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A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the com

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990-2020. Apparently when the iPhone was announced the whole company was in deep shock and disarray. They were planning on the first touchscreen phones hitting the market around 2010-2015, and here was a company promising to deliver one by 2008.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 6y ago
Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch well. In the end they went for a bizarre hybrid design where the screen pushed down when you tapped something on the screen. Like a button would. I got used to it over time but the first time I used it, I thought I'd dislocated the screen. Within a year, Verizon realized it wasn't going to rival AT&T w/ BB, and had Motorola create the Droid brand, which may have been one of the most popular Android phones in the US before Samsung arrived.
- gambler 6y ago
  >Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality this is usually what they resort to when things go south. Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either via stupid features or working long hours or both.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I remember trying out a Storm. Webpage would render incredibly slowly because Blackberry weren't capable of putting a wifi chip in the handset (it was limited to edge if I recall). The whole UI was sluggish. Cherry on top? No apps. There was a way to write apps but it was pretty much a unique SDK per phone model. No app store of course. It hit the market a few months after Apple revealed the iPhone 3G and the App Store.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    I remember the no Wi-fi. It was shocking, but made perfect sense from BB's perspective. These were work devices after all, and your precious data was expected to be routed through an encrypted BES server that would also compress packet contents to save bandwidth. But it did have apps. Just not many. I remember downloading Pandora, Shazam and Whatsapp from the Blackberry App store. Android and iOS stores obviously dwarfed it in terms of quantity though.
  - FooHentai 6y ago
    When the Storm came out, the place I was working had placed pre-orders for the executive team. First day, they're all configured and sent out to much fanfare. Second day, many of them came back to IT, some airborne. After a month they were pretty much all returned in favor of something that actually worked, and we never placed any further orders. Remember their 'haptic' touchscreen tech, SurePress? Click Clack. Felt like a child's toy. Quite the departure from genuinely great stuff like the trackball/pearl.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Verizon was pretty hilarious with denial early on. I recall them coming to talk about what a piece of garbage the iPhone was to our CIO, and how BlackBerry would bury them, etc. Then the CIO pulls out his iPhone and demos it. Lol. One of the reps flipped to AT&T a few weeks later. It’s really a shame actually, the BB was a great device and had an unbeatable security model for enterprises for a long time. iPhone is just a magical product.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    That verizon would do that is not surprising. They did not want to budge on those dataplan costs. Touting 'superior network' as their selling point. It was not until they tried to move into M2M that they realized no one was going to pay 45 bucks per MB and that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint would sell data and text at a much more reasonable rate. The original iPhone was neat but not much better than everything else out there in that category. Its one killer feature was that unlimited plan. That turned a remote device from something you did very little with because you did not want to get reamed on the data plans, to something you could hook the internet up to. It took verizon ages to realize it.
  - getlawgdon 6y ago
    iphone is magical; yet I'm replying on pixel3 right now despite recently moving to 12 max pro. I'm now carrying 2 phones around. the iPhone for the camera and the pixel for the superior usability. magical I tell you.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      Fifteen years later everyone has evolved. At the time though, the iPhone was questionable for a business user on paper. Weird touch keyboard, poor security (its active sync client lied about encryption), etc. But in the flesh, it was magical.
    - piva00 6y ago
      Is it superior usability or superior possibilities to customise the phone?
seba_dos1 6y ago
Well, there must have been more to it than just "first touchscreen phones" - Openmoko Neo1973 was announced shortly before the iPhone was revealed and it was a touchscreen-only phone already, delivered in 2007.
wombatmobile 6y ago
> Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way They were tripped up by their own success as the 800 lb gorilla of dumb phones that sold in the hundreds of millions. Nokia had a seperate department for “renewing the company through innovation”. It was an internal incubator which reported directly to the CEO. It could scout for tech, and develop prototype product products. The problems started at the point where a new product was ready to leave the incubator. It had to be “sold” to an existing business unit in a suitable division. The hurdle was that pre-2007 Nokia divisions were raking in billions selling mature tech in enormous volumes through existing channels. There was no room and few candidates to champion anything new which required nurturing, development, ancillory technology and marketplaces, or, heaven forbid, new business models, starting from a revenue base of $0.00.
rixrax 6y ago
There was no shock when iPhone was launched. Nokia had tried touch display phones already by that time and they had gone the way of N900 and deemed unviable. Disarray yes, but not because of iPhone. Of course there were people that appreciated the threat that iPhone might become, but if anything it was laughed at and ridiculed. I mean come on - no 3G and no QWERTY keyboard. Who in the world would use that! ;)
- butokai 6y ago
  The N900 came two years after the iPhone, and Nokia's first touchscreen phone (the 5800) one year after the iPhone, though
  - kefyras 6y ago
    Nokia's first touchscreen smartphone came out in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 it was an oddball, for sure, but still.
pjmlp 6y ago
Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had touchscreen phones running Symbian on sale in 2002!
- scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
  multi-touch + properly thought through nad responsive UI design was the dealbreaker.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Agreed, still they were touch screen regardless of having a stylus.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rchaud 6y ago

Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch well. In the end they went for a bizarre hybrid design where the screen pushed down when you tapped something on the screen. Like a button would. I got used to it over time but the first time I used it, I thought I'd dislocated the screen. Within a year, Verizon realized it wasn't going to rival AT&T w/ BB, and had Motorola create the Droid brand, which may have been one of the most popular Android phones in the US before Samsung arrived.

gambler 6y ago
>Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality this is usually what they resort to when things go south. Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either via stupid features or working long hours or both.
908B64B197 6y ago
I remember trying out a Storm. Webpage would render incredibly slowly because Blackberry weren't capable of putting a wifi chip in the handset (it was limited to edge if I recall). The whole UI was sluggish. Cherry on top? No apps. There was a way to write apps but it was pretty much a unique SDK per phone model. No app store of course. It hit the market a few months after Apple revealed the iPhone 3G and the App Store.
- rchaud 6y ago
  I remember the no Wi-fi. It was shocking, but made perfect sense from BB's perspective. These were work devices after all, and your precious data was expected to be routed through an encrypted BES server that would also compress packet contents to save bandwidth. But it did have apps. Just not many. I remember downloading Pandora, Shazam and Whatsapp from the Blackberry App store. Android and iOS stores obviously dwarfed it in terms of quantity though.
- FooHentai 6y ago
  When the Storm came out, the place I was working had placed pre-orders for the executive team. First day, they're all configured and sent out to much fanfare. Second day, many of them came back to IT, some airborne. After a month they were pretty much all returned in favor of something that actually worked, and we never placed any further orders. Remember their 'haptic' touchscreen tech, SurePress? Click Clack. Felt like a child's toy. Quite the departure from genuinely great stuff like the trackball/pearl.
Spooky23 6y ago
Verizon was pretty hilarious with denial early on. I recall them coming to talk about what a piece of garbage the iPhone was to our CIO, and how BlackBerry would bury them, etc. Then the CIO pulls out his iPhone and demos it. Lol. One of the reps flipped to AT&T a few weeks later. It’s really a shame actually, the BB was a great device and had an unbeatable security model for enterprises for a long time. iPhone is just a magical product.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  That verizon would do that is not surprising. They did not want to budge on those dataplan costs. Touting 'superior network' as their selling point. It was not until they tried to move into M2M that they realized no one was going to pay 45 bucks per MB and that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint would sell data and text at a much more reasonable rate. The original iPhone was neat but not much better than everything else out there in that category. Its one killer feature was that unlimited plan. That turned a remote device from something you did very little with because you did not want to get reamed on the data plans, to something you could hook the internet up to. It took verizon ages to realize it.
- getlawgdon 6y ago
  iphone is magical; yet I'm replying on pixel3 right now despite recently moving to 12 max pro. I'm now carrying 2 phones around. the iPhone for the camera and the pixel for the superior usability. magical I tell you.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Fifteen years later everyone has evolved. At the time though, the iPhone was questionable for a business user on paper. Weird touch keyboard, poor security (its active sync client lied about encryption), etc. But in the flesh, it was magical.
  - piva00 6y ago
    Is it superior usability or superior possibilities to customise the phone?

seba_dos1 6y ago

Well, there must have been more to it than just "first touchscreen phones" - Openmoko Neo1973 was announced shortly before the iPhone was revealed and it was a touchscreen-only phone already, delivered in 2007.

wombatmobile 6y ago

> Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way They were tripped up by their own success as the 800 lb gorilla of dumb phones that sold in the hundreds of millions. Nokia had a seperate department for “renewing the company through innovation”. It was an internal incubator which reported directly to the CEO. It could scout for tech, and develop prototype product products. The problems started at the point where a new product was ready to leave the incubator. It had to be “sold” to an existing business unit in a suitable division. The hurdle was that pre-2007 Nokia divisions were raking in billions selling mature tech in enormous volumes through existing channels. There was no room and few candidates to champion anything new which required nurturing, development, ancillory technology and marketplaces, or, heaven forbid, new business models, starting from a revenue base of $0.00.

rixrax 6y ago

There was no shock when iPhone was launched. Nokia had tried touch display phones already by that time and they had gone the way of N900 and deemed unviable. Disarray yes, but not because of iPhone. Of course there were people that appreciated the threat that iPhone might become, but if anything it was laughed at and ridiculed. I mean come on - no 3G and no QWERTY keyboard. Who in the world would use that! ;)

butokai 6y ago
The N900 came two years after the iPhone, and Nokia's first touchscreen phone (the 5800) one year after the iPhone, though
- kefyras 6y ago
  Nokia's first touchscreen smartphone came out in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 it was an oddball, for sure, but still.

pjmlp 6y ago

Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had touchscreen phones running Symbian on sale in 2002!

scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
multi-touch + properly thought through nad responsive UI design was the dealbreaker.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Agreed, still they were touch screen regardless of having a stylus.