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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.
Sorry, what does this mean? Could you explain?
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.
"Image of a man holding a woman and a phone."
third slide...
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs
[1] https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0383
they would never have the same kind of focus or philosophy as Apple, nor the willpower to pivot to real smartphones and a proper OS for them
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
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.
They didn’t sell it for most networks in the USA (because your uncompetitive oligopoly cellphone market had not been shaken up yet and did not have competition rules governing it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61
This thing was in every sense a computer. Good battery life considering its screen, IMAP email, a Webkit web browser with full JS support before Apple released theirs, a music player, fully functional apps and tools to make them, 3G and wifi, office file support, VoIP support, Blackberry support if you wanted it. Great little keyboard.
Excellent device that was vastly more capable for actual work than the first several generations of iPhone (you could select and edit text, copy and paste) and available affordably to consumers in the UK.
Text selection and editing on iOS (and iPadOS!) is still more frustrating than it was on the E61.
The fact that we were already using these sorts of phones for functional work in Europe is a bit of the reason why the early Android phones with their “silly” trackballs that could actually control a text cursor did well compared to the early iPhones, and why interesting niche phones like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (that I subsequently owned, incredible device) did well here.
It took me to the iPhone 5S to even bother looking at iPhones, even though I had been a Mac user for fifteen years by then. Even then I only got it because the light sensor on my Xperia Mini Pro died; I would have carried on using that for years, it was fabulous.
You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...
It had a quite cool launch demo with Asphalt,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YMdIswaW8
Remember that this are PS like graphics on a phone.
Nowadays there are plenty of WebGL games that aren't half as good.
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.
instead they're refining their existing products until they can come up with a hit. although I'm not sure the iPhone Duo is gonna be a hit
there's simply not that much innovation going on these days, there was a lot more low-hanging fruit in the early 2000s
The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.
The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.
Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750
which makes sense because they had these half button half touchscreen hybrid phones
the internet browsing features were something akin to like paid phone numbers which you'd avoid using because it was like special stuff
it wasn't first class in any way, it was perpetually stuck in the past. and as you can see, their entire business model was based on iterating on the same thing in a million ways, so there's no way they were gonna do something from the ground up to focus on a first class experience for one form factor which could support 3rd party developers etc.
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.
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...
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.
I could be wrong, but I recall an exec at one of their events on stage doubling down and saying they know better than Apple - that people want buttons (or something like that), which basically means their decline was inevitable due to the culture
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.
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.
Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.