Comment by adev_
4 hours ago
> they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
Nokia had at least three tiers of OS: Series 30, Series 40 (which had subseries) and Series 60. It was S60 which was the smartphone Symbian based one which is where they went especially nuts.
S40 was actually really good and solid, and if someone remembers the UI of a Nokia fondly it's almost certainly a S30 or S40 device. A bit basic, but for a feature phone of that era it was great. The reason SonyEricsson started gaining market share was their phones were more like improved S40 devices (like higher fidelity UIs) than Nokia's S60 lines which were . . . not.
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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...
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)
The N95 was the phone to have.-