[gmuslera]

Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.

But between their own internal sectors still betting on Symbian, not being open enough and the mole that Microsoft introduced with Elop that opportunity was lost.

From there on there was Sailfish (that never managed to get enough adoption), Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS among others, but no big vendors backing.

And the opportunity moment was already passed, as the de facto platforms for mobile development were iOS and Android, not even Microsoft was successful pushing their own platform there. All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won't give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.

[Tknl]

N900 was my first smartphone and still miss the feeling of having a proper Linux box in my pocket. Unfortunately didn't buy the n9 as it was clear it was dead in the water by the time it came out.

Based on my contacts at Nokia it was simply underfunding, believing that symbian would remain dominant in developing countries and seeing the meamo/meego line as a distracting and expensive side project as well as internal competition which people sought to sabotage internally. Some ex-Nokia people blogged quite extensively on it.

[AndrewOMartin]

Holy f---ing s--t! Did you just reboot your web server through an SSH pipe with your cellphone?!?

[MrMember]

The N900 was phenomenal for its time. One of the best smartphones ever made. If you just wanted to use it as a smartphone you could but if you wanted to dig deeper it was such a versatile and capable device.

[skykooler]

I still use Sailfish OS, but it's becoming more frustrating with more and more things locked into proprietary apps (which are only available for android and ios) with no option to do things over a web interface. Just the other day I had to leave a laundromat because they only accepted payment via their mobile app.

[bad_user]

Nokia may have had an opportunity; however, you may not remember history, but the iPhone 1 was a game changer, and one thing that Android did right was to immediately adapt to the new form factor. Android won its place in the duopoly because it was and still is technically excellent, it adapted faster, and because it was immediately available to use by phone makers, borrowing many good lessons from Windows.

The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.

I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.

[senko]

Nokia had a device on the market, the 770, before iPhone 1 release, and launched a successor, the 800 around the same time. However, for internal political reasons the devices didn’t have a GSM chip. The 800 was comparable to the iPhone: the touchscreen was much worse, but had a keyboard and could multitask.

So, from the technical standpoint they could have adapted much faster. However, the Maemo team didn’t stand a chance against allpowerful Symbian internally. The team was tiny (50ish people on the software side if I recall correctly?), wasn’t given neither the resources nor the goahead to try and build the smartphone on the platform.

It took years for the executive to realize Symbian’s not going to cut it and devote more resources to Maemo. Finally, with the launch of N900 Nokia two years later had a capable horse in the race.

It promptly went to kneecap it by announcing, in the same announcement speech that introduced the N900, that the platform is obsolete and the new version will use a different platform (qt instead of gtk, rh instead of deb, etc etc). It was the worst ever act of self sabotage I have ever seen and to this day I don’t believe it wasn’t a malicious act by some executives, nobody could be that stupid.

Anyways, Nokia proceeded to rewrite the entire platform, tied up with Intel in the process, and just wasted time until Elop told everyone to jump off.

In 2007-2008 Nokia stood a fighting chance, but internal power struggles, short sightedness and politics killed it.

(when I say Nokia I mean the smartphone division)

[mongol]

The N800 was actually before the iPhone too, I know since I had it. This meant I wasn't as impressed by the IPhone as others, but I failed to appreciate the strength of the iPhone too. N800 had a resistive screen and a pen. It had a quite cumbersome interface and was more fragile. Also, it wasn't a phone. But I used it like I use my smartphone today.

[zozbot234]

The LG Prada was the real game changer, the iPhone was just a knock-off.

[pjmlp]

As ex-Nokia, it was a game changer in the US market where Symbian didn't had much luck in the market.

Symbian development community wasn't that happy with Windows on Nokia phones, that is why most pivoted into Android and iOS.

Nokia was mostly an anti-Microsot culture shop when I joined in 2004, we had HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian. Windows was only used as thin client.

[transpute]

Android was fortunate to recruit Matias Duarte with experience from Danger Sidekick and Palm WebOS.

[szundi]

Only thing to add that it was funny how Blackberry didn't get for years that the browser is so important in the phones. Others missed that as well, everyone was doing the stupid half-browser thing. Of course they did as a normal browser needed a level up from their hardwares to be a PC leauge player.

This would have maybe delayed the inevitable though for some years anyway, just sayin.

[transpute]

Blackberry did eventually get their act together, but it was too late. There was a Blackberry KEY2 phone based on Android, with a valiant effort to sandbox Android/Google with Blackberry security policy controls. That phone belongs in a museum of adversarial interoperability, alongside Godzilla/Kong memes.

We need more devices with runtime competition between tech titans. Some is visible on iOS with Apple v. Facebook on ad targeting and contact databases.

[willywanker]

Blackberry was primarily a corporate vendor, their phones were geared for email and Exchange server support, not end users, and their corporate users presumably weren't surfing the internet on their phones regularly. By the time of the iPhone, these features were available to the consumer market as well and it was no longer a unique advantage for them.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won't give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.

I don't know about that. What's left are the things the existing platforms won't give you.

Example: uBlock, but for apps. Runs the app in a container and blocks network requests to tracking servers, or otherwise modifies the app to remove misfeatures. Think: Game Genie for social media apps.

The problem is you don't just need the killer app, you also need all of the existing apps, and hardware to run it on. So the real problem is you need your new system to be able to do that, but simultaneously be able to run common Android apps on common Android hardware.

[plaidphantom]

For those who don't know, DuckDuckGo provides an app tracking blocker for Android that implements itself as an on-device pseudo-VPN and blocks known tracking services. No containerization/sandboxing, but it's a start.

https://spreadprivacy.com/introducing-app-tracking-protectio...

[CalRobert]

I switched from Android to iphone a few months ago because I'm an idiot, and I was really disappointed to find there's apparently no way to set up an ssh tunnel in to my server so I can go to localhost:3000 and check out dagster from my iphone.

10+ years ago I had an HTC touch pro 2 with Lineage OS and I miss it dearly. Amazing hardware keyboard, linux in my pocket, no BS. And that phone originally ran Windows Mobile, funny enough.

[trenchgun]

You can do it, just need third party app

[CalRobert]

Seems like it’s limited to ten minutes max in background by iOS

[nurettin]

Even the N8 was comparable to the android I have today after 14 years. Full touch screen, great battery life, excellent camera quality, great maps, regular OS updates, ran all the software it had smoothly and could be programmed in C++ with Qt Creator.

Then Microsoft came and ruined the N series by making nokia release some broken version of the OS (code named anna and then bella) so that people would buy Lumia. After a couple of months, there was no more application store. What terrible blunder that was.

[pjmlp]

Now imagine the Symbian community, with its anti Windows CE/Pocket PC bias, shortly after doing the whole set of transitions with Caride, Qt Creator, PIPS, being told that after all that transition work, they had to throw everything away and code for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight and XNA in C#.

Naturally most went elsewhere.

[rjzzleep]

> Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.

Meego, Maemo was really early experimentation IMHO. WebOS and Tizen were two worthy contenders, but both of them went to die in enterprise institutions that have no understanding how to create a product. HP absolutely smashed WebOS, and Samsung in its usual ultra hostile fashion destroyed any open source potential Tizen had. HP, Samsung, and Oracle is where Open Source goes to die.

[kamarg]

WebOS was absolutely amazing. The Palm Pre on the other hand felt like plastic trash. I was young enough when it came out that I was dependent on my parents to buy and pay for my phone still and I dragged my dad to a Sprint store at 5:00am to make sure we were first in line to get one so they didn't sell out. When we got there I figured I must have the wrong date because we were the entire line.

I used that Pre until the plastic shell started falling apart and by then the writing was on the wall that it wasn't going to be the next big thing for phones and I regretfully bought my first Android phone with my own hard earned money.

[mlukaszek]

There was also Bada OS, Samsung's attempt to cut the dependency on Android. I was actually running a device with 1.0, and it was surprisingly usable. The investment in building a development community was also there. They released lots of documentation and the SDK. Sadly, they followed with a 2.0 that really wanted to feel like Android (but wasn't).

They obviously didn't want to put all their eggs into one basket and kept releasing Android phones in parallel. Eventually, Bada died a silent death, although some of it probably found its way to Tizen.

[transpute]

Palm/HP WebOS descendant lives as open-source based on OpenEmbedded, shipped on LG TVs.

https://www.webosose.org/

[pjmlp]

And much saner than using Android based TVs.

[kukkeliskuu]

My understanding as well that Nokia bet everything on Symbian.

[10xalphadev]

Wanna buy my N900? I don't miss using it. Especially its abysmal GPS, abysmal video recording, resistive touchscreen, terrible manual calendar sync setup, no choice of map software, etc. etc. Good riddance. That proper keyboard alone couldn't make up for everything else.