In that photo, does everyone else see the birth control phone in the upper right hand side of the pile? I remember the razr phone and the Nokia brick and the sidekick and all the weird little cell phones we used to have but…I’ve never seen that birth control phone.
I just watched a video essay about design that talked about this, basically before the iPhone manufacturers were trying all kinds of crazy shit, after the iPhone it was black rectangles all around.
Maemo was so much better than any os coming after it… Meego was in my opinion the wrong path to take. I still miss the N900, what an amazing device it was…
I was just waiting for the n900 whining so that I could join in. Damn, I miss my n900. It had flaws but for its time, it was amazing. With a good CPU, I’d buy it today in a heartbeat.
To be fair, Microsoft only bought and killed off the phone division. The rest of Nokia is still around including their R&D department bell labs. You know the same bell labs that’s developed some little know inventions like C and C++, solar panels, the transistor, and UNIX…
Nokia bought the parent company of bell labs in 2016. By that point bell labs had already been completely restructured to the point that it has basically nothing to do with the historical bell labs.
It wasn’t really Microsoft that killed Nokia’s cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.
Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. “Oh, trust us, we’re the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what’s best for the market”. They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.
Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.
I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they’ll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)
I read some articles in the past that before was Nokia bought they worked on some new os. Idk if it was based on android, but I think it might have been Linux. I don’t remember. Microsoft, after the purchase, of course flushed it.
Meltemi. It was supposed to be OS for <100 Euro Linux devices.
The second elop, or how he is known by his friends flop, saw it and saw it was good he killed it. Can’t have something cheaper and better then what daddy Microsoft has.
Of course it was, Symbian is pretty alive and well, Nokia is still one of the main names, then that guy comes, says it’s all burning, closes projects left and right, tanks the company, leaves to work in Microsoft. Oh, and I think he worked in Microsoft before coming to Nokia.
At this point I’ve seen that your comment answered another one, and not about Elop, but I’ve already typed that… Yes, it absolutely could. Nokia has done so many cool things.
Imagine if Maemo phones were a thing. Even if Symbian were still a thing. All that Android vs Apple crap would be happening somewhere far away in the tech third world, like shootouts in westerns.
Yeah he worked in Microsoft before that and when he ended in Nokia the path was quite clear what it would be. But I’ve had the chance to talk with many engineers that were working at Nokia back in the day and the problems didn’t start because of Microsoft.
Basically Nokia had the whole management divided between symbian, maemo, and windows mobile, and as they couldn’t agree on a future path all the efforts were divided. Symbian was quite a disaster at the end and it wouldn’t have gone far most likely, those that wanted to continue with it didn’t have a clear view of the changes coming in the mobile world.
Maemo was great, really advanced, based on Linux, and working really well, maybe too advanced even, specially for your common users back then. The whole system was constantly put down and delayed and the first devices sold wouldn’t even work as a phone, only the 4th ended up with mobile connection, which didn’t help at all to make it useful (wifi was not as big as it is now) and sold.
Finally there was Windows Mobile which was still starting basically then and had far less strength, but with the support of Microsoft behind it it was easier to push it out. I don’t understand why it still has such support when it comes to the UI, I personally never liked it and it felt too simplistic and boring, but the more options the better I guess. Of course once Microsoft managed to plant his own guy inside Nokia they managed to favor the balance towards Win mobile and the other two were left behind more and more.
So Microsoft was a key part in what ended happening but they were not the ones that put Nokia in trouble. That was a lack of direction in the management level.
Japan too. The U.S. Congress threatened Japan with a trade war if they didn’t shutter their TRON project to create a domestic Unix. Nowadays it’s almost entirely Windows, and Japan has stagnated in terms of technology. They might have another chance at it with the world searching for an alternative to Taiwan for semiconductors and the potential legal status of AI training in Japan.
MeeGo was quite good! And the latest Symbian wasn’t that bad either at the time, though I’ve heard the source code was all hacky (hence the creation of MeeGo).
I was just about to post that there were Android phones with keyboards too, but I looked it up to be sure, and by god they are clumsy and ugly in comparison.
Personally I love the screen keyboard solution, I find it very elegant and handy. But I admit I need a big screen for it, but I also like the bigger screen in general better anyway.
I waited through meamo, meego, and tizen hoping for it to take off. Went with Firefox OS and Ubuntu touch instead, which had very little to offer. Not too long ago I felt I had to give up and go with android, and dream of a world where nokia would have taken the meamo/meego/tizen path instead.
My 1020 was my favourite, had it in lemon yellow. Was the first phone I had with a camera bump, took really nice photos for a phone at the time and even shot in raw. I would love another phone with a polycarbonate body.
To be honest, Windows Phone OS was a marvel in terms of user experience and design language. It was a fresh breath on interacting and utilizing the new always online world.
Calling it ‘Bad Software’ is not fair at all.
Too bad MS picked every possible bad decision to cripple it, starting with not putting it’s weight behind the OS at all.
I really, really miss the feeling of being in control of my whole digital existence with just a single glance.
It was a better UI and user experience then Android by the time it launched…but by the time it launched the smartphone market had already exploded and the app developer marketplace had already matured into a profitable sector. There was no incentive to attract enough developers to build out a similar ecosystem on the late to the party Windows Phone
The main incentive twirled around UWP mentality, “Write one app that works on Windows, WP and Xbox automagically”.
I think it was a fucking-a-star idea that could gather fresh developers to a big potential userbase. And surprisingly, it worked for a time as well.
But MS again cold-feeted the platform themselves in a short span and scared everyone.
I actually witnessed many brilliant developers wrote their very first C# code with UWP, only to spin out to other platforms later as WinPhone’s apparent neglect. PocketCasts and Flipboard are two that went very successful on other platforms.
Exacty. The Lumia 925 was so fucking good, and streets ahead of competitors, especially for the price. The camera on that phone made pics that is still better than some phone cameras today, from models that cost double or more!
I’ve been running Launcher 10 on Android for a long while now. Replicates the tile interface and app list/drawer. I think it has ads with an IAP to disable them and another IAP for Live Tiles support.
Yeah, visually there are alternatives on Android, but there were a few features built into WP that Android doesn’t fundamentally support that made the whole difference.
Like having your SO’s all accounts merged under a single node, and seeing everything related to her, be it from WhatsApp, Mail, SMS, Photo Shares etc inside a single tile was awesome. Can Android do that in 2024?
HTC had Blinkfeed for a while which was kind of similar to People Hub. It probably wouldn’t even be feasible these days as so many services have put their APIs behind paywalls.
I’ve been enjoying the launcher 10 launcher on my phone for more than two years now. Whenever I change my launcher, I keep going back to it. I find it to be so productive for my use. And the windows 10 live tiles ui is also great.
I was always in the Android camp because it was more FOSS then, more AOSP. Being said that, another competitor was and is desperately needed. When Windows Phones were in the wild, I had hope. But take a look at Windows 11, if Windows Phone had been a success, by now it would be utter shit.
When they compromised on their UI design to make it more like Android and iOS in WP10, it was already over. It was also such a buggy mess compared to WP8.1.
I’d argue that Windows 11 is a result of what Google has been getting away with Android.
Google has shown Microsoft that the users happily pay money for giving up the control of their device. While Android was open 10 years ago, Google has worked hard to lock it down for 99% of the end users. The amount of personal data they get from each device is staggering.
They all find their way to shit when profit, not user satisfaction, is the ultimate goal. In the end, we are talking Microsoft here, we already know them.
Not to mention google and apple deliberately C&Ding stuff like the awesome first party youtube apps and stuff like project islandwood. They deliberately tried to stop their apps from working because they knew what would happen if WP succeeded.
I had such high hopes for Meego. I feel like even if Nokia moved to Android I’d have been thrilled, I like where they’re headed in the dumb phone market
Oh no I’m aware, I had the n9, n900, and I regret not getting the n950 more than many things in my life. I like sailfish quite a bit but since I don’t live in EU I can’t exactly take full advantage of the android app layer
The Lumia Windows phones were actually pretty nice. App support was lacking but I have never been an app user. I would have kept using mine if the BlackBerry KeyOne hadn’t come out shortly after.
I think it’s common for former BlackBerry stans to go for unconventional phones to replace them. iPhone and typical Android phones are boring to me. I’m currently using a Surface Duo 2 and looking into a foldable as my next phone.
I had a Lumia with Win Phone (I forget the exact model & sw version) and thought it was great - it was super fast, lightweight and the battery life was decent but there weren’t many apps out there, at least not in comparison to Android
Yeah and I do not recall knowing people who thought it would end well. It was universally viewed as a bad move as opposed to developing MeeGo or going Android.
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