8 ms·

Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

185 points by jruohonen 3mo ago

rbanffy 3mo ago
I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.
- afavour 3mo ago
  I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them. Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.
  - TFNA 3mo ago
    Today the vast majority of people I know rarely use the browser on their phones. They interact with the internet through apps from various walled gardens, and even for news on the open web they are likely to install someone's app. Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown computer OSs, but the general public doesn't want a full-blown OS, they want a bunch of icons to corporate apps.
    - afavour 3mo ago
      > Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.
      - rbanffy 3mo ago
        Their Windows CE developer mindshare didn’t make the translation to post iPhone software. There was so little in common between the two worlds one would need to start from scratch.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - qwytw 3mo ago
    > Arguably they should have just gone with Android, It's not obvious Nokia could have realistically competed with the East Asian phone manufacturers for more than a few years. It was/is a very low margin market with very cutthroat competition.
  - VulgarExigency 3mo ago
    As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.
    - afavour 3mo ago
      I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.
      - seba_dos1 3mo ago
        Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.
        afavour 3mo ago
        I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing. Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.
        seba_dos1 3mo ago
        They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies. Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.
- merelydev 3mo ago
  I don't think that's their biggest mistake. Their downfall was because they where mainly a hardware company without any network effects. Customers could easily switch from Nokia to any other hardware without an issue.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
  No, their biggest mistake was having no clue what they were doing or, why. Nokia were a tech slop factory - one new model roughly every two weeks, with no obvious strategy or rationale, many only superficially different. Every so often they'd produce a classic that was ahead of its time, like the Communicator series, then by the time the surrounding infra had caught up they'd moved on and allowed a competitor to eat that space. iPhone and Android were both killing them, and they had no idea how to respond. Elop was the undertaker, and much hated for reasonable reasons. But the brand was already a zombie by that point.
- toast0 3mo ago
  I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobile 10 had continued that trend and delivered on the promise of all WP8 phones being upgradable to WM10, things would be different now. Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere. Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P
  - anonymars 3mo ago
    Not only that, but developing for Windows Phone 8 required using Windows 8 (which was a flop) That being said I don't know that there was a path to success. I don't think it was as much about the little apps as the big ones: Instagram, YouTube, Pokemon Go... Google in particular got to play the role of anti-competitive
    - toast0 3mo ago
      Word on the street was Google didn't want to bother with WP because they worked so hard on WinCE apps and all of that was thrown away. Probably not the whole reason, but they did make an exchange connector available for gmail on wp, so it's not like they didn't support the platform at all.. YouTube in the browser would have been fine if the browser wasn't terrible. I definitely felt the lack of Pokemon Go ... but given it released in mid 2016, it's pretty clear why it didn't show up on Windows Phone / Windows Mobile... the writing was already on the wall by then and Windows development would have likely trailed anyway. WP8.1 came out in April 2014; it was an improvement, but you really wanted a follow up release. WM10 came out November 2015 and wasn't very good unless you had the flagship phones, which nobody would buy; I did end up running one of the last builds of WM10 and it actually got pretty good (other than Edge still had terrible UX)... too bad it happened so late. Windows Phone's strength was at the bottom of the market --- cheap phones that were usable, but cheap phones didn't run WM10 well, so the huge global market of people who wanted a smart phone but only had $100 to spend was left for Android. If you look at sales numbers [1], things were going ok until about q3 2015. A dip in Q3 is kind of expected, because WM10 was coming soon, so people are likely to wait ... but then WM10 is crap and people buy an Android or iPhone and there you go. [1] https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-sold-q2-2016/ https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-...
RiverCrochet 3mo ago
From the article: "Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget. But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones." We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3mo ago
  Not far. Not even MS had the clout to impose a third alternative in phones, and it was needed. And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.
- hedgehog 3mo ago
  It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity. Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.
  - storus 3mo ago
    Windows Phone aesthetics was repulsive to most people at that time; we finally got TrueColor 4k screens and all MS could do was to use 10 colors everywhere and start the flat fad that destroyed UX on most systems. What a waste.
    - 3mo ago
let_rec 3mo ago
Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?
- fineIllregister 3mo ago
  It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.
  - garaetjjte 3mo ago
    Windows Phone 7 was artificially limited crap, any amount of head start wouldn't help it.
  - toast0 3mo ago
    Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited. I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore. [1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-2011-pdf_0.pdf https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8) [2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sales-per-year-2007-2027/ https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...
    - let_rec 3mo ago
      > Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited. WhatsApp was on Windows Phone though. Instagram was not on Windows Phone, which hurt it, but there is no indication it would have come to MeeGo either.
ohm 3mo ago
There is a Korean manhwa/manga called Real Man or A Man's Man. It’s about a guy who worked in the mobile phone company. He goes back in time and starts developing software and hardware phone designs before the companies who originally made them do.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
  I feel like theres so much manga that this is the kind of premise you're left with if you don't want to copy someone else
rjrjrjrj 3mo ago
My recollection of the mid-2000s is that Nokia simply had no idea how to be a platform provider. They had 2 or 3 main operating systems, but within each of those there were numerous different versions. Most handsets didn't get updated, so you had to download a zillion different SDKs just to do basic testing. And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.
- pornel 3mo ago
  I don't remember the details of Symbian any more, other than it was some ancient fork of C++ and clunky cooperative multitasking.
dataAI 3mo ago
Those were the days. Former Nokia (N9 Meego) employees formed Jolla and it is still alive. They nowadays sell tens of thousands of Linux phones, so not taking over the phone market.
arjie 3mo ago
They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggregate the organization had a fragmentation of SDKs, no single device domination, and didn't really value the other participants on their ecosystem. Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself. That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.
- storus 3mo ago
  Capacitive screens were out of possibility for them as Apple bought 2 year production in advance, a trick Tim deployed repeatedly in many areas. MeeGo had a chance but US funds didn't want to allow a state where an EU company would rule the fastest growing market of that time and their darling MS slips into irrelevance and its trojan horse killed it off quickly.
- leonidasrup 3mo ago
  Nokia development was limited by its relation with telecom industry (telecoms could limits what Nokias could do, software feautures. The telecoms wanted to profit from software running on Nokias, telecoms didn't wanted to be just dumb Internet providers. Telecoms wanted to be digital service providers - AOLs). In contrast Apple with iPhone had much stronger position: "Cingular gave Apple the freedom to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house, a rare practice at the time, and paid Apple a fraction of its monthly service revenue (until the iPhone 3G), in exchange for four years of exclusive U.S. sales, until 2011." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
  - pjc50 3mo ago
    We complain (rightly) about the Apple monopoly, but have forgotten that the carriers were a much more annoying monopoly, with even worse policies for trying to charge for things that they'd specifically prevented you from doing. I think the last remaining example of that is charging for using your phone as a WiFi hotspot.
mempko 3mo ago
I was working for a Nokia subsidiary called HERE maps at the time this was happening. All I can say is MeeGo was a great OS and would have competed really well with iOS. They released one phone with it called the N9 in some smaller countries and then discontinued that year in favor of Windows. The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.
gmuslera 3mo ago
The predecessor of the N9, the Nokia N900, with Maemo, is not even mentioned in the article, and it caused a buzz at least in the circles I were back then. And it had one of the best physical keyboards for a smartphone back then. The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS. There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.
- PopePompus 3mo ago
  Don't forget the N950! It was an aluminum body successor to the N900, with a glorious slide-out keyboard. Built like a tank. They were never released for sale to the public, perhaps because Nokia's leadership had already decided to kill its line of Linux phones. But I've got one.
Diogenesian 3mo ago
The picture of the guy with his handdrawn "dream phone" is quite charming. Sort of a Homerphone, but it is drawn well. https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-holds-up-a-document-with-a-detailed-hand-drawn-nokia-phone-sketch.jpg?id=67118834&quality=100 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-hol... "Sir, please, a QWERTY keyboard would be so much -" "No." Homerphone reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI
sangeeth96 3mo ago
They (WP and Lumia) would've been a strong 3rd player if the right investments and care were given since MS acquisition but alas, I think I should've noticed the writing on the wall for all of MS' consumer business (Xbox, being the latest!) from the moment Satya stepped in and Nokia got cut off. Satya was great for businesses and MS' investors, terrible for consumers.
- throwa356262 3mo ago
  I would love to switch back to WP. I would love it even more if we could all go back in time and switch to meego. I used one for a short while and it felt well thought compared to the mess that was android at that time.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  At that time everyone I knew who had a Lumia/WP absolutely loved it. I don't know how but Microsoft totally fumbled that.
B1FF_PSUVM 3mo ago
> In September 2008, the first Android phone went on sale—the HTC Dream, Excursion: HTC would later sell the HTC HD2 with WindowsMobile (a predecessor of WindowsPhone), which could be "dual-booted" with Android ROMs from the XDA-developers forum or similar. The 2009 HTC HD2 was basically the modern glass slab, except for a discrete bottom line of physical buttons, which hadn't yet been eaten by software at the time.
jmartrican 3mo ago
IMHO they should cosnider re-releasing the 3310. It might sell similar to vinyl. Maybe update the games section to have some more games.
- mghackerlady 3mo ago
  They have, multiple times. Granted, it isn't the original 3310. They've always been modernised in some way, and I suspect creating the original wouldn't be very feasible today
  - jmartrican 3mo ago
    Oh yeah, i should have guessed. Thanks for pointing it out.
- jagaerglad 3mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310_(2017) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310_(2017)
ptx 3mo ago
> Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. [...] But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. This seems a little misleading. From what I remember, and from what Wikipedia says, Elop had already announced the deal with Microsoft long before announcing the N9, so Nokia was in essence already dead when it launched.
ksec 3mo ago
And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market. Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late. Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it. But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise. Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?
- presbyterian 3mo ago
  > There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.
  - ksec 3mo ago
    The platform owner themselves. Obviously it wouldn't be an idea for startup. But OpenAI, Meta, or Tesla could have enough leverage to do so. Or even Amazon.
- roundabout-host 3mo ago
  You should not want a third platform which is as locked as Android/iOS, but the option to have platform-agnostic banking, for example, with the WWW, combined with unlocked bootloaders, so that you can use anything you want.
purpleidea 3mo ago
What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. We're still waiting to solve that problem...
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  GrapheneOS is fully open source.
  - fsflover 3mo ago
    Except the proprietary blobs of course.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
- no_time 3mo ago
  >Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.
  - ACCount37 3mo ago
    Tivoization should have been strangled in its crib. "Secure boot" as it's used today is the death knell of user freedom.
    - brookst 3mo ago
      It’s all tradeoffs. Secure boot sucks for enthusiasts but wow would the phone security / root kit scene be a nightmare without it.
ckastner 3mo ago
The death knell was Elop announcing that Nokia would be exclusively Windows, at a time when Windows had low single-digit market share and where this exclusivity was a one-way street. Other major manufacturers continued to ship Windows phones, and they did that in parallel to their main Android line. I never understood what the end game here was. If they had wanted market dominance based on someone else's OS, they could have just used the well-established Android. There was little to gain (their efforts of promoting Windows Phone would have also helped the competition's offerings) and all to lose.
epolanski 3mo ago
I still remember the Lumia 920 as the best phone I ever used. Snappy, well done OS, intuitive, great camera. What Microsoft mobile lacked, despite having a higher market share than iOS at some point was app support. Developers and companies pretended it did not exist. Banks, your local transport, whatever. I think that was what killed windows mobile phone. Any other just doesn't hold: os and hardware were very, very good.
- lifestyleguru 3mo ago
  Lumia with Windows Phone 8 and forward was very good. I didn't feel the need to have an iPhone, ahead of Android of that time.
dzonga 3mo ago
Innovator's Dilemma strikes again. then add to that an incompetent management. double whammy.
ZuLuuuuuu 3mo ago
A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop! What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.
- ed_elliott_asc 3mo ago
  This was such a short sighted move - with a phone platform and HoloLens they could have built their version of meta glasses and been able to capture all that real world vision for building ai models.
- jzwinck 3mo ago
  Did Windows Phone solve the problem that Windows Mobile had where libraries like the .net runtime were incomplete? I remember trying to build an app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and not being able to use third party libraries because some of the basic functions of Windows were missing on mobile. I'm not even talking about UI, more like networking and other backend features.
  - pavlov 3mo ago
    Windows Phone solved it by supporting only Silverlight apps... No Windows APIs. I also loved the Windows Phone 7 UI. But the app story was always a mess, and the competitive situation with Google meant that 2012's super-important apps like YouTube would never appear on the platform, whatever they did.
- internet2000 3mo ago
bamboozled 3mo ago
Very nostalgic for the Nokia times, before the "bicycles for our minds" came along.
markb139 3mo ago
Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much worked was done producing a touch based UI (I worked on a few of the apps). We had a customisable Home Screen with drag&drop icons. Multitasking with inter app communication. Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.
rickdeckard 3mo ago
“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.” In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone. -- Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market. Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS (the iPhone wasn't a Smartphone yet), expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device. But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this. For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.
rickdeckard 3mo ago
> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge. Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, running a week or longer on a single charge. The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers, most of all revenue-share (and a scheme where the ~1000USD device-price included marketing budget the carrier could then "consume" from Apple), two moves which decoupled Apple from Market-pressure and created an incredible influx of money into their R&D.
- rickdeckard 3mo ago
  For YEARS to come, carriers refused to rectify this skewed market, so while Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, LG had to continue jumping through hoops and could only earn money at the point of sale, while Apple's monthly income accumulated based on the total amount of active devices. In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation. But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari. All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher). Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)
- mjg59 3mo ago
  Oh, come on. Yes, compared to any modern device the iPhone was a piece of shit (no cut and paste when shipped? No 3G?), but as someone who owned a high end S60 device at the time, the iPhone was a breath of fresh air - the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it. The problem Nokia and others had is that they were judging potential iPhone buyers against the people buying their smartphones, not against the market waiting for a smartphone that wasn't an absolute piece of shit from a UX perspective.
butz 3mo ago
And at the 2026 wea are in a very sad state, where only choice for new smartphone is a huge rectangle with varying sizes of camera bumps on the back.
maxglute 3mo ago
I feel like if JP wasn't trapped behind their Galapagos cell network standard, they would have kicked Nokia's ass. I have fond memories of my Nokias, but it never felt like the had supreme hardware vs JP.
Glandalf 3mo ago
The old torpedo executive trick, works great.
uecker 3mo ago
"But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. " I think it would have. The N9 was killed before it came to market. It was never sold in any of the major markets, the platform was declared dead as the switch to Windows Phone was already announced. But the N9 was technically a very good phone and I do not think it came too late. At that time Nokia was still strong with Symbian and the iPhone was not strong in Europe. The move to Windows Phone (even if you think it would be a good platform) delayed things further. Declaring all your existing products a dead end before having an alternative on the market was a really bad idea.
Grimblewald 3mo ago
Nokia is in for a massive comeback through the graphene collab. I feel it in bones. Normal people at work are talking guillotines and getting these lovecraftian fucking ghouls out of our private affairs. If they nail the grapheneOS collab launch and anouncement, they'll be back in a big way.

185 points by jruohonen 3mo ago

I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.

afavour 3mo ago
I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them. Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.
- TFNA 3mo ago
  Today the vast majority of people I know rarely use the browser on their phones. They interact with the internet through apps from various walled gardens, and even for news on the open web they are likely to install someone's app. Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown computer OSs, but the general public doesn't want a full-blown OS, they want a bunch of icons to corporate apps.
  - afavour 3mo ago
    > Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      Their Windows CE developer mindshare didn’t make the translation to post iPhone software. There was so little in common between the two worlds one would need to start from scratch.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- qwytw 3mo ago
  > Arguably they should have just gone with Android, It's not obvious Nokia could have realistically competed with the East Asian phone manufacturers for more than a few years. It was/is a very low margin market with very cutthroat competition.
- VulgarExigency 3mo ago
  As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.
  - afavour 3mo ago
    I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.
    - seba_dos1 3mo ago
      Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.
      - afavour 3mo ago
        I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing. Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.
        seba_dos1 3mo ago
        They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies. Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.
merelydev 3mo ago
I don't think that's their biggest mistake. Their downfall was because they where mainly a hardware company without any network effects. Customers could easily switch from Nokia to any other hardware without an issue.
TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
No, their biggest mistake was having no clue what they were doing or, why. Nokia were a tech slop factory - one new model roughly every two weeks, with no obvious strategy or rationale, many only superficially different. Every so often they'd produce a classic that was ahead of its time, like the Communicator series, then by the time the surrounding infra had caught up they'd moved on and allowed a competitor to eat that space. iPhone and Android were both killing them, and they had no idea how to respond. Elop was the undertaker, and much hated for reasonable reasons. But the brand was already a zombie by that point.
toast0 3mo ago
I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobile 10 had continued that trend and delivered on the promise of all WP8 phones being upgradable to WM10, things would be different now. Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere. Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P
- anonymars 3mo ago
  Not only that, but developing for Windows Phone 8 required using Windows 8 (which was a flop) That being said I don't know that there was a path to success. I don't think it was as much about the little apps as the big ones: Instagram, YouTube, Pokemon Go... Google in particular got to play the role of anti-competitive
  - toast0 3mo ago
    Word on the street was Google didn't want to bother with WP because they worked so hard on WinCE apps and all of that was thrown away. Probably not the whole reason, but they did make an exchange connector available for gmail on wp, so it's not like they didn't support the platform at all.. YouTube in the browser would have been fine if the browser wasn't terrible. I definitely felt the lack of Pokemon Go ... but given it released in mid 2016, it's pretty clear why it didn't show up on Windows Phone / Windows Mobile... the writing was already on the wall by then and Windows development would have likely trailed anyway. WP8.1 came out in April 2014; it was an improvement, but you really wanted a follow up release. WM10 came out November 2015 and wasn't very good unless you had the flagship phones, which nobody would buy; I did end up running one of the last builds of WM10 and it actually got pretty good (other than Edge still had terrible UX)... too bad it happened so late. Windows Phone's strength was at the bottom of the market --- cheap phones that were usable, but cheap phones didn't run WM10 well, so the huge global market of people who wanted a smart phone but only had $100 to spend was left for Android. If you look at sales numbers [1], things were going ok until about q3 2015. A dip in Q3 is kind of expected, because WM10 was coming soon, so people are likely to wait ... but then WM10 is crap and people buy an Android or iPhone and there you go. [1] https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-sold-q2-2016/ https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-...

RiverCrochet 3mo ago

From the article: "Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget. But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones." We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.

B1FF_PSUVM 3mo ago
Not far. Not even MS had the clout to impose a third alternative in phones, and it was needed. And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.
hedgehog 3mo ago
It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity. Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.
- storus 3mo ago
  Windows Phone aesthetics was repulsive to most people at that time; we finally got TrueColor 4k screens and all MS could do was to use 10 colors everywhere and start the flat fad that destroyed UX on most systems. What a waste.
  - 3mo ago

let_rec 3mo ago

Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?

fineIllregister 3mo ago
It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.
- garaetjjte 3mo ago
  Windows Phone 7 was artificially limited crap, any amount of head start wouldn't help it.
- toast0 3mo ago
  Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited. I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore. [1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-2011-pdf_0.pdf https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8) [2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sales-per-year-2007-2027/ https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...
  - let_rec 3mo ago
    > Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited. WhatsApp was on Windows Phone though. Instagram was not on Windows Phone, which hurt it, but there is no indication it would have come to MeeGo either.

ohm 3mo ago

There is a Korean manhwa/manga called Real Man or A Man's Man. It’s about a guy who worked in the mobile phone company. He goes back in time and starts developing software and hardware phone designs before the companies who originally made them do.

bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
I feel like theres so much manga that this is the kind of premise you're left with if you don't want to copy someone else

rjrjrjrj 3mo ago

My recollection of the mid-2000s is that Nokia simply had no idea how to be a platform provider. They had 2 or 3 main operating systems, but within each of those there were numerous different versions. Most handsets didn't get updated, so you had to download a zillion different SDKs just to do basic testing. And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.

pornel 3mo ago
I don't remember the details of Symbian any more, other than it was some ancient fork of C++ and clunky cooperative multitasking.

dataAI 3mo ago

Those were the days. Former Nokia (N9 Meego) employees formed Jolla and it is still alive. They nowadays sell tens of thousands of Linux phones, so not taking over the phone market.

arjie 3mo ago

They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggregate the organization had a fragmentation of SDKs, no single device domination, and didn't really value the other participants on their ecosystem. Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself. That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.

storus 3mo ago
Capacitive screens were out of possibility for them as Apple bought 2 year production in advance, a trick Tim deployed repeatedly in many areas. MeeGo had a chance but US funds didn't want to allow a state where an EU company would rule the fastest growing market of that time and their darling MS slips into irrelevance and its trojan horse killed it off quickly.
leonidasrup 3mo ago
Nokia development was limited by its relation with telecom industry (telecoms could limits what Nokias could do, software feautures. The telecoms wanted to profit from software running on Nokias, telecoms didn't wanted to be just dumb Internet providers. Telecoms wanted to be digital service providers - AOLs). In contrast Apple with iPhone had much stronger position: "Cingular gave Apple the freedom to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house, a rare practice at the time, and paid Apple a fraction of its monthly service revenue (until the iPhone 3G), in exchange for four years of exclusive U.S. sales, until 2011." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
- pjc50 3mo ago
  We complain (rightly) about the Apple monopoly, but have forgotten that the carriers were a much more annoying monopoly, with even worse policies for trying to charge for things that they'd specifically prevented you from doing. I think the last remaining example of that is charging for using your phone as a WiFi hotspot.

mempko 3mo ago

I was working for a Nokia subsidiary called HERE maps at the time this was happening. All I can say is MeeGo was a great OS and would have competed really well with iOS. They released one phone with it called the N9 in some smaller countries and then discontinued that year in favor of Windows. The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.

gmuslera 3mo ago

The predecessor of the N9, the Nokia N900, with Maemo, is not even mentioned in the article, and it caused a buzz at least in the circles I were back then. And it had one of the best physical keyboards for a smartphone back then. The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS. There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.

PopePompus 3mo ago
Don't forget the N950! It was an aluminum body successor to the N900, with a glorious slide-out keyboard. Built like a tank. They were never released for sale to the public, perhaps because Nokia's leadership had already decided to kill its line of Linux phones. But I've got one.

Diogenesian 3mo ago

The picture of the guy with his handdrawn "dream phone" is quite charming. Sort of a Homerphone, but it is drawn well. https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-holds-up-a-document-with-a-detailed-hand-drawn-nokia-phone-sketch.jpg?id=67118834&quality=100 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-hol... "Sir, please, a QWERTY keyboard would be so much -" "No." Homerphone reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI

sangeeth96 3mo ago

They (WP and Lumia) would've been a strong 3rd player if the right investments and care were given since MS acquisition but alas, I think I should've noticed the writing on the wall for all of MS' consumer business (Xbox, being the latest!) from the moment Satya stepped in and Nokia got cut off. Satya was great for businesses and MS' investors, terrible for consumers.

throwa356262 3mo ago
I would love to switch back to WP. I would love it even more if we could all go back in time and switch to meego. I used one for a short while and it felt well thought compared to the mess that was android at that time.
SoftTalker 3mo ago
At that time everyone I knew who had a Lumia/WP absolutely loved it. I don't know how but Microsoft totally fumbled that.

B1FF_PSUVM 3mo ago

> In September 2008, the first Android phone went on sale—the HTC Dream, Excursion: HTC would later sell the HTC HD2 with WindowsMobile (a predecessor of WindowsPhone), which could be "dual-booted" with Android ROMs from the XDA-developers forum or similar. The 2009 HTC HD2 was basically the modern glass slab, except for a discrete bottom line of physical buttons, which hadn't yet been eaten by software at the time.

jmartrican 3mo ago

IMHO they should cosnider re-releasing the 3310. It might sell similar to vinyl. Maybe update the games section to have some more games.

mghackerlady 3mo ago
They have, multiple times. Granted, it isn't the original 3310. They've always been modernised in some way, and I suspect creating the original wouldn't be very feasible today
- jmartrican 3mo ago
  Oh yeah, i should have guessed. Thanks for pointing it out.
jagaerglad 3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310_(2017) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310_(2017)

ptx 3mo ago

> Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. [...] But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. This seems a little misleading. From what I remember, and from what Wikipedia says, Elop had already announced the deal with Microsoft long before announcing the N9, so Nokia was in essence already dead when it launched.

ksec 3mo ago

And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market. Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late. Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it. But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise. Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?

presbyterian 3mo ago
> There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.
- ksec 3mo ago
  The platform owner themselves. Obviously it wouldn't be an idea for startup. But OpenAI, Meta, or Tesla could have enough leverage to do so. Or even Amazon.
roundabout-host 3mo ago
You should not want a third platform which is as locked as Android/iOS, but the option to have platform-agnostic banking, for example, with the WWW, combined with unlocked bootloaders, so that you can use anything you want.

purpleidea 3mo ago

What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. We're still waiting to solve that problem...

Cider9986 3mo ago
GrapheneOS is fully open source.
- fsflover 3mo ago
  Except the proprietary blobs of course.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
no_time 3mo ago
>Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.
- ACCount37 3mo ago
  Tivoization should have been strangled in its crib. "Secure boot" as it's used today is the death knell of user freedom.
  - brookst 3mo ago
    It’s all tradeoffs. Secure boot sucks for enthusiasts but wow would the phone security / root kit scene be a nightmare without it.

ckastner 3mo ago

The death knell was Elop announcing that Nokia would be exclusively Windows, at a time when Windows had low single-digit market share and where this exclusivity was a one-way street. Other major manufacturers continued to ship Windows phones, and they did that in parallel to their main Android line. I never understood what the end game here was. If they had wanted market dominance based on someone else's OS, they could have just used the well-established Android. There was little to gain (their efforts of promoting Windows Phone would have also helped the competition's offerings) and all to lose.

epolanski 3mo ago

I still remember the Lumia 920 as the best phone I ever used. Snappy, well done OS, intuitive, great camera. What Microsoft mobile lacked, despite having a higher market share than iOS at some point was app support. Developers and companies pretended it did not exist. Banks, your local transport, whatever. I think that was what killed windows mobile phone. Any other just doesn't hold: os and hardware were very, very good.

lifestyleguru 3mo ago
Lumia with Windows Phone 8 and forward was very good. I didn't feel the need to have an iPhone, ahead of Android of that time.

dzonga 3mo ago

Innovator's Dilemma strikes again. then add to that an incompetent management. double whammy.

ZuLuuuuuu 3mo ago

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop! What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.

ed_elliott_asc 3mo ago
This was such a short sighted move - with a phone platform and HoloLens they could have built their version of meta glasses and been able to capture all that real world vision for building ai models.
jzwinck 3mo ago
Did Windows Phone solve the problem that Windows Mobile had where libraries like the .net runtime were incomplete? I remember trying to build an app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and not being able to use third party libraries because some of the basic functions of Windows were missing on mobile. I'm not even talking about UI, more like networking and other backend features.
- pavlov 3mo ago
  Windows Phone solved it by supporting only Silverlight apps... No Windows APIs. I also loved the Windows Phone 7 UI. But the app story was always a mess, and the competitive situation with Google meant that 2012's super-important apps like YouTube would never appear on the platform, whatever they did.
internet2000 3mo ago

bamboozled 3mo ago

Very nostalgic for the Nokia times, before the "bicycles for our minds" came along.

markb139 3mo ago

Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much worked was done producing a touch based UI (I worked on a few of the apps). We had a customisable Home Screen with drag&drop icons. Multitasking with inter app communication. Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.

rickdeckard 3mo ago

“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.” In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone. -- Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market. Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS (the iPhone wasn't a Smartphone yet), expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device. But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this. For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.

rickdeckard 3mo ago

> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge. Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, running a week or longer on a single charge. The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers, most of all revenue-share (and a scheme where the ~1000USD device-price included marketing budget the carrier could then "consume" from Apple), two moves which decoupled Apple from Market-pressure and created an incredible influx of money into their R&D.

rickdeckard 3mo ago
For YEARS to come, carriers refused to rectify this skewed market, so while Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, LG had to continue jumping through hoops and could only earn money at the point of sale, while Apple's monthly income accumulated based on the total amount of active devices. In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation. But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari. All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher). Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)
mjg59 3mo ago
Oh, come on. Yes, compared to any modern device the iPhone was a piece of shit (no cut and paste when shipped? No 3G?), but as someone who owned a high end S60 device at the time, the iPhone was a breath of fresh air - the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it. The problem Nokia and others had is that they were judging potential iPhone buyers against the people buying their smartphones, not against the market waiting for a smartphone that wasn't an absolute piece of shit from a UX perspective.

butz 3mo ago

And at the 2026 wea are in a very sad state, where only choice for new smartphone is a huge rectangle with varying sizes of camera bumps on the back.

maxglute 3mo ago

I feel like if JP wasn't trapped behind their Galapagos cell network standard, they would have kicked Nokia's ass. I have fond memories of my Nokias, but it never felt like the had supreme hardware vs JP.

Glandalf 3mo ago

The old torpedo executive trick, works great.

uecker 3mo ago

"But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. " I think it would have. The N9 was killed before it came to market. It was never sold in any of the major markets, the platform was declared dead as the switch to Windows Phone was already announced. But the N9 was technically a very good phone and I do not think it came too late. At that time Nokia was still strong with Symbian and the iPhone was not strong in Europe. The move to Windows Phone (even if you think it would be a good platform) delayed things further. Declaring all your existing products a dead end before having an alternative on the market was a really bad idea.

Grimblewald 3mo ago

Nokia is in for a massive comeback through the graphene collab. I feel it in bones. Normal people at work are talking guillotines and getting these lovecraftian fucking ghouls out of our private affairs. If they nail the grapheneOS collab launch and anouncement, they'll be back in a big way.