6 ms·

I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimate

by anonu 2y ago

I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Blackberry took that approach. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberry-iphone-book/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberr... > Instead they comforted themselves with reminders that the iPhone's keyboard was difficult to use and the battery life, terrible. BlackBerry was leading the pack, after all.
- mixdup 2y ago
  I would kill to see the presentation from RIM This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
  - nickpeterson 2y ago
    I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
    - Ensorceled 2y ago
      I know people who were at RIM at the time, including someone who was in the room when they passed around the first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and, more importantly, because they were so confident Apple would not be able to pull off the networking required and people wouldn't be able to use the device at all.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        People forget just how powerful RIM was in the business world, and the keyboard WAS a real stickler (even today, you can go to any large conference and ask "who here misses the blackberry keyboard" and you'll get a decent show of hands). It was a real issue and a real opportunity - I remember for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry keyboard" - but during those years more and more people started carrying two phones, an iPhone for home and a blackberry for work. That was the beginning of the end.
        kergonath 2y ago
        > I remember for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry keyboard" Part of the problem is that there were not enough of them to sustain a company the size of RIM. The vast majority of the market did not care and instead valued the other side of the tradeoff, the things you can do with a touch screen but not with a physical keyboard.
    - scrlk 2y ago
      Losing the Signal: How BlackBerry’s bid to one-up the iPhone failed: https://archive.ph/IgW6s https://archive.ph/IgW6s > In the summer of 2007, however, Lazaridis cracked open a phone that gave him pause. “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,” he marvelled after peering inside one of the new iPhones. > Lazaridis shared the revelation with his handset engineers, who had been pushing to expand BlackBerry’s Internet reach for years. Before, Lazaridis had waved them off. Carriers wouldn’t allow RIM to include more than a simple browser because it would crash their networks. After his iPhone autopsy, however, he realized the smartphone race was in danger of shifting. If consumers and carriers continued to embrace the iPhone, BlackBerry would need more than its efficient e-mail and battery to lead the market. “If this thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he said. The new battleground was mobile computing. Lazaridis figured RIM’s core corporate market was safe because the iPhone couldn’t match BlackBerry’s reliable keyboard and in-house network delivery of secure e-mails. But in the consumer market, where the Pearl phone was competing, RIM needed a full Web browser. BlackBerry was a sensation because it put e-mail in people’s pockets. Now, iPhone was offering the full Internet. If BlackBerry was to prevail, he told RIM’s engineers, “We have to fix everything that’s wrong with the iPhone.”
      - kergonath 2y ago
        Mike Lazaridis is may have his blind spots, but he is a great engineer by all accounts.
        panick21_ 2y ago
        Right guy for the right time, but no longer the right guy later on.
sybercecurity 2y ago
Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small. I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small. I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea. In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.
darthrupert 2y ago
Some part understood, and those people started the Maemo project. It got a tiny fraction of the available resources.
venusenvy47 2y ago
The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company before the year was out. https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.motorola.com/author/padmasree-warrior/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...
- sho_hn 2y ago
  Not that it hurt her career in any way, looking at her Wikipedia article. Failing upwards is a thing.
- sgerenser 2y ago
  This section: “There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry” has to rival “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” In the early impressions that didn’t age well category.
AlanYx 2y ago
>they understand what they were facing Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing. For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.
- agos 2y ago
  the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset
- ylee 2y ago
  > For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with). The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive. The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.

by anonu 2y ago

ceejayoz 2y ago

Blackberry took that approach. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberry-iphone-book/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberr... > Instead they comforted themselves with reminders that the iPhone's keyboard was difficult to use and the battery life, terrible. BlackBerry was leading the pack, after all.

mixdup 2y ago
I would kill to see the presentation from RIM This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
- nickpeterson 2y ago
  I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
  - Ensorceled 2y ago
    I know people who were at RIM at the time, including someone who was in the room when they passed around the first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and, more importantly, because they were so confident Apple would not be able to pull off the networking required and people wouldn't be able to use the device at all.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      People forget just how powerful RIM was in the business world, and the keyboard WAS a real stickler (even today, you can go to any large conference and ask "who here misses the blackberry keyboard" and you'll get a decent show of hands). It was a real issue and a real opportunity - I remember for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry keyboard" - but during those years more and more people started carrying two phones, an iPhone for home and a blackberry for work. That was the beginning of the end.
      - kergonath 2y ago
        > I remember for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry keyboard" Part of the problem is that there were not enough of them to sustain a company the size of RIM. The vast majority of the market did not care and instead valued the other side of the tradeoff, the things you can do with a touch screen but not with a physical keyboard.
  - scrlk 2y ago
    Losing the Signal: How BlackBerry’s bid to one-up the iPhone failed: https://archive.ph/IgW6s https://archive.ph/IgW6s > In the summer of 2007, however, Lazaridis cracked open a phone that gave him pause. “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,” he marvelled after peering inside one of the new iPhones. > Lazaridis shared the revelation with his handset engineers, who had been pushing to expand BlackBerry’s Internet reach for years. Before, Lazaridis had waved them off. Carriers wouldn’t allow RIM to include more than a simple browser because it would crash their networks. After his iPhone autopsy, however, he realized the smartphone race was in danger of shifting. If consumers and carriers continued to embrace the iPhone, BlackBerry would need more than its efficient e-mail and battery to lead the market. “If this thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he said. The new battleground was mobile computing. Lazaridis figured RIM’s core corporate market was safe because the iPhone couldn’t match BlackBerry’s reliable keyboard and in-house network delivery of secure e-mails. But in the consumer market, where the Pearl phone was competing, RIM needed a full Web browser. BlackBerry was a sensation because it put e-mail in people’s pockets. Now, iPhone was offering the full Internet. If BlackBerry was to prevail, he told RIM’s engineers, “We have to fix everything that’s wrong with the iPhone.”
    - kergonath 2y ago
      Mike Lazaridis is may have his blind spots, but he is a great engineer by all accounts.
      - panick21_ 2y ago
        Right guy for the right time, but no longer the right guy later on.

sybercecurity 2y ago

Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small. I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.

cesarb 2y ago
> and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small. I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.
Sharlin 2y ago
The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea. In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.

darthrupert 2y ago

Some part understood, and those people started the Maemo project. It got a tiny fraction of the available resources.

venusenvy47 2y ago

The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company before the year was out. https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.motorola.com/author/padmasree-warrior/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...

sho_hn 2y ago
Not that it hurt her career in any way, looking at her Wikipedia article. Failing upwards is a thing.
sgerenser 2y ago
This section: “There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry” has to rival “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” In the early impressions that didn’t age well category.

AlanYx 2y ago

>they understand what they were facing Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing. For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.

agos 2y ago
the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset
ylee 2y ago
> For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
alkonaut 2y ago
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with). The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive. The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.