[purpleidea]

What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.

We're still waiting to solve that problem...

[msh]

Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.

[pavlov]

> still better for them than what ended up happening

Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013.

There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.

As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.

And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. The cash from Microsoft enabled the investments that made them a network leader.

[rickdeckard]

> Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013. There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.

They paid for a fully operating Windows Phone company with competitive devices and an established brand, at a time when Microsoft had a strong hardware-strategy.

It was the perfect move for both Microsoft and Nokia.

Microsoft even tried to bargain that Nokia had no alternative to sell because of their dependency on Windows Phone OS, so Nokia demonstrated that this is not true by announcing the "Nokia X", a device with skinned fork of Android without Google and Nokia's own App-store in Feb'2014, JUST to close the acquisition deal with Microsoft.

> As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.

Not to forget, Nokia kept almost ALL of their patents AND ownership of the brand in that deal.

[modo_mario]

But they chose a guy who would leave microsoft, accelerate the rot and set them on the windows phone path before that sale? I don't think it was the best value for those assets. They still were a big phone brand with a ton of consumer attachment prior to that even if on the decline. i wanted to buy their phones.

[ulfw]

As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features but they'd likely compete very well in the shut-out-from-most-competition US market and a good chance to be a secondary player in the European markets. Not a leader anymore but a significant player for sure.

Windows Phone was dead on arrival. Throwing yourself behind a losing platform was Nokia's death knell.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

> As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features

This is completely wrong.

The Asian Market is far more diverse than that.

The Nokia brand was extremely strong.

The Asian market was and is very capable of supporting high end phones. It’s a smaller percentage of the market than in the west, but the entire market is also a lot bigger, so the absolute size of the Asian high end phone market is not far off from either the U.S. or European high end phone markets.

[ulfw]

Funny you assume Nokia would be a high end phone brand and that you assume Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi are not.

Reality of 2026 is that those are by far the best Android brands out there. Oppo Find N6 beats any foldable in screen, build quality, cameras, processor, RAM. Vivo X Fold 6 in battery. Oppo Find X9 Ulta, Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Vivo X300 Ultra beat any Apple or Samsung in cameras and battery etc etc

All I am saying is: the market in Asia is a lot more diverse than the one in Europe and a shit ton more diverse than the US market which is basically a duopoly of Apple and Samsung (with minor market share for everyone else Motorola, Nothing, etc). No Oppo, no Vivo, no Xiaomi, no Honor, no Huawei, soon no Oneplus etc.

[justsomehnguy]

Nokia fanboys would never accept anything other than Elop/MS fault.

Even if you shove the sales values in their face and ask to explain why the revenue was dropping for a 3rd year by the time of the Burning Platform memo.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267819/nokias-net-sales-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

And it's always N900 and 'dEvelOpmeNt hIstoRy'.

I'm pretty sure what most of them didn't even read the memo, literally.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

Because they didn’t sell Android phones? More specifically, they didn’t have phones that ran an OS for which all the apps were being built, which practically meant Android since Apple wasn’t licensing iOS.

Going to Windows Phone 7 didn’t solve the fundamental problem they needed to solve. The ecosystem, while also eliminating the ability to differentiate or innovate.

[justsomehnguy]

No, Android has nothing to do with what Nokia did it to itself.

They were making a supbar products and did them for quite a years and people moved while Nokia itself didn't. I need re-iterate what by the time of the memo it was already too late.

If you want - read my previous thoughts on the topic and don't miss the thing about Ovi in the second link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32699296

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35054778

[mjg59]

The N900 shipped two years after the iPhone while still having a resistive touchscreen. In the story of Nokia resisting Apple and Android it's basically irrelevant - it's part of the history that led to the N9, but it's not until we get to the N9 that there's a meaningful response to the market shift they represented.

[regularfry]

Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism but even back then that was partly down to Apple propaganda which caught on because people were used to cheap screens with rubbish resistive sensors. The touchscreen on the N900 was good: high resolution, rigid, fast, accurate, sensitive enough for fingertip use.

[ACCount37]

Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism, and all of it is deserved.

Apple has, correctly, recognized that for a touch-first UI, a resistive touchscreen will always feel worse, wear out worse and perform worse than a glass-integrated capacitive touchscreen. This was a big part of how they got their touch-optimized UI to work and feel this good - which was how they differentiated the first iPhone from the sea of contemporary PDAs.

Nokia sticking with the most half-assed touch UI adaptations, Nokia sticking with resistive tech - all of is symptomatic of Nokia either not understanding what Apple's edge was, or being too slow to react to it.

[mjg59]

The N900 was never really intended to be a mass market device, more something to attract enthusiast excitement and serve as a reasonable developer platform - so in that respect it being kind of half assed isn't too much of a surprise. The problem was it taking another two years until the (in theory) mass-market hardware was ready and also there having been another basically pointless upheaval in dev experience (the shift from Maemo to Meego, which included changing packaging formats), and in that respect the experience was incredibly half assed.

[ACCount37]

Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic were Nokia's first mass produced, mass market "iPhone killers", and they were half-assed responses at best.

Nokia N8 was their first device that was truly competitive with iPhone, and by then, the image of Nokia as a cutting edge smartphone brand was already in decline.

A lot of iPhone's edge, by then, wasn't just in the touch-native UX, but also in app support (developers! developers! developers!), and they had the mindshare advantage there.

Nokia N9 was even better in a vacuum - but was even more late to market, and had even worse app support.

[tverbeure]

Did it have multi-touch?

Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.

(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)

[regularfry]

The fanfare over multi-touch in phones is something I've never understood. It's flashy but phone use (certainly my phone use) is optimised for one thumb, not two fingers.

[justsomehnguy]

If somehow you could have the same phone but with a resistive, single-touch screen and use it just like you use it now, then you would learn what:

a resistive screens do actually need to be pressed instead of just touched, if you never get a literal sore thumb from a touch screen usage - well you don't miss anything but it's quite painful after a while and adds to a carpal tunnel syndrome

a multi-touch sensor greatly helps when you need to discern and filter out the false positives

[tverbeure]

There's a difference between "optimized for" and "it's the only thing you need".

I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.

[hyperhello]

You can do things with your hands (fingers) This gives many people an enormously satisfying feeling.

[mjg59]

And no multitouch.

[ufmace]

I agree, and add that the N900 shipping 2 years later is another piece of proof that Nokia was doomed long-term. It was way too little, way too late. Nokia was never anywhere near the expertise they needed to be a first-class mobile OS platform developer. Apple and Google started executing on features and platform capabilities 10x faster than Nokia ever did, and they never even really tried to figure out how to fix that.

[mehdix]

It hurts reading this after just realizing that I can't unlock my Samsung S24's bootloader anymore (to take control of my phone), because Samsung has decided to erase that feature irreversibly using a remote update.

[no_time]

>Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.

In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.

[ACCount37]

Tivoization should have been strangled in its crib. "Secure boot" as it's used today is the death knell of user freedom.

[brookst]

It’s all tradeoffs. Secure boot sucks for enthusiasts but wow would the phone security / root kit scene be a nightmare without it.

[ACCount37]

Would it?

A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it.

Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users can and can't remove? What operators users can and can't connect to? Then, suddenly, "secure boot" makes an awful lot of sense.

Which is exactly how "secure boot" is treated by vendors nowadays. It's there to "secure" something alright. It's there to chain device software to the device vendor securely.

There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.

[brookst]

> There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.

Yes, because hardware is sold at or below cost, and giving away a general purpose computer without reaping the long term upside is a recipe for disaster.

But look at the prevalence of cheating on PC games versus console and tell me secure boot does nothing for actual security.

[fsflover]

> cheating

> security

How are these two connected? Are you talking about security of companies from the users?

[roundabout-host]

Then tell me how PCs have survived for 40 years, given that you can always install another OS.

[inigyou]

IIRC tivoizing GPLv2 software is illegal in some countries such as Germany. See Steck vs AVM

[Cider9986]

GrapheneOS is fully open source.

[fsflover]

Except the proprietary blobs of course.

[roundabout-host]

I want a UEFI phone.

[Frieren]

> Microsoft

They have fight open source and open standards for so long that it is in their DNA.

Open source and standards are the best most efficient solution, but proprietary platforms have the money to buy politicians and create FUD in the development community.

A big part of the current political situation is derived from platforms owning the public discourse and profiting from human attention.

A world of open standards and open software is a better world.

[alfiedotwtf]

N900. So say we all.