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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, bu
by pavlov 3y ago
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 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.
The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though.
Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.
- diggan 3y ago> Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next. Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off. Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.
- hasmanean 3y agoThey brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beenBoutIT 3y agoUnlike 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.
- rappr 3y agoThey tried that a few years ago with the iPhone 5C. We saw no difference in repair rates at the time.
- giantrobot 3y agoAh, 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.
- int_19h 3y agoTheir 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.
- giantrobot 3y agoiPhones 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.
- lou1306 3y agoI 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.
- dylan604 3y agoI 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. Something as simple as those devices would be much less noticeable if replaced by mood.
- doubled112 3y agoThis is how I'm hoping my 13 Mini works out. I can just keep using it until it's ancient.
- lamp_book 3y agoI switched to Apple specifically because Androids I owned aged quickly and badly. Some people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users they hold.
- 3y ago
- hennell 3y agoNot sure if it's a difference to era, or a just a earlier stage for Apple in the same cycle. Apple made good phones that work and last well, then 'fashionedised' them with different colours leaning into the newest model as a status symbol. But arguably Nokia did the same, at the time Nokia was a decent phone even if they had no standards between models - no one else did either. Blackberry found more consistency then lent into the status symbol approach. I suspect that there's probably a common pattern with brands building a decent product, becoming renowned for that, then becoming more fashion like to play up their new status. Eventually someone else able focusing on the product features over the name steals the market.
- serial_dev 3y agoI'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 who care about showing off their latest model can do so.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoApple 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!
- agumonkey 3y agoMaybe it's a matter of doing things in order ? Nokia had no strong image, they were well established but not like Apple, and also iPhones are flagships with a lot of advanced capabilities.. nokia lineups at the time were very much mainstream/average (the notion of advanced device was also limited at the time). When you're on top of the industry, you may have a shot at selling lifestyle.
- nwiswell 3y ago> SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro This more analogous to different model years of a car, rather than entirely different car models. The customer immediately and intuitively understands 14 is better than 13, 15 is better than 14, etc. The main thing clear to me is that the "mental flow chart" involved in selecting an Apple phone is much, much clearer than it would be for selecting a Nokia.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoYeah, but they only release like 4 or so new models a year, excluding storage/color differences, which are relatively trivial, despite making many billions of dollars. Apple made almost $200B from iPhone in 2023, for example; per model, even including the older ones, that's an insane revenue per model. Not sure I can think of any other product at that level.
- theshrike79 3y agoNokias problem was exactly what OP described. The whole company didn't talk to each other. Software did their own thing, design their own and the poor industrial designers tried to keep up. Apple's secret sauce was proper vertical and horizontal integration so that every design feature was also supported by software. Sauce: Worked at Nokia in the "let's release 200 phones a year" -times.
- usrusr 3y agoAny other company, if they had the iPhone, would have failed selling it in numbers. Because only at Apple it was preceded by the iPod that set a unique precedent in how much more expensive than all competitors a device could be. And that shift in price perception was deeply connected to the brand. It's easy to forget just how much more expensive the iPhone was than other phones that reached a meaningfully wide audience (or would have, in absence of the iPhone). Not indulging in the fancy moodboard stuff wouldn't have helped Nokia the tiniest bit. (edit: reply might have better fit GP directly)
- prewett 3y agoThe success of the iPhone was not due to a price anchoring effect. Sure, if you just wanted to make calls the iPhone was (is) rather expensive. But they were really selling a computer in your pocket, which among other things could browse the web like a computer, display maps from pretty much any location on earth, and replace those bulky Franklin Planners. Not to mention take phone calls. There was nothing like it for multiple years. I am a pretty late adopter, but I bought the original iPhone. Totally worth it. Two years later when everyone's phone contract was up, they all got iPhones.
- bdavbdav 3y agoI’d heavily dispute that - I’m not an Apple fanboy, and also not sure where the Apple regular replacement fallacy comes from. Back in the day, phones would be sold on 12mo contracts. Now, I’m surrounded by people (who are of very sound means) rocking iPhones from 5+ years ago, which are able to function in the tasks most adult phone users care about just as well as a recent model. Friends are passing old iPads down to kids instead of binning.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoWas this the different coloured cases campaign? - I remember it being a little before 2003, but I was working at a company doing work where we had frequent contact with Nokia product managers talking about shipping a news/financial data HDML/WAP app, they didn't partner with us eventually because they needed to concentrate on delivering different coloured removable back case panels - both with the phone and after sale extra packs, so teenagers could choose their phone style. Quite a humbling experience
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoYes this I think is the core issue: while Nokia phones were all a bit different, they were different in superficial and frankly, low-effort ways. Form that did not follow function, phones that looked liked some flashy "original-but-not-really-original" design study straight out of a bachelor's Product Design class. They could never have invented the iPhone, even if they were organised differently. The culture just wasn't there. The herculean drive to simplify, beautify and improve and NOT ACCEPT HALF-BAKED CRAP that propels Apple is impossible to replicate if it is not part of your DNA and vigorously enforced from the very top. Nokia wanted to "segment markets", Apple wanted to build the perfect phone.
- pavlov 3y agoThat’s basically it. Instead of the perfect phone, most of Nokia wanted to build the phone that makes you want to buy another phone soon. I made them a cappuccino-themed pinball game. The underlying idea was that when the customer is bored with the autumn colors and fabric edges and whatever, they’re buying the next Nokia for the new experience. Apple made a phone whose physical form was adaptable to any software experience. They didn’t need to put in a cappuccino pinball on the device because users could get that, and a million other experiences, from the app store, and mold their own experience. Some parts of Nokia understood this — Symbian was actually a capable smartphone OS under the clunky UI — but the company DNA kept thinking of smartphones as just another feature column for the plastic fantastic market segment games.
- killerstorm 3y agoSymbian forced people to code in a weird dialect of C++: no exceptions, no RAII, custom stdlib. It didn't have analogs of std::string and std::vector, grow-able containers were considered too complex.
- usr1106 3y agoWhen Symbian, then called EPOC32, was developed there was no C++ standard library and no compiler that could handle exceptions without severe problems. So they had macro kludges. They were so unintuitive that some 75% of their coders could not handle strings without severe errors. It did not help that they hired coders directly out of the university (many without a degree yet) and every good coder was promoted to management tasks.
- 24t 3y agoI remember playing that! It would have been on a Nokia 6300 though, I wasn't very adventurous with phone colours
- beretguy 3y agoDo you still have that game? Can you publish it somewhere (internet archive?) and gives us link?
- robocat 3y ago> 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.
- indymike 3y ago> 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. Yes, for making calls, texting, taking pictures and changing settings, Nokia phones were really nice. The whole games (Java) and apps (WAP) side wasn't the greatest. To be fair, no one had a decent game and app experience until the iPhone and G1 (Android) hit.
- MonaroVXR 3y agoUrban Asphalt on my Sony K300i was something else, Siemens MC60 was something else too
- monknomo 3y agosnake was fine
- plussed_reader 3y agoSnake predates Nokia mobile phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)
- Y-bar 3y ago> Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object. At an industrial design conference in Gothenburg (spring 2005 iirc) I met a senior designer from Nokia around that time, he had a doctorates in ergonomics and interaction design. He lamented that he was not allowed to so any user interface work, only do the aesthetics. Management from up far had decided that design was only about what it looked like, form was not allowed to work with function.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThe irony is that Apple today acts kind of like a fashion brand. Nokia was a fashion brand without a clear vision, though.
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- dougSF70 3y agoI worked for a research firm that did research for Nokia Design, large scale immersion sessions in exotic locations. One project the deliverable was a set of cards 11" x 8" in a custom box. Each card depicted an insight from the research. I think Nokia Design were charged 25k for the production of these cards. For me this was peak-insanity and two years later Nokia imploded.
- nradov 3y agoA 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 grew up wanting a Rolex dies off.
- romwell 3y ago>Everyone knows what happened next. ...Microsoft did a hostile takeover with the help of an "ex"-Microsoft Elop being appointed Nokia CEO? Might I say, MS and Nokia eloped. Oh, and cancelled the very much beloved Linux-based handset without even advertising it.
- panick21_ 3y agoNot really. In fact, its the opposite. The board broad in Elop because they wanted to be taken. Its not so much a hostile takeover but a 'invitation' of takeover. Think about the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago> Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Worked for Apple, though. (Oh how I hate Apple-made software.)
- CRConrad 3y ago> (Oh how I hate Apple-made software.) The oh-so-"intuitive" iOS, with all it's fucking impossible-to-remember swiping gestures this way and that. Aaaargh! Unfortunately Android has been going the same way for the last half a decade or so. :-( (And Sailfish -- or whatever it's called nowadays -- looked like a contender at first, but then it swiftly marched into the swipey bog.)
- trm42 3y agoFor Symbian phones Nokia was designing different icons for every phone model. When times started to go bad for them, they introduced common icons for new models and hailed that as a big design innovation.