It's clearly not the Mobile-First Design Archive ;)
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.
The irony, for those that missed it, is Nokia did a lot to make WebKit usable on S60, thereby setting up the foundations for mobile Safari in the first place.
Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.
Stupid wiggly and slightly laggy dots with no option to stop motion altogether are making it annoying to browse on desktop as well. Everything is constantly moving and there's hardly any telling what's what among model dots, and they don't have much spatial persistency so you're just constantly lost. The only predictable way to browse is just going thru 755 cards page by page.
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
Well, that aged differently, on different fronts...
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?
The most insane flexible screen proposal from Nokia was the "nanotech" one - Nokia Morph [1], where the phone "normal" candybar shape was formed out of folding it twice with a clip for speakers - you would pull the clip and unfold it into something akin to A5 or A4 paper. Future sounded bright with software defined tactile buttons and the like.
I think it's funny how most of the pictures are about people doing usual things (talking with friends physically present, having dinner, having a meeting, etc.) and there is also a phone in their hand, like it's nothing. It feels weird to see people doing something on the phone while also being so present in other activities, and also interesting that some photos from 90' nailed it how it will be in the the 20'
I think browsing this gives you a good idea of why Nokia failed. they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit.
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
Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).
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.
It was lunacy business-wise but it sure brought some color to the market and I really liked seeing what they came up with. It wasn't for me, and not for most people, of course. But now we all have a black glass slab. Does make me a bit sad and am always eyeballing new form-factors (ie cyberdeck like). Idk, it's how capitalism works, but perhaps one day technology will find a way to be more flexible and we can bring back some lunacy...
from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
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.
That isn't the problem, rather that our companies also got infected by MBAs with late stage capitalism mindset, and followed all US economic think thanks great ideas to outsource everything.
and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit
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.
point is they weren't pushing the technology, they were pushing the existing form factor, not thinking ahead.
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
It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.
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.
I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.
Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.
I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.
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).
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.
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.
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.
what a coincidence, less than an hour ago I looked for pictures of Nokia 2110 since I just found out that the letters on older phones were placed on different keys: OQZ were on the 0 key, not listed alphabetically, and that is still happening on small keypads used by cashiers, at least here in Italy, that's why I noticed it
I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate. Sure, they made mistakes, but it wasn't entirely unfeasible to assume that the mobile phone market had matured in terms of features, and the next big thing was going to be "phones as fashion statements." When you think about it, prior to the phone, everything people carried on them everyday was some sort of fashion statement. Clothes, glasses, jewllery, watches, handbags, backpacks etc. I think they assumed that the phone was like the watch; peaked functionally, but room to grow in terms of form.
And in a way that actually happened with the iPhone. Yes, that was also a functionality boost, but it was also a fashion object. I did a (for university, small scale) observation study at the time and found it notable that some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus - that was a shift, a thing formerly seen as a functional device became a fashion accessory.
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.
Cool, but damn this is annoying to browse with phone.
Well, its a media-rich & heavy site, clearly not develped for mobile usage :-)
It's clearly not the Mobile-First Design Archive ;)
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.
The irony, for those that missed it, is Nokia did a lot to make WebKit usable on S60, thereby setting up the foundations for mobile Safari in the first place.
Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.
Stupid wiggly and slightly laggy dots with no option to stop motion altogether are making it annoying to browse on desktop as well. Everything is constantly moving and there's hardly any telling what's what among model dots, and they don't have much spatial persistency so you're just constantly lost. The only predictable way to browse is just going thru 755 cards page by page.
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...
It's not that great on desktop either
This version is slightly more tolerable:
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_eef40316-aa3b-4fe3-8...
To be honest, it's not much better on desktop. Jittering dots everywhere.
Opened a random one: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_b81c4b91-a275-40b5-9b...
third slide...
Well, that aged differently, on different fronts...
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
The most insane flexible screen proposal from Nokia was the "nanotech" one - Nokia Morph [1], where the phone "normal" candybar shape was formed out of folding it twice with a clip for speakers - you would pull the clip and unfold it into something akin to A5 or A4 paper. Future sounded bright with software defined tactile buttons and the like.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs
Looks amazing! And absolutely reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFsRif1wVGs
I think it's funny how most of the pictures are about people doing usual things (talking with friends physically present, having dinner, having a meeting, etc.) and there is also a phone in their hand, like it's nothing. It feels weird to see people doing something on the phone while also being so present in other activities, and also interesting that some photos from 90' nailed it how it will be in the the 20'
"Hey claude make me the most annoying bs UI possible for the data I want to display, make no mistake"
I was thinking it was maybe GPT since I've had it generate this kind of black/green UI when I've prompted for just a blank skeleton page
Was posted on Hackernews nearly 2 years ago with the same UI so this being a vibe coded project is unlikely.
Then I'm sad someone put so much effort to deliver this
I guess it was just part of the current website generation's training set!
I love whenever this is posted everyone gets so mad about the UI (it is terrible)
I think browsing this gives you a good idea of why Nokia failed. they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit.
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
As a consumer I enjoy when companies try out random shit in such a user friendly way.
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.
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.
Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).
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
It was lunacy business-wise but it sure brought some color to the market and I really liked seeing what they came up with. It wasn't for me, and not for most people, of course. But now we all have a black glass slab. Does make me a bit sad and am always eyeballing new form-factors (ie cyberdeck like). Idk, it's how capitalism works, but perhaps one day technology will find a way to be more flexible and we can bring back some lunacy...
from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
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.
Why? Duo feels pretty nice. Wouldn’t want the first generation (but it is never a good idea to have the first generation of anything)
Different times. Companies aren't allowed to fail in 2026.
Nokia was also European. We Euroopeans aren't good at not letting our companies fail, also see Philips, Acorn etc.
That isn't the problem, rather that our companies also got infected by MBAs with late stage capitalism mindset, and followed all US economic think thanks great ideas to outsource everything.
The N95 was the phone to have.-
no, if they were like Nokia, they'd be desperately trying to make everything and new versions of things
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
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.
point is they weren't pushing the technology, they were pushing the existing form factor, not thinking ahead.
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
It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.
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.
I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.
Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...
N95 was the first Nokia model where OpenGL ES was fully hardware accelerated and not using software rendering, by the way.
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.
Communicator devices with Symbian were pretty clear personal computers.
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
I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.
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.
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.
Yeah, I use a Jolla phone today but wish it had the power of a properly resourced company behind it.
Many people forget that the Apple of today only exists out of sheer luck, by bringing back in house one of their founders.
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.
Interesting - one of the presentations I found was this one on Design Insights From Apple's iPod (2006).
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...
It is a far more complex story than that.
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.
More discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721915 (58 comments)
what a coincidence, less than an hour ago I looked for pictures of Nokia 2110 since I just found out that the letters on older phones were placed on different keys: OQZ were on the 0 key, not listed alphabetically, and that is still happening on small keypads used by cashiers, at least here in Italy, that's why I noticed it
I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate. Sure, they made mistakes, but it wasn't entirely unfeasible to assume that the mobile phone market had matured in terms of features, and the next big thing was going to be "phones as fashion statements." When you think about it, prior to the phone, everything people carried on them everyday was some sort of fashion statement. Clothes, glasses, jewllery, watches, handbags, backpacks etc. I think they assumed that the phone was like the watch; peaked functionally, but room to grow in terms of form.
And in a way that actually happened with the iPhone. Yes, that was also a functionality boost, but it was also a fashion object. I did a (for university, small scale) observation study at the time and found it notable that some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus - that was a shift, a thing formerly seen as a functional device became a fashion accessory.
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.
I noticed nokia pop up in telecom infrastructure around the same time I noticed nokia phone users using something else.
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.
It's missing the Booklet 3G. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Booklet_3G
The captions are pretty great:
"Image of a man holding a woman and a phone."