BBC - The Rise And Fall Of Nokia

[Black Phoenix]

I don't know if this was posted already, but I came around this, and there is some interesting from the half of it to the end that can be applied to a lot of companies nowadays:

[I wanted a rude username]

Insightful quote from Duncan Lamb, former Nokia creative director:

Apple's made some pretty interesting trade-offs; one of them is battery life, and one of them is the durability of the product. Now, ten years later, we all kind of accept that our phones last for a day, and then we charge them, and we have chargers next to the bed, which is the new normal. And we all accept that if we're stupid and we drop our phone, then the screen will smash, we know that that will happen. Ten years ago that was not acceptable.

[BravoV]

I owned N900 at that time, Android was still very young, and at that time, there was a great hope on Meego, but alas, it looks like the top management was half halfheartedly support and totally abandoned it.

Imo, it could be a game changer for the company if they took it seriously as they were considered as the king of the hill of mobile manufacturer in the world.

[rjp]

Being a practical people in a cold, harsh environment that touch screens didnt work properly meant they ended up with  the wrong perspective.

[I wanted a rude username]

That's a good point. The excellent N900 for example uses a resistive touch-screen, which works in the cold because it doesn't depend on the material touching it, so you can use gloves (or a stylus). It doesn't support multi-touch though.

The alternate approach would have been to just launch a capacitive touch screen and let people struggle with it until the market figured out a solution for cold weather use (I think there are now gloves whose fingers are tipped with an appropriate touch screen compatible material). But that was not the Nokia way.

[Black Phoenix]

(...) But that was not the Nokia way.

Exactly as the quote from Duncan Lamb. Nokia way was doing a reliable, working, long standby, robust equipment, with good software. Not form over function. Although the world evolved into form over function, and software into a "live service" - Release and fix later, while breaking something more.

There are 3 Nokia Phones that I used in my life and one is still my backup when I need a phone for calls and sms:

Nokia 6230 - my first work phone and first Nokia, I loved that one, small no frills and good looking;
Nokia E71 - my second work phone (different company) and my current backup. The full keyboard were great for emails and taking notes, and that thing had battery for days;
Nokia E7 - had this phone stolen in 2013, was my personal phone before I had the first iPhone. I really liked this one, I always was a more work user with my phones, so lack of games or multimedia functionalities were not a miss for me.

Even nowadays with my OnePlus 6T I don't use it to his full capabilities, specially in terms of CPU and RAM. Basically is for communication apps (WeChat, Whatsapp, Telegram, Spark and Slack), phone calls and mobile payment. Other than that I don't watch Youtube or play games. I browse occasionally on the phone but nothing more than 30 min a day max.

Spark specially is the email app I use more, after Google discontinued their own app Inbox. This one is almost as Inbox was with the same functionalities. Specially with the one inbox for all the email accounts configured and seamless replies to said accounts, auto categorization of emails and even delegation of emails.

[PartialDischarge]

In my opinion Nokia invented the tablet with the N800, I had one before anyone had tablets or iphones and made skype phone calls in public wifis, people were amazed at the things it could do while fitting in your pocket, and linux was a plus.

The N900 was great but too late, released 2 years after the first iphone!, wassup wasn’t even never developed for it, I think their demise was in having so many models of phones all with crappy Symbian, had they updated much sooner to  Linux (maemo) and supported it with applications the history would have been different.

[nctnico]

The N900 was great but too late, released 2 years after the first iphone!, wassup wasn’t even never developed for it, I think their demise was in having so many models of phones all with crappy Symbian, had they updated much sooner to  Linux (maemo) and supported it with applications the history would have been different.

True. Symbian didn't scale at all and made it very hard to write applications for the phones.

Still if you look at the history of Nokia you notice that they are more like an investment firm rather than a manufacturer which is good at a particular kind of products. And they always get away with money in their pockets. Look at how they managed to sell a dead horse to Microsoft.

[jadew]

Yep, I also think that Symbian was at fault for Nokia's demise.

Writing software for it sucked, compared to Windows CE. If they adopted Windows since early on, maybe things would have been a bit different. Sony and HTC gained a lot of ground because they did, once the smartphone market became a thing.

[nctnico]

Windows CE is probably worse compared to Symbian. Lot's of stuff you need in an OS missing and serious limitations. Google got it right by using Linux as a base with a Java VM on top. However it did require Google to write their own Java VM from scratch because the existing ones where rather crappy (resulting in an inconsistent user experience).

[thinkfat]

In November 2010 I attended the Meego conference in Dublin. It was shortly after Nokia and Intel had announced joining efforts with Maemo and Moblin and creating Meego together. Excitement waned after talking to some of the developers there, nobody would commit on a roadmap, features. They were struggling with small details all over the place. Creating an OS that should scale from mobile phones to laptops somehow didn't catch with me. It smelled like bloat. I was working in consumer electronics back in the days and I understood the complexity and challenges of running Linux on a device as constrained in resources as a mobile phone. I was deeply involved in the development of several PVPs running Linux during that time. Meego never developed the necessary momentum. When Nokia pulled out shortly after and went for Windows Phone 7, it was over.

Btw, today I own a Nokia 6.1 phone. Not "flagship" product, but solidly constructed and a robust performer.