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Comment by tschwimmer

2 years ago

I'm pretty sure the metaphorical platform had already fully melted down by 2011, they just hadn't realized it yet. Nokia was not dead on January 9th, 2007 but maybe by 2008 when the App Store launched or perhaps in 2010 when FaceTime launched with the iPhone 4. At that time Nokia made very solid utility devices that admirably did their jobs. What they failed to ever make and what I suspect they failed to realize that Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts. The N9000 and the N9 were technically very good (on paper even better than the iPhone) but they lacked the integrated and holistic design decisions that made the iPhone special.

> Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts.

It's harder to do now with iPhone's market size, but I think we're looking at it with rosy glasses.

Where Apple succeeded is having a viable touch interface. That's where RIM, Nokia, Fujitsu, Compaq and countless other device makers failed at. Including Nokia.

Otherwise the iPhone was buggy and crashing all the time, battery life was trash compared to other phones or the iPod, I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls and we just were willing to go through all of that to get a usable touch UI.

  • > I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls

    I know there was a lot of noise about dropped calls and all that in the US, but this was not a thing here in Europe. I would assume that the issue was at least as much with AT&T than with the iPhone.

    Here there were controversies about a lot of things (for example, it became caught up in the electro-sensitivity pseudoscience argument, there was also some noise about the glass front being brittle), but not reception. At least not before the iPhone 4.

    • Yes, it might the difference on the network stacks. Perhaps it was decent on GSM ?

      In asia it was the same deal (from iPhone 3G, not the original one). Most of the issues seemed to be when the phone ran from too long and/or was low on battery. From my understanding memory was leaking all over the place, and as the phone app isn't isolated from the system it was affected too (even if the network chip is a separate hardware and OS)

      Basically rebooting every now and then was a good idea at the time.