In 2011 I worked for a cell phone store, and a Nokia sales rep came in to demo a new phone. His one quote that cracked me up "We'll never win over the niche of people who want iPhones."
It was obvious to anyone with eyes and fingers that iPhones were far superior to what Nokia was creating. Some random features I remember him showing: you could plug a mouse into the phone and it would vibrate during walking directions. They probably realized they couldn't make a better product, so they tried to make a differentiated one with some things that people don't care about.
The fascinating thing is that Nokia knew. They knew right from the beginning. This "different phones for different niches" was just a desperate marketing spiel to save face.
This is a letter a finnish journalist sent to Nokia in 2008. He was blown away by the iPhone! The letter was circulated internally and different managers called him to explain Nokias strategy. He meets up with the bosses and the following ensues:
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The manager started to brief me on the backgrounds of Nokia's strategy. The idea was that people are different, and therefore, they need different kinds of telephones.
I became agitated: "The kind of person who wants to use a bad telephone does not exist!", I said.
THIS SPARKED AN argument. I explained in different ways how dreadful my new telephone was, and the manager spoke in its defence.
All of a sudden he went silent. He looked directly in my eyes and said: "This conversation is in confidence, isn't it?"
I assured him that it was.
He continued:
"I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and with what you have said now."
I was astounded.
"I agree completely with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you."
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5 Years later (2013) he meets the manager again. He tells a story so disarmingly cute Apple should print it as advertising:
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He told me that when the iPhones came out in the United States in the summer of 2007, the situation was followed at Nokia with keen interest. A large number of iPhones were immediately delivered to Nokia's head offices in Espoo by courier.
The manager took his own iPhone home that same evening. He studied it so enthusiastically that it caught the interest of his four-year-old daughter.
As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately.
In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question:
"Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?"
It was at that was the moment that the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
Sure, but their hardware was always great and their software could have been Android.
Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? In the early days of Android, they were the go-to vendor for a close-to-stock Android experience. That could have been Nokia.
Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
> Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware?
I'm looking at HTC - what I see is a company that did great with Android for a short while, then got chewed up as Apple and Samsung ran away with the high end of the market while the Chinese manufacturers gobbled up the bottom end. All the "Nokia should've gone with Android!" comments I see around the internet never try to explain how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola).
> Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
> how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola)
Back in the day Nokia had good hardware, a 40% marketshare, brand recognition, a loyal customer base and a wide distribution network. Certainly noone knows what Android could have done for them, but theoretically they were at a better position to take advantage of it than HTC/Sony/Motorola.
I don't know about HTC Androids, but I've had about 3 Motorola phones and they've been both expensive and low quality. That's not a winning combination, irregardless of what your competition does.
For example I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 1st gen. A phone that when I bought it, I had to replace it in warranty because the color temperature of the screen was uneven and extremely annoying. And I paid at the time the price for a high end phone and got a subpar camera, a screen that doesn't have the contrast of other phones in its generation and a design that feels cheap and bulky. Well, at least it has stock Android on it.
I got basically fooled in buying it, thinking it is a Nexus.
And I could say similar things about Sony. And about LG for that matter. For instance LG had big hits in LG G3 and in Nexus 4 & 5. My wife wanted an LG G5, but apparently it gets overheated, with the customer rep telling us they've had multiple returns. So she went with the Galaxy S7 Edge, because it was the safe choice.
Here's the big problem: if we are talking about exceptional hardware, none of these companies produce good products consistently. Do you know who does that? Apple and Samsung. And back in the day Nokia as well.
Well, since 2010 I've only had two smartphones, both HTC, and in fact the first still works flawlessly (it's just too slow for me with its 768 MB RAM, especially as I use a lot of apps - a coworker of mine who bought it at the same time in 2010 still uses it daily though).
My friends and relatives with Samsung phones have had around 4 of them since that time because they always break.
HTC got started on Windows Mobile phones, and I'd argue that's where a good portion of their initial popularity carried over from. Their HTC Sense Android skinning was basically an Android port of TouchFlo 3D from Windows Mobile.
>Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware?
Lose money on their phone business?
>Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
Not so sure about it. Even the best VR headset would be a niche product for the next 5 years at least. At best it can get to Wii kind of success for HTC, but that's not sustainable. And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
You could say this about basically anything for any company. The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
Sure you can. Nokia was pretty entrenched in the phone business in 2007. Sony has very diverse revenue sources, yet most of them have dwindled due to competition.
Maemo was the 2nd-worst piece of crap anyone ever ran on a phone (just losing out to OpenMoko). It was a disaster. At the time it was competing against BlackBerry OS, that ran rings around it.
Edit: and by the time Maemo was actually running on a _phone_ it was head-to-head against iOS and WebOS. I think you could actually make a good case for WebOS being the greatest ever, but compared to those two Maemo was awful.
What specific concerns did you have with Maemo? Both the N900 and N9 combined "real Linux" with a handful of mass-market apps like Skype and maps, with the N900 having both a hardware keyboard and touchscreen.
Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.
Yes, that appears to be from the N8xx. The N800 was contemporaneous with the iPhone so I don't feel this is an unfair comparison. It shows how Nokia had the notion of touchscreen UIs completely wrong.
I still insist it's an unfair comparison because the linux tablets were a minor sideshow to the symbian phones. Then of course it's a fair comparison in that symbian wasn't great either, but at least they didn't just minimally repurpose a desktop UI.
Did you ever try syncing contacts with a Maemo? Because if you think going into redpill mode and configuring a command line sync so you can get your address book syncing with anything represents anything than a steam mound of UX shit, you are either actually insane, or so out of touch with what any normal human might think of as a reasonable experience that you might as well be.
The chief feature I miss on Android is the ability to user rsync to syncrhonise its content with my PC in a reasonable way. I can rsync to the phone -- but none of the apps are allowed to read the directory thus synced.
Maybe IOs is more forgiving. But how would a terminal emulator help?
Sounds wonderful reat if you enjoy GPRS latency and typing code with soft keyboards. I'd also assume that working with local peripherals work great with that setup?
You're insane. Maemo was fantastic, and completely blew everything away that was out at the time the N900 was released. iOS was awful at the time, and in its nth generation of being awful. WebOS wasn't bad at all, but I'm not seeing the vast difference between it and Maemo that you see (with no explanation), and I was running both.
My main memory of Maemo (I ran an N900 for close to a year, my first smartphone after a couple of Motorola feature phones) is that the features I would have needed to get a decent user experience were never completed by Nokia. There was never a proper app store, the navigation app was close to useless, it didn't integrate well with Nokia's desktop software, etc. And then they just abandoned it.
As for the OS itself, I just remember being surprised at how what seemed (naively) to me to be a lot of RAM for a small device just wasn't enough. Hardly a fault that was unique to Maemo, though. So much bloatware today...
