much better than my current Galaxy J3 2016, I honestly consider switching back and the only thing holding me back is the hassle of transferring your data between Android/Windows Mobile.
- blauditore 10y ago
  I recently did it (the other way around): - Contacts are straightforward, just export/import on their web platforms. - Calendar is tricker; I ended up linking my old one to not miss existing events and just create new events in the new calendar. Everything else, like photos, mails and 3rd-party apps have not been an issue for me because they connect to the same clouds/services as before. Btw, since you can do most migrations from a browser, you may just try it without buying a phone first.

110 points by tellarin 10y ago

I remember working all summer when I was a teenager to be able to purchase a phone, I bought Nokia 7210 and my friends who worked with me got the Samsung c100. While the polyphony on their phone was better, mine lasted much longer even tho I treated it badly, both of their phones dies within 2 years, my Nokia is still in my drawer and is even turning on :))

whowalrus 10y ago

A nice little article. I have fond memories of Nokia too: - Nokia 1100 was my first mobile phone (the days when you would need to charge a mobile phone once a week!) - The Nokia Lumia 620 was the first smartphone I immediately fell in love with, both for the OS and the industrial design (it felt so good to hold in my hands!)

sjnair96 10y ago
Yes, Nokia's Symbian (my first smartphone the 5530, little brother to the 5800) and Maemo OS (N900!) were great, and I somewhat miss that era.
- jdright 10y ago
  Maemo was simple genius. Way better than anything even today.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    It's a pity Elop killed it, and then sabotaged Nokia with move to Windows Phone. They should have never hired him to begin with. But Nokia's problems started before him. They were torn by internal politics. Instead of pouring all resources into Maemo / Meego, teams were bickering about whether Symbian should get precedence and so on. That was the root of their problems.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      It was classic "innovators dilemma". The leadership knew Symbian was getting frazzled around the edges, and was Maemo was their experiment with an alternative (the first Maemo interface was effectively their S90 interface ported to GTK), but they didn't want to sink Symbian before they knew they could transition their revenue over. Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop. Between that and how HP pretty much installed a revolving door on the CEO office, i wonder if boardroom meddling is a massive curse on tech companies. This because a board will focus on quarterly increases in profits, even if the company is solvent and likely to remain so for a decade or more. Consider Dell taking his namesake company private again so that he could enact long term goals without the board constantly interfering.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        > Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop. With a mandate to sell the company, which many seem to be unaware of. http://bgr.com/2013/09/24/nokia-ceo-elop-contract-details/ http://bgr.com/2013/09/24/nokia-ceo-elop-contract-details/
        digi_owl 10y ago
        Likely because it emerged after people had washed their hands of the whole mess.
  - cheiVia0 10y ago
    Maemo lives on in https://neo900.org/ https://neo900.org/
    - eriknstr 10y ago
      The Neo900 project posted two days ago that they would like peer review for their prototype #2. http://neo900.org/news/2016-week-47 http://neo900.org/news/2016-week-47 This link was apparently posted to HN two days ago when it was published but with the boring title "Neo900 2016 Week 47". I think there is probably someone on HN interested in looking over it, so I posted it to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613 with a better title hoping someone who should see it sees it, though the time of day might be bad and even though I tried to use a better title it might still be too vague to attract any attention. I looked over the schematics myself but I don't have any input for the Neo900 guys, being just a second year EE student (also, though I'm interested in electronics and microelectronics I'm still going to go the path of the power subdisipline as has been my plan since before I started).
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Sadly not really the Maemo i came to love on my N800.
    - moyta 10y ago
      I heard about this way back in 2014, why hasn't neo900 progressed much? It seems like Xunlong is able to turn out new boards based on the A20, H3 and H5 in a matter of weeks at a price point of $7 to $35, with the Linux sunxi community building a fully free stack for them in rapid order. Why has it taken so long, and additionally cost so much to produce a single board? I feel like a project like this needs to just partner with a Chinese business like Xunlong and specify what they want & with what chipset, like how the OrangePi Plus 2E was built.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Likely the Xunlong boards are made in quantities that are 100x that of Neo900, and are easier to offload and thus have better ROI.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    > Maemo was simple genius. The soft spot in my heart for "simple genius" remains WebOS. Palm WebOS prefigured pretty much the last 5 years of "innovations" in both android and ios. In a way, WebOS was reminiscent of Smalltalk or Lisp Machines, it was the future of software hampered by hardware.
  - memsom 10y ago
    Maemo was nice, but setting up the SDK was a nightmare. That coupled with the breaking changes between each major version saw the app pool get smaller and smaller. I left the scene around the time the N810 was about 1 year old as the N900 was going to make all prior hardware obsolete- literally, as in the OS was not targeting it. I still have an N810 in storage somewhere. It was shockingly underpowered when I last used it. This was a repeating theme in Nokia - get a good technology and fumble it. They did something similar with a cloud enabled RFID based application my company at the time was planning to use. They EOL'd it suddenly just as we'd had all the training and were doing initial R&D to bring it up in our product.
    - zelos 10y ago
      The Qt based stack they had working when I was developing for the N900 was actually pretty nice. The platform-specific documentation was generally horrible, and queries to Nokia tended to be answered with "it's on the wiki somewhere", but overall it was fairly developer-friendly. As you say, of course, the fact that I was working on rewriting the original Gtk version of the app was a pretty big warning sign.
cannam 10y ago
Agreed on the Lumia 620, which despite its cheap materials was a lovely design. Perfect size, nice to hold, and the dual-layer back covers were fab.

bikamonki 10y ago

Well, maybe they can collaborate remotely, form a descentralized corporation and make a new phone :)

Nition 10y ago
Some of them sort of did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla
- krige 10y ago
  "out of stock" - oh god dammit
  - Nition 10y ago
    Jolla's had a fair bit of financial trouble so unfortunately they've stopped making their own hardware for the moment. Instead they've been concentrating on the OS and trying to get third parties interested (the Intex Aqua Fish is one third party phone running Sailfish). However they have recently released just a few units of a new phone called the Jolla C. So they're not totally out of the hardware arena. It'll be interesting to see how they go and if they manage to hang on. I had a Nokia N9 and then a Jolla (which is still my phone now), and I do really like the interface. Although the slightly curved screen on the N9 worked beautifully with the swipe-based Meego interface and the flat screen on the Jolla isn't quite the same.
  - gulpahum 10y ago
    You should be able to get Intex Aqua Fish phone (a manufacturer in India). It runs Sailfish 2.0 created by Jolla. (I haven't actually ordered Aqua Fish, so I can't say much about it). Here's one seller in eBay: http://www.ebay.in/itm/Intex-Aqua-Fish-4G-LTE-with-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-5-2GB-RAM-16-GB-8MP-/282098603976 http://www.ebay.in/itm/Intex-Aqua-Fish-4G-LTE-with-Qualcomm-...
    - Nition 10y ago
      The original Jolla phone still runs the latest Sailfish versions as well so it's another option. But the hardware is pretty dated compared to new phones.

hourislate 10y ago

Nokia was an amazing company. The corporate culture was first class. They had some of the most intelligent and hard working people I ever met. The Finns are incredibly talented. There were many folks in the Americas that were absolutely amazing. What a shame things worked out the way they did.

nextos 10y ago
It's a shame. Maemo was amazing. Their cheap phones like 1100 were also a pleasure to use. I wish they hadn't hired Elop and done the bizarre bet-it-all to Windows thing.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  There's one time, the Nokia C5, a 'feature phone' iirc, the UI was abysmally Bad. 4 nested layers of generic metacategories, until you reach something too cramped to read. Made me feel physically angry.
aikah 10y ago
You can thank Elop and his pals who ruined to company, the same way he ruined Macromedia before that.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. I think Elop saw the writing on the wall re: Android. If their Windows phones had done well he'd look like a genius. If their Android phones had done well... they'd have scraped a few percentage points of profit off the market at best? It is doubtful they could have given Samsung a run for their money but assuming they did their profits would have been gutted by cheap Chinese competitors. I'm not sure why anyone signed up to make Android phones. I can only assume it was panic about how far ahead the iPhone was when it was introduced. Microsoft and Intel made all the profits in the PC industry, the manufacturers fought over table scraps. The survivors like Dell quickly moved into enterprise services where they could make actual money. The cell phone suckers signed up for the same thing in mobile: Let Google and the carriers make all the money while they duke it out gladiator-style to eek out a meager profit. In that situation you're left without the R&D budget to compete with the likes of Apple (who takes most of the profit in cell phones) or Samsung (who has a massive conglomerate including chip fabs, a battery business, and a display business!). So the tl;dr is that Nokia making Android phones would have been, at best, a shadow of its former self. It was institutionally incapable of making that transition because it wanted to protect its former business. They also believed their carrier relationships would save them (aka the Carrier is the real customer for phones, not the end-user... end-users will take what the carrier offers and like it.) Nokia was also incapable of creating their own platform. The number of surviving companies who have successful done that can be counted with your fingers and all of them are based on the US west coast. It takes a software-is-king culture that neither Nokia nor Blackberry ever had. The only way Blackberry or Nokia survive is to immediately pivot the day the iPhone is announced, open huge software engineering offices in the Bay Area, and start developing their own platforms ASAP. Act as if you're going out of business immediately. There is also a cautionary tale for startups: By the time you realize your competitor is going to eat your lunch it may be too late to do anything about it. You can't wait until you are losing 20% of your customers to react because it will take you 3-12 months to turn the ship and catch up, then at least as long again to mature features, inform customers, and hit purchasing windows. That can be up to two years you've been focused on catching up while your competitor was free to keep innovating. By the time you get it all sorted out you'll be losing 80-90% of your customers, only now the market is bigger and network effects are even stronger so you'll have to work twice as hard to get back to where you were.

pksadiq 10y ago

My first phone was Nokia 1100. The first time I used internet was in Nokia 3100 (which I love the most). And what helped me learn programming was Nokia N70 (which I still own). I still remember the (g)olden days of pys60. :)

_andromeda_ 10y ago
My first was Nokia 1110 and I also had the N70. I thought N70 was the coolest device ever.

plainOldText 10y ago

I recently bought a Nokia 6310i. I simply wanted to own one, as when I was a teenager I had always looked up to the business people that had one. Back in those days this phone even came as an accessory with certain cars, such as Mercedes-Benz. However, placing it next to my iPhone made me appreciate our progress and the possibilities we've opened up by adopting the new smartphones and the whole app ecosystem.

agumonkey 10y ago
I spent months reviewing this phone back then. Hesitating to buy a pro plan. I understand the feeling.
digi_owl 10y ago
Well you are comparing S40 with iOS, so that should not be surprising. But if you did a comparison with Symbian or Windows PocketPC the difference is basically skin deep. The most interesting to come out in a decade seems to be Project Tango.

Abishek_Muthian 10y ago

I wonder how many of the Ex. Nokia employees joined the HMD (The JV between Nokia and Foxconn) which would be making the new android powered smartphones. Btw, India was the last market in which Nokia had a decent grip before eventually loosing to Samsung & Micromax. Nokia still sells it's feature phones here & if it could make it's android phones affordable , then it has a good chance of making a come back at-least in India.

pekk 10y ago
The list of competitors in Android is long. They would already be competing on cost, even more so in India. What would be the point of Nokia making hardware for Google's OS when there are already so many others at every market segment?
- bergie 10y ago
  I've seen people from Kenya refer to their smartphones (of any manufacturer) as "my Nokia". So the brand seems to have some value still...

agumonkey 10y ago

Funny I was just reading the history of most sold cellphones, and how high and long was Nokia's reign. How quick its fall too. 400M #1 to nothing in two years.

vtuulos 10y ago

In 2006-2007, just before iPhone was released, we tried to pitch Nokia to adopt Python as the main language for mobile application development. We even wrote a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-applications-platform/dp/0470515058 https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-application... Python for Symbian (S60) was amazing - arguably the best way to develop smartphone apps at the time. It made you orders of magnitude more productive than native, convoluted version of C++. It came with bindings to camera, accelerometer etc. The underlying vision was to enable large masses of people to develop mobile apps quickly and thus unlock Nokia's capable hardware that was buried under a clunky OS. A Python-based user-driven app ecosystem might not have killed iPhone but it might have filled some of the vacuum that gave rise to Android. Nokia was way ahead of its time with many ideas.

skykooler 10y ago
Interestingly, the Jolla phone - arguably the descendant of Nokia's smartphone programs - uses Python as one of the native app languages. So it finally made it, albeit outside of Nokia's ecosystem.
asmosoinio 10y ago
You were working on that? I was using that for a prototype app and REALLY liked the productivity after a few years of S60 "C++" programming. So: Thanks! But I think it was kinda hard to get installation instructions clear enough for our partners to install the Python app. Not that I really remember anymore what the installation steps were...
limmeau 10y ago
I got that book. It helped me deduplicate the address book of my E72 from within an interactive Python session. Oh, those times.
pjmlp 10y ago
I was an employee on those days and Symbian C++ really required an extra dose of love, even PIPS didn't make it much better. Symbian architecture was quite interesting but the tooling was horrendous, first the Codewarrior IDE, then the two iterations of Eclipse based tooling, all having a pile of Perl and Bash scripts underneath. This one reason why external developers went to more pleasant pastures, where programming didn't meant a daily fight with the tools.

krige 10y ago

Most of the phones I have ever owned were Nokias (the 3100, a brief stint on horrible Ericsson k310i, the 6131, and the Lumia 635). I have always found them to be very sturdy, ergonomic, and responsive. The 635 in particular I liked so much better than my current Galaxy J3 2016, I honestly consider switching back and the only thing holding me back is the hassle of transferring your data between Android/Windows Mobile.

blauditore 10y ago
I recently did it (the other way around): - Contacts are straightforward, just export/import on their web platforms. - Calendar is tricker; I ended up linking my old one to not miss existing events and just create new events in the new calendar. Everything else, like photos, mails and 3rd-party apps have not been an issue for me because they connect to the same clouds/services as before. Btw, since you can do most migrations from a browser, you may just try it without buying a phone first.