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> 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

• 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 ago
    Urban Asphalt on my Sony K300i was something else, Siemens MC60 was something else too
  • monknomo 3y ago
    snake was fine
    • plussed_reader 3y ago
      Snake predates Nokia mobile phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)
      • Eduard 3y ago
        Pong predates Snake. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong
      • monknomo 3y ago
        We are talking about apps and games on nokia phones; of those apps and games, snake was fine. Point to where I said snake was novel, or nokia invented snake
        • plussed_reader 3y ago
          Right, and MS didn't invent solitaire but it is a beloved app on win95. If you're selling the OS on built-in ports of older games I think you're reaching.
  • AniseAbyss 3y ago
    [dead]
  • asveikau 3y ago
    I think this reads like a comment from a market where S60 wasn't popular. They had a capable app platform and it wasn't java or wap, but not really in North America. (That's part of the problem... They segmented their potential customers too much. They could have pushed smartphones in North America at the same time as in Europe. At the time I heard they didn't because it would piss off carriers.)
  • strken 3y ago
    Late J2ME apps were quite good. I remember having Opera Mini (which was a surprisingly good browser), Google Maps, an ebook reader, a GBA emulator, and even a video player which could play down-converted video at reasonable framerates. This wasn't Nokia, but I believe the experience on their phones was about the same.
• magnuspaaske 3y ago
  It might have helped that the Nordics were pretty advanced with developing mobile networks and mobile network technology. There was also SonyEricson in the region and it kind of makes sense that companies making network technology would also make handsets in the early innings and only later would people realise those are actually two different skillsets and market and need different companies.
  • Lio 3y ago
    You mean Ericsson. It only became SonyEricsson after the Ericsson management fucked up handling a fire at their supplier Philips. The story I heard was that Ericsson had a culture of not handing bad news up the management change unless it was a real problem. Senior management didn't want to be bothered by small details. By the time they realised it was a massive problem it was too late to buy on the open market and they were forced to spin out the mobile business into a join venture with Sony. I don't think that was down to "differences in skillsets". It was generic short sighted management that killed Ericsson's handset business and it could just as easily have killed the network infrastructure side of the company if the problem had it happened there first. If management don't won't accept hearing bad news from their subordinates they won't be told it. Yes-Men kill you in the long run.
• Analemma_ 3y ago
  > Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. I think you're suffering from a kind of observation bias specific to forums like HN, which have a disproportionate number of people with a chip on their shoulder about defunct tech products and companies. The people who liked Nokia's UI are loud and visible about it, especially when it lets them gripe about Microsoft/Apple/whatever, while the people who didn't like it don't feel the need to talk about it.
  • laurencerowe 3y ago
    As I remember it, it was the classic Nokia UI that was loved in comparison to the plethora of awkward intermediate UIs that were attempted by Nokia and others until iPhone/Android emerged. It really did feel like phones were getting worse for a few years for negligible benefits.
  • robocat 3y ago
    You're hallucinating a narrative about me based on your stereotypes. I think we all can identify people with Stockholm syndrome love, arising from their past technology abusers. You could be generically correct. However I never bought a Nokia and I haven't used one much. I am not a Nokia apologist. I lived through the period, and I'm commenting on what I saw at the time. Sometimes there are fans of a product or brand for good reasons. Perhaps one of Nokia's major skills was familiarity between their models - especially for keeping the same menu structure and keyboard shortcuts. Familiarity is a powerful force. Oh, and they reliably worked - a definite plus! I did own mobiles from other manufacturers and I have the scars from dealing with their (edit) painful UIs (Sony, Kyocera*, Motorola, Dell). A keypad and small screen (or worse a one-line numeric display) create some difficult constraints. Cordless and Voip phones proudly continued the tradition of crappy handset UIs well into the age of iPhone. * I loved my Kyocera Palm Pilot phone - there was even a LISP App that you could program a simple UI in -magic! Although my first love was an Atari Portfolio DOS handheld (not a phone): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio
    • nikau 3y ago
      The Nokia n95 was way more advanced than the original iPhone except for the screen. It's just that consumers wanted the big screen over everything else. N95 photos still look decent even by today's standards, the original iPhone was a potato in comparison.
• treflop 3y ago
  You’re both right. Nokia nailed it. But then someone else invented the steam engine. Hard to go back to horses.
• neuralRiot 3y ago
  We are seeing the history backwards, from present day ro past but remember that cellphones were phones with other computing purposes added, not personal computers with phone capabilities as they are today.
• zokier 3y ago
  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.
  • seba_dos1 3y ago
    S30 came years after S40 and only targeted low-end. S40 was a rather well-received UI, but neither it nor S30 were ever used on smartphones. The only UI used with Symbian from what you mentioned was S60 and yes, it didn't have a reputation of being particularly clean. That said, S40 was being used on feature phones for more than a decade (from Nokia 7110 in 1999 up to Nokia 515 from 2013), so it spanned across multiple UI generations and while it was very successful initially, at the end of its lifespan it didn't do particularly well when put on models with big touchscreens.
  • marttt 3y ago
    I'm a weirdo who has intentionally never owned a smartphone, so "using up" old dumb phones found in our family has been a fun hobby for roughly two decades. Longest streak was using a 3310 for 12-or-so years, starting when I went to gymnasium and letting it go in late 20s when I was about to become a father. Man, that was one hell of a phone (also serving as a beer bottle opener, etc for many students back in the day). Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading. But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also. Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it. That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet. Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic 2: https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg
• hodgesrm 3y ago
  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 but enraged weasel. It was hard not to feel affection for it. Edit: typo
  • mangamadaiyan 3y ago
    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.
    • krisoft 3y ago
      In comparision a current iphone 15 is IP68 rated. If you would have the same hike with one of those you could expect to be able to call an uber at the end of the day. I think that is quite neat progress. Basically the definition of indestructible shifted. Back then it was obvious the phone won’t work after such an immersion. And indestructible meant that with proper care it could be restored to working condition. Today it is more of an exception when a phone dies under the same treatment.
      • mangamadaiyan 3y ago
        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.
        • pmontra 3y ago
• notatoad 3y ago
  some portion of nokia definitely did care about technology, form factors, usability, and all the other things that made phones a tech product. their continual wild experiments prove that. but they also had their normal phones with broad appeal, and could make a good business out of mood-board variants of them. if they didn't make a business out of selling the 3310 in the current season's fashionable colours, they'd have been doing something wrong.
• selcuka 3y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7110
  • bloopernova 3y ago
    I would really like something like that navi-roller below my spacebars on my keyboard, to use as a way to select from drop-downs and push to enter. Unfortunately keyboard navigation of graphical elements is really lacking these days.
    • mjcohen 3y ago
      A google search for "keyboard with roller" brings up a lot of options.
      • bloopernova 3y ago
        I didn't phrase it very well, sorry about that. I meant that display managers, UI toolkits, and browsers don't support the keyboard as much as I'd like.
        • CRConrad 3y ago
          But still, adding a mouse-contraption below your keyboard could make it feel like you're using the keyboard to run it while your computer recieves your input as mouse signals, so you'll both be happy. (Some brand names to search for are Rollermouse, Mousetrapper, Optapad, andErgoslider.)
    • int_19h 3y ago
      Some Symbian PDAs had a similar scroll wheel on the side, similar to the volume rocker, but more versatile.
  • sundvor 3y ago