[RecycledEle]

A year before the first iPhone was released, I told Nokia they needed to take their N700 Internet Tablet, add voice calling and text messaging, and offer it in many screen sizes like 3", 4", 5", 6", and 7".

If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.

[jillesvangurp]

You and loads of other people in Nokia. Including me. The N800 actually had a silly webcam and skype running on the device. And Google used it to dual boot early versions of Android on it. This was before they had the first nexus phone to work with.

The only thing it lacked (on purpose) was phone functionality. They were just stubbornly betting the company on Symbian and never committed properly to making a flagship Linux device. So every single maemo and meego device that they launched was encumbered with underpowered hardware, crippled features, or they would just position it as a developer phone and kill all the marketing. Because Symbian was "obviously" their future. There was a pretty big camp in Nokia who did not believe that though. And by the time the iphone and Android had launched the company was panicking and started doing increasingly more erratic things.

They came close a few times with the N8, the N900 and the N9. With the N8 they had a really nice device with aluminium body, oled screen, and 12 megapixel camera (mind you this was 12 years ago). But they chickened out and launched it with Symbian and it kind of was just another underwhelming not quite good enough Symbian device. The N900 was a developer phone and the first proper meego phone. I had one, it was great. But it was also under powered and seriously ugly.

The N9 did eventually launch but years late and with the message that they were shelving the whole meego team and betting the company on windows phone. They even managed to squeeze out an Android phone just before MS completed the acquisition (they promptly killed that). A year or so later, Microsoft bought the phone unit, and then fired the whole lot a year later as soon as they got rid of Steve Balmer.

[upupupandaway]

Now it's easy to see the Windows Phone as a dumb decision, but for us insiders at the time it was a bit of a desperate situation as there was no solution in 4-5 years given the absolute zoo of frameworks that took over the company. I remember being told by my VP that Anssi Vanjoki cried when the OS+Framework+Hardware situation was clearly demoed to the leadership. He knew it was over.

[jillesvangurp]

Anssi Vanjoki was the one that strangled the software strategy and created that mess. First by flogging the dead horse that was Symbian for way too long. And secondly by frustrating the Maemo/Meego strategy for something like seven years. And indeed failing to provide adequate leadership when it came to managing internal UI platforms.

Windows phone was a risky decision and they literally bet the company on it and then MS got all hand wavy about doing an update and then took their sweet time doing that update while Nokia basically died. The whole strategy could have worked but it would have required Microsoft to be way less flaky. And of course having outsourced the future of the company to them, Nokia no longer was in control of their own future. Which was an expensive mistake for Nokia share holders.

[johnnyanmac]

> With the N8 they had a really nice device with aluminium body, oled screen, and 12 megapixel camera (mind you this was 12 years ago). But they chickened out and launched it with Symbian and it kind of was just another underwhelming not quite good enough Symbian device.

in all fairness, there wasn't really a good move to make here yet. IOS was and is closed down, and early android was pretty rough on the software end. and Android device would not necessarily have saved them.

Windows 7 mobile wasnt much better and it was still a ways from the Windows 8 devices. Which was pretty good as devices but was simply too late to capture the network effect. A real shame; I think 3 is the minimum numbers of competitors I'd want for an industry this huge.

[upupupandaway]

I worked there for a long time. The development of Maemo and what came after it was one the biggest slow motion software fuckups at all time. At one point we had:

- Symbian S60, S80, S90. --- Symbian ˆ2, ˆ3, whatever that fuck that was. ----- Something called Open C, to facilitate porting since Symbian was a pain in the ass. ----- EasyApi (Lol). - Maemo - Qt on Maemo - Qt on Symbian - A new Qt-based UI for Maemo that I forgot the name. Orbit I think. - Its version for Symbian (which was called Morbit). - Harmattan (not a UI framework but it was a version of Maemo, a new one) - Then came the Meego disaster.

All at the same time. It was absolutely incredible how we could develop so many development/UI frameworks/OS at the same time and be wrong at all of them. What you see as the best device (N950) was built on a platform that was already dead because the higher-ups decided to merge that with Intel (with a new UI framework if I remember it) and Harmattan was already dead.

I left that company 10+ years ago and I still suffer at how complacency ruined what was the best employer I've ever had. On the positive side, people from the right sides of Nokia had enormous reputation in the marketplace, so for components such as cameras, radios, modems, etc. for all major phone makers (including Apple) you can be 100% sure Nokia people to this day work on it. One imaging team in Finland was hired as a full group by Samsung.

Good times.

[pavlov]

I had an N700 too. Nokia would be in exactly the same place today if their iPhone competitor had been that platform augmented by 3G phone capabilities.

It was a finicky Linux GUI on a resistive screen, conceptually closer to Windows Mobile and Symbian touchscreen devices (like the SonyEricsson phones) than any modern platforms.

Android would have still beaten Nokia to a usable iPhone clone/competitor.

[fsloth]

N700 was underwhelming. N950 was a complete badass in all the ways it was not and in a bette world we would have a vibrant ecosystem on N950 successors. Sadly is was not to be.

[upupupandaway]

The OS lives on: https://sailfishos.org/

[albertgoeswoof]

It had a resistive touch screen and stylus, so it was never going to succeed.

[basch]

People really underestimate the paradigmic leap capacitive touch and momentum scrolling were. iOS didnt mature till probably the 4th phone, but it FELT different immediately.

[ryzvonusef]

I remember the N900, it was such a geeky device, with it's Maemo OS, it had the hallmarks of all the things possible from a small portable handheld, a la Steam Deck.

Nokia was just so pig-headed, why didn't they listen? I remember when Slashdot use to rave about the device, they could have developed a niche, people who were in the mobile app development biz were also fans of the device, they would have developed so many apps of their own volition.

[jarym]

They did a LOT wrong, including thinking their 'customer' were the phone carriers, betting that Nokia understood those 'customers' better, and betting that Apple wouldn't be able to make any meaningful inroads without the carriers.

Apple mostly went around the carriers initially and for the first time consumers started buying phones without a carrier contract in meaningful numbers.

Nokia were proven wrong, hubris got the better of them.

[b3orn]

> Apple mostly went around the carriers initially

The first iPhone was only available with a contract, they literally didn't go around the carriers, at least in the USA (AT&T) and Germany (T-Mobile).

[pjmlp]

We used to tell on the internal shows for products to be announced, that Linux based devices like the N700 that the biggest missing feature was a radio antena, however the feedback was always that they didn't want to step into Symbian business unit.

Back on those days UNIX versus Symbian culture didn't get much along, when the board brough Elop, and what was essencially a UNIX shop working across HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian, most employees and developer community weren't pleased with "we go Windows now".

I was in Espoo the week following the burning platforms memo, and didn't meet anyone that agreed with it.

[upupupandaway]

The only other choice was Android. I was in a team close to the decision. The roadmap (optimistic) shown to the board where we could have a product line based on Meego covering mid-range S60 to something close to the iPhone was three years away.

[pjmlp]

Interesting, although I would say that Symbian Belle did look quite good, and QT/PIPS was going into the right direction as well, but that memo killed the remaining goodwill of the developer community that cared enough for the transition.

And the release of N9 was mostly due to ongoing contracts, which were going to be quite costly by not releasing it at all.

Bummer, but it is as it is.

[cornfutes]

But the thing (n810) had WiMAX? I don’t think the problem was text/voice.

The problem was that it had a resistive touch screen. Samsung already had touchscreen MP3 players that you can install apps on, but it was the capacitive touch at that price point that gave Apple a good 3+ year head start on software. At the time, being able to dial phone numbers with IPhone was mind blowing versus a resistive touch

That’s what was revolutionary about IPhone. They didn’t invent capacitive but they brought it to the $1k range.

Nokia was developing their own OS and App Store, too, but it was the iPhone’s cohesive experience that made everything else fit together

[RecycledEle]

> But the thing (n810) had WiMAX? I don’t think the problem was text/voice

At the time, WiMax was not available in 99% of the US, so that was a non-starter for most of us.

[csomar]

I still remember the N900 when it was first launched. It was revolutionary. Period. It's unfortunate we ended in this situation where phones are just incapable of doing anything but being a camera.

[upupupandaway]

The Maemo dev conferences held by Nokia when the N900 launched had that nice air of old-school-unix-hacker culture. It was inspiring.