6 ms·

Nokia Design Archive

172 points by microflash 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Cumpiler69 2y ago
Guys, what are we doing here? To me it's a very confusing website, that's also a stuttery mess(Chrome, Win10, Ryzen 4000 6 core). I would much prefer the web page styles of the 90's with just hyperlinks and pictures instead of these fancy orbital sci-fi neural net styles so that some fron-end designers can flex their skills. It looks cool but the UX is bad. Is this the future of European tech? Online museums to show digital tourists our glorious long gone tech past similar to our IRL museums? The irony is not lost on me.
- doikor 2y ago
  They were being thrown away/deleted so some researches from the university decided to save them. I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    >I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully. Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
    - doikor 2y ago
      These are not pulled from some random website. These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia (well Microsoft Mobile Oy these days) https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html > The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies. You can look at the uncurated collection at aalto university repo https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... (not sure if all of the materials digitized/online though)
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        > These are not pulled from some random website. Did anyone say they were? In this particular thread? > These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia Yes yes, that seems quite plausible. But why are you arguing that in response to a complaint about the site's sucky usability? It has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
    - troupo 2y ago
      How exactly would wayback machine allow you to have a collection of related items and their connection to each other? How do you go from e.g. Vision 99 (if you manage to find it in Wayback machine) to all related entires? https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027 https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027
      - beAbU 2y ago
        By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language, that was sent to your terminal using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is all 1960s era concepts. Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
        troupo 2y ago
        > By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need > Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content. And does wayback machine have this "any wiki"? Meanwhile the site in question is literally the wiki with hyperlinks you're talking about
        CRConrad 2y ago
        > Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need You just click on the blue underlined text; it's called a "hyperlink". Revolutionary new concept, I know. It's not as if that confusing flash-like Captain Web Designer interface works without you clicking on stuff, now is it?
- nabla9 2y ago
  Here: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-aaca-dd4b013203f7 https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-a... This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    Thanks
- emsixteen 2y ago
  I feel genuinely stupid trying to use a website like this.
- vincnetas 2y ago
  Here you go the 90's style web page with folder structure : https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
rob74 2y ago
Hm, for a site specialized in Nokia phones, it sure has a lot of "unknown models". I assume those are design mockups or prototypes of phones that didn't make it to mass production? At least this N-Gage lookalike https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a522-8f386c214cf2/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a5... clearly has a dummy screen...
- troupo 2y ago
  It's an internal Nokia design archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 So there are a lot of internal designs and prototypes
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I visited a lunch spot popular with Nokia R&D employees. It was extremely common for people to have a prototype phone in a fabric bag at the lunch table, so you couldn't see what they were putting to the test of daily use. Lots of very funky phones were glimpsed, only few of them later became commercial products with definite model numbers.
bni 2y ago
What a mess of a webpage. Probably there is interesting content there but the presentation made me close it down immediatley.
- reddalo 2y ago
  Yeah, I don't understand what's going on. I was curious, but that mess of a webpage made me close it right away.
- sampo 2y ago
  I think this is a traditional interface to the same archive: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
nabla9 2y ago
Can anyone find the Nokia touch screen prototype that came 7 years before iPhone around 2000 but was rejected by management.
- throwaway03562 2y ago
  Found a sketch here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history_buffs_nokias_first_touch_screen_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history...
- pavlov 2y ago
  This is probably the one you mean, the oval-shaped "3G concept" touchscreen device from 1999-2000: https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001 https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001 You can hover over the "related entries" links to view the images.
  - nabla9 2y ago
    That's not it. Those had roll wheels or something and no touch screens. I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      This archive is all about the R&D prototypes. Unfortunately the website makes it impossible to find anything.
      - nabla9 2y ago
        No it's not. It's a design archive. It includes design concepts, some involving prototypes, but only in relation to design. Industrial design and engineering R&D are different things.
- Cloudef 2y ago
pavlov 2y ago
What a mess. The graph nodes slowly crawl around, as if to ensure that when you click you won't hit the thing you meant. Feels like something built in Flash during Nokia's heady days. (Unintentional irony? Nokia was known as a company with lots of Flash concepts and little software product execution.) But the content seems really interesting. These are internal prototypes and documents from Nokia's archive, now released for the first time. I wish there was a way to browse them in chronological order without all this janky graph visualization nonsense. There's a link in the corner that takes you to the actual archive repository: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... This seems like it might be a less brain-melting way to browse the content.
- neom 2y ago
  I don't suppose you managed to grab it before we hugged it? I guess it will recover and I'll check back, but if you happened to have grabbed it locally I'd love to dig through it today :) (je @ h4x.club if you're able - thank you!:)
- sizzle 2y ago
  I agree the usability is a nightmare
moondowner 2y ago
No mention of my fav Nokia of all time, the N9; also no mention of MeeGo and Maemo
- usagisushi 2y ago
  I came across something interesting titled "Apple iPhone was launched, presentation (2007-12-31)"[0]. It mentions Nokia N800 and implicitly implies a lineage of devices (N770 > N800 > N810 > N900 > N9). Sometimes I wonder what Nokia might have been like in a timeline without Jobs and Ballmer. > Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena [0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
  - agawish 2y ago
    It looked like Nokia felt shaken by the iPhone and had the right mindset at the time, but their actions didn't match what was presented, the world would have been different indeed if Nokia had stepped up their game in this time.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    I had the N770, the N800 and also the N900. It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm. They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      N800 and other Open Source Software Operations' devices were not allowed to have cellular connection because of Nokia internal politics. N9 development was also hindred by the Maemo->MeeGo and the GTK->Qt transitions. And it was killed in its infancy in the Microsoft takeover. There's no denying that Nokia screwed up but it was mostly because of stupid politics, not technology.
simultsop 2y ago
I wonder if the software empowering this data is an open source project?
- ddxxdd 2y ago
  I just want to know how it was made. It looks like the entire presentation is encapsulated inside of a "canvas" tag.
  - simultsop 2y ago
    Also looks like, Nokia worked on this archive intensively starting 2023. Seems like a whole retrospective project. Amazingly inspiring.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
neuroelectron 2y ago
"low power" has zero hits. I guess low power is implied.
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  This archive more about the aesthetics design, not technical stuffs.
ianbooker 2y ago
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad2e-4e6442a88cd8/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad... Is this a Nokia Watch or rather a Nokia Cuff?
- yencabulator 2y ago
  They had both! This one looks like a tamer variant of their cuff design. The cuff that got more attention was called Morph.
__jonas 2y ago
There is some really interesting media in there, I'm not a huge fan of how it's surfaced with this network visualization tbh - the small viewport version you get on mobile or when shrinking the window down is actually nicer imo, you can just flip through the individual entries
GrumpyNl 2y ago
The interface is a mess, but the data is phenomenal.
bemmu 2y ago
"My First Nokia" designs were funny in this presentation: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_47c69f41-6009-4520-9e4f-cfd6f9155585/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_47c69f41-6009-4520-9e...
- imp0cat 2y ago
  This means also, that the expected lifetime of a phone is more than 20 years. It must be updateable and durable. Impressive! More companies should think like that.
  - morsch 2y ago
    This is in relation to a concept of phone "body" combined with a replacable faceplate which would expose different functionality (additional buttons, slide-out keyboard). One year later they introduced "Xpress-on" covers, which seem to boil down to having different colors. A bit more mundane.
robertlagrant 2y ago
The UI for this does seem a bit "Baby's first force-directed graph". It's quite hard to use for navigation - if it sprang to life on load but then stayed static (other than hover highlighting) I think that would be much better.
secondcoming 2y ago
RIP back button
v-yadli 2y ago
Anyone remember the Morph concept? https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0fd-e3609d404b03/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs Blew me away back then, but forgot the name. This archive helped to recover the bits in my head. Thank you!
darngood 2y ago
[dead]
maxglute 2y ago
Needs an imgur with 800 photos.
pkphilip 2y ago
I really wish the old Nokia was still around but without the cruft of their internal politics. Something that Nokia was slow to get is also the appeal of the App Store / Play Store as a way of downloading apps easily which was always a problem in the older mobile operating systems.
nalinidash 2y ago
Has anyone tried putting all of it into archive.org?

172 points by microflash 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Guys, what are we doing here? To me it's a very confusing website, that's also a stuttery mess(Chrome, Win10, Ryzen 4000 6 core). I would much prefer the web page styles of the 90's with just hyperlinks and pictures instead of these fancy orbital sci-fi neural net styles so that some fron-end designers can flex their skills. It looks cool but the UX is bad. Is this the future of European tech? Online museums to show digital tourists our glorious long gone tech past similar to our IRL museums? The irony is not lost on me.

doikor 2y ago
They were being thrown away/deleted so some researches from the university decided to save them. I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully. Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
  - doikor 2y ago
    These are not pulled from some random website. These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia (well Microsoft Mobile Oy these days) https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html > The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies. You can look at the uncurated collection at aalto university repo https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... (not sure if all of the materials digitized/online though)
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > These are not pulled from some random website. Did anyone say they were? In this particular thread? > These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia Yes yes, that seems quite plausible. But why are you arguing that in response to a complaint about the site's sucky usability? It has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
  - troupo 2y ago
    How exactly would wayback machine allow you to have a collection of related items and their connection to each other? How do you go from e.g. Vision 99 (if you manage to find it in Wayback machine) to all related entires? https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027 https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027
    - beAbU 2y ago
      By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language, that was sent to your terminal using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is all 1960s era concepts. Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
      - troupo 2y ago
        > By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need > Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content. And does wayback machine have this "any wiki"? Meanwhile the site in question is literally the wiki with hyperlinks you're talking about
        CRConrad 2y ago
        > Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need You just click on the blue underlined text; it's called a "hyperlink". Revolutionary new concept, I know. It's not as if that confusing flash-like Captain Web Designer interface works without you clicking on stuff, now is it?
nabla9 2y ago
Here: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-aaca-dd4b013203f7 https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-a... This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  Thanks
emsixteen 2y ago
I feel genuinely stupid trying to use a website like this.
vincnetas 2y ago
Here you go the 90's style web page with folder structure : https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...

rob74 2y ago

Hm, for a site specialized in Nokia phones, it sure has a lot of "unknown models". I assume those are design mockups or prototypes of phones that didn't make it to mass production? At least this N-Gage lookalike https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a522-8f386c214cf2/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a5... clearly has a dummy screen...

troupo 2y ago
It's an internal Nokia design archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 So there are a lot of internal designs and prototypes
yencabulator 2y ago
I visited a lunch spot popular with Nokia R&D employees. It was extremely common for people to have a prototype phone in a fabric bag at the lunch table, so you couldn't see what they were putting to the test of daily use. Lots of very funky phones were glimpsed, only few of them later became commercial products with definite model numbers.

bni 2y ago

What a mess of a webpage. Probably there is interesting content there but the presentation made me close it down immediatley.

reddalo 2y ago
Yeah, I don't understand what's going on. I was curious, but that mess of a webpage made me close it right away.
sampo 2y ago
I think this is a traditional interface to the same archive: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...

nabla9 2y ago

Can anyone find the Nokia touch screen prototype that came 7 years before iPhone around 2000 but was rejected by management.

throwaway03562 2y ago
Found a sketch here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history_buffs_nokias_first_touch_screen_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history...
pavlov 2y ago
This is probably the one you mean, the oval-shaped "3G concept" touchscreen device from 1999-2000: https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001 https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001 You can hover over the "related entries" links to view the images.
- nabla9 2y ago
  That's not it. Those had roll wheels or something and no touch screens. I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    This archive is all about the R&D prototypes. Unfortunately the website makes it impossible to find anything.
    - nabla9 2y ago
      No it's not. It's a design archive. It includes design concepts, some involving prototypes, but only in relation to design. Industrial design and engineering R&D are different things.
Cloudef 2y ago

pavlov 2y ago

What a mess. The graph nodes slowly crawl around, as if to ensure that when you click you won't hit the thing you meant. Feels like something built in Flash during Nokia's heady days. (Unintentional irony? Nokia was known as a company with lots of Flash concepts and little software product execution.) But the content seems really interesting. These are internal prototypes and documents from Nokia's archive, now released for the first time. I wish there was a way to browse them in chronological order without all this janky graph visualization nonsense. There's a link in the corner that takes you to the actual archive repository: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8e87-611f84c3fc4c https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... This seems like it might be a less brain-melting way to browse the content.

neom 2y ago
I don't suppose you managed to grab it before we hugged it? I guess it will recover and I'll check back, but if you happened to have grabbed it locally I'd love to dig through it today :) (je @ h4x.club if you're able - thank you!:)
sizzle 2y ago
I agree the usability is a nightmare

moondowner 2y ago

No mention of my fav Nokia of all time, the N9; also no mention of MeeGo and Maemo

usagisushi 2y ago
I came across something interesting titled "Apple iPhone was launched, presentation (2007-12-31)"[0]. It mentions Nokia N800 and implicitly implies a lineage of devices (N770 > N800 > N810 > N900 > N9). Sometimes I wonder what Nokia might have been like in a timeline without Jobs and Ballmer. > Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena [0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
- agawish 2y ago
  It looked like Nokia felt shaken by the iPhone and had the right mindset at the time, but their actions didn't match what was presented, the world would have been different indeed if Nokia had stepped up their game in this time.
- pavlov 2y ago
  I had the N770, the N800 and also the N900. It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm. They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    N800 and other Open Source Software Operations' devices were not allowed to have cellular connection because of Nokia internal politics. N9 development was also hindred by the Maemo->MeeGo and the GTK->Qt transitions. And it was killed in its infancy in the Microsoft takeover. There's no denying that Nokia screwed up but it was mostly because of stupid politics, not technology.

simultsop 2y ago

I wonder if the software empowering this data is an open source project?

ddxxdd 2y ago
I just want to know how it was made. It looks like the entire presentation is encapsulated inside of a "canvas" tag.
- simultsop 2y ago
  Also looks like, Nokia worked on this archive intensively starting 2023. Seems like a whole retrospective project. Amazingly inspiring.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

neuroelectron 2y ago

"low power" has zero hits. I guess low power is implied.

j16sdiz 2y ago
This archive more about the aesthetics design, not technical stuffs.

ianbooker 2y ago

https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad2e-4e6442a88cd8/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad... Is this a Nokia Watch or rather a Nokia Cuff?

yencabulator 2y ago
They had both! This one looks like a tamer variant of their cuff design. The cuff that got more attention was called Morph.

__jonas 2y ago

There is some really interesting media in there, I'm not a huge fan of how it's surfaced with this network visualization tbh - the small viewport version you get on mobile or when shrinking the window down is actually nicer imo, you can just flip through the individual entries

GrumpyNl 2y ago

The interface is a mess, but the data is phenomenal.

bemmu 2y ago

"My First Nokia" designs were funny in this presentation: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_47c69f41-6009-4520-9e4f-cfd6f9155585/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_47c69f41-6009-4520-9e...

imp0cat 2y ago
This means also, that the expected lifetime of a phone is more than 20 years. It must be updateable and durable. Impressive! More companies should think like that.
- morsch 2y ago
  This is in relation to a concept of phone "body" combined with a replacable faceplate which would expose different functionality (additional buttons, slide-out keyboard). One year later they introduced "Xpress-on" covers, which seem to boil down to having different colors. A bit more mundane.

robertlagrant 2y ago

The UI for this does seem a bit "Baby's first force-directed graph". It's quite hard to use for navigation - if it sprang to life on load but then stayed static (other than hover highlighting) I think that would be much better.

secondcoming 2y ago

RIP back button

v-yadli 2y ago

Anyone remember the Morph concept? https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0fd-e3609d404b03/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs Blew me away back then, but forgot the name. This archive helped to recover the bits in my head. Thank you!

darngood 2y ago

[dead]

maxglute 2y ago

Needs an imgur with 800 photos.

pkphilip 2y ago

I really wish the old Nokia was still around but without the cruft of their internal politics. Something that Nokia was slow to get is also the appeal of the App Store / Play Store as a way of downloading apps easily which was always a problem in the older mobile operating systems.

nalinidash 2y ago

Has anyone tried putting all of it into archive.org?