Comment by anonu
2 days ago
I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.
2 days ago
I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.
>they understand what they were facing
Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.
For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.
With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.
> For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.
Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset
> Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.
The biggest one to note is the somewhat-hopeful comment that the lack of Java support was cutting off the iPhone from a "large swath of existing software" ... that barely anyone enjoyed using, and didn't amount to much mindshare or incumbent advantage.
also that most of the deck is about the hardware.
There is almost no understanding of the software needed for an iPhone UI.
However "Develop Touch UI" is point #2 on their action item list, after partnering with TMobile.
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.
We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with).
The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive.
The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it.
You glossed over the one killer feature of the original iPhone: It had a fully functional web browser and enough compute power to just barely run it. This was the thing that made all previous smartphones instantly obsolete. No goddamn WAP proxy. No needing 3-4 minutes to get Yahoo to render. It didn't completely trash the layout of every other page. It was an actually useful web browser.
2 replies →
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes,
I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.
IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.
3 replies →
Oh how we forget... Phones at the time were HORRIBLE. To you, today, it looks like the iPhone couldn't do much. Back then it was revolutionary that a phone could simply render a proper website or connect to your home wifi.
The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature.
I don’t recall any of my older phones having software updates that had major new features. Any update would have been some esoteric bug fixes or something.
The idea that the phone was just another general purpose computer with an operating system that could be updated to a significantly changed interface was not a concept that existed in the mainstream at the time.
All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with whatever software happened to be installed at the time. Each phone had very different software that was fixed and unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and Apple came along and made that model obsolete.
Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.
The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea.
In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.
> and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.
The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company before the year was out.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...
This section: “There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry” has to rival “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” In the early impressions that didn’t age well category.
Not that it hurt her career in any way, looking at her Wikipedia article. Failing upwards is a thing.
Blackberry took that approach.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberr...
> Instead they comforted themselves with reminders that the iPhone's keyboard was difficult to use and the battery life, terrible. BlackBerry was leading the pack, after all.
I would kill to see the presentation from RIM
This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
6 replies →
Some part understood, and those people started the Maemo project. It got a tiny fraction of the available resources.