Nokia Design Archive (2025)

My guess is they didn't realize what telecom was preparing for and decided a foothold in that industry was an investment in telephone future.

Think about how different the target group for blackberry for example had been, or how little glamour the (mostly) cheap and small nokia phones of the past years had been.

All set aside, I did always wonder, why the screen has to fold (be flexible), surely a very thin line between 2 hard screens is very workable, perhaps it is even possible to make it (almost) invisible with some optical tricks at the touching edges.

Another point: It is easy to think of such things, it's the manufacturing and specifically manufacturing at scale that is the real work. That's why I think patents can really hold us back, by blocking the market from trying stuff because a company made some nice drawings (coming from a guy that was in a company that wanted to "blanket some markets" with patents). Perhaps we could have had our flying cars ;)

Btw, that last slide is very much like the communicator from Earth: Final Conflict [0], but then again, what can you make with a rolling screen?

[0] https://earthfinalconflict.fandom.com/wiki/Global

Nokia, the giant at the time, was designing a better phone. And then a better phone. And another phone after that. Their design and engineering were in no way inferior to Apple's, but they were designing phones, not a personal computer.

Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.

There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.

The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.

So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.

Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.

Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.

And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.

But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.

It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.

It could have gone very differently.

You mean like Apple today ?

The Apple watch is from 2015.

What new product Apple produced since Tim Cook took over ?

The iPhone Duo ? Ironically it has quite a smell of Nokia N95 all over again.

They highlight:

- core design team

- start with an idea for an unmet customer need

- drive innovation from imagining user’s experience

- define essentials for “insanely great”

- simplify to great lengths to hide complexity

- grow user involvement through evolution

https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_7b149a54-2085-4f7d-9b...

Apple’s focus and philosophy sure gives them an advantage. At the same time users who like e.g. smaller screens have to suffer or go elsewhere.

Apple of today gets idolatrised to a point that it never us in the 1990's, when they did enough random shit that they almost went bankrupt.

Also, Nokia Alumni over here, from 2005 - 2010.

To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.

Otherwise, extremely interesting materials. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to include later nokia smartphones, like ones with maemo and meego like n900 and n9, even though in my opinion they still very much had something to say and to show with their design, both physically with shape and look of the phones, and with phone interfaces. dare i say, they were quite influential still, and those design sensibilities, at least phone look wise, still echoed for years in later nokia (lumia and even hmd nokia) phones

a lot of funky stuff in presentations, like this one https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_68d7aeff-c4fb-49c0-be... or this one https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_b5225dd0-743a-4b6d-ba...

https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_eef40316-aa3b-4fe3-8...

Sadly it's a reflection of why Nokia failed - Mobile Safari on iOS pretty much nailed the coffin for the Nokia approach to mobile browsing.

I think what's interesting is how looking back at the Nokia nostalgia is compelling because iOS and Android have become such overlords over our digital lives.