They thought about making a Switch in 2004 …
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_eabfd363-1d3d-4ba0-8604-7df4f05376c7/
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Nice find!
Reminds me of my old N-Gage
Taking phone calls on that thing was so strange. You had to hold it like you’d hold a sandwich.
How have I not seen this before lmao
You hold your sandwiches like this? Weirdo…
Broadly yeah, pinched between my thumb and fingers, though of course I don’t eat it vertically lol
🤌🥪
The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.
The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.
The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.
We called it “Sidetalkin’”.
This creepy-ass liminal space mock-up of how one of their stores might look…
Nokia was cool when phones were fun.
I especially like the alien design.
That one is even more goatse looking than the N-Gage
Nokia was the Casio of mobile phones. Sad it couldn’t keep up with the smartphone era.
Nokia was purposely sabotaged by Stephen Elop.
Elop was a Microsoft employee who moved to Nokia to become their CEO.
Elop scrapped Meego as well as the rapidly-improving and highly promising Symbian OS that Nokia had, killed internal projects that used Android, and went all in on Windows Phone 7, a completely unproven platform that just happened to be from his ex employer.
After the market really didn’t like that, Microsoft was able to buy Nokia for a bargain price (€5.4bn), and Elop was given a €18.8m bonus.
Curiosly, that bonus works out as €1 million for every €1 billion that was wiped off Nokia’s market cap during his time as CEO. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…
When he was asked for the good of the company to take a smaller bonus, Elop said that he “couldn’t”.
After the deal to buy Nokia went through, Elop moved to a different cushty position within Microsoft.
Nokia didn’t really fumble smartphones. They were purposely ran into the ground by Microsoft so they could use a powerful brand name as the the thin end of a wedge to take over the phone market, without having to pay much for it. Then Microsoft fumbled it from then on out.
Classic Microsoft. Never trust a Microsoft anything really.
This is how I remembered it. I always see Elop as a trojan horse from Microsoft
all they needed to do is to make the app making/launching easier and more profitable to the devs and I think the OS would be still alive. They pulled the plug too fast.
They chose windows os over android. It was their downfall. The amazingly designed phones we could have had if they would have used Android instead… I miss my old Nokia phones, all of them but especially the 3310.
Windows OS was the better OS as the time, ran great on low spec hardware, and the tile system and integration of apps was a a lot better than anything Android or iOS has to offer at the time. The downfall was hardly any apps, changing the OS so much every update that the people that were developing left the eco-system because they where fed up of having to change their apps again, and hardly any first party apps. The promise that you could run Android apps on your Windows phone device was never delivered. Also Steve doubling down that he was too busy to use apps so why would you want them on your phone thing.
I still love my Lumia and turn in on from time to time
I would have never gotten a Lumia back in 2013 if it ran Android. I would’ve stuck with iOS. Android was hideous and a mess. People here don’t like Microsoft but WP was way ahead of its time in a number of aspects and complemented the Lumia design language really well.
Windows phones were extremily unstable. Android was indeed a mess, but it ran reasonably well on all phones while Windows phones had poor support and many crashed a lot. By the way, I indeed don’t like Microsoft, but I dislike that company as much as Google and almost as much as Apple.
I could swap the word Windows phone and Android in your statement and that was my experience then. This was the Galaxy S3 era where Android ran like a stuttery mess. No apps have ever crashed on my Lumia at least until I installed developer previews towards the end of it’s life (it wasn’t even a supported model to begin with) and it was smooth as butter so I’m not sure where you got this idea from. Have you ever used one back then?
Yeah I had a Moterola. Nearly everyone I knew with a windows phone had issues. It’s also why I switched. But it’s sad though, we need more options. Now I’m hoping for Linux phones, because fuck Apple, fuck Microsoft and fuck Google. Welcome to the age of the technocrats, where people are forced into submission by stripping them of their rights and their privacy by techbro oligarchs.
Are you sure you’re talking about Windows Phone or Windows Mobile because the only Motorola phone I could find online that ran Windows was Windows Mobile from way back in the mid 2000s which is completely different from Windows Phone that came out in the 2010s.
Ah, I guess that must be it than. My time perception is crap, you are probably right. I know I got an iPhone 3 and 4 and switched to android afterwards, a Samsung galaxy 3 to start with. Before the iPhone I had Nokia phones and during that time a Moterola with windows os on in. Thanks for clearing it up though! Too bad they didn’t continue. We need more options and rivalry.
Ok, but that webpad genuinely seems way ahead of it’s time. I want a webpad, and I’m 1000000% sure it’s software is so out of date it would be like running windows 3.1 today.
Still though. How awesome does the webpad look?
Nokia were doing insanely awesome things with their hardware, beyond basically building phones which were impervious to standard human idiocy (hi, I am an average human idiot).
Ah, replaceable batteries…
Honestly, I kept my Nokia going until I got a Fairphone - purely to be able to replace the battery.
It was great when visiting places they just asked me to install some shitty app (ie to view a restaurant menu, etc.) I’d just show them the Nokia and they’d have to treat me ”properly”
Anddd now we have boring slab design, thanks Steve Apple.
But there are tries to make flip phones again with bendy screens - too fragile I think.
The biggest problem with that is sadly the most functional design also happens to be the most boring.
Direct Link to the archive: https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/
Torille
Nokia were crazy back in the day but I think people may remember them a bit too fondly. I remember how whenever there was some new tech or idea they would absolutely trickle them out just to try and squeeze as much money out of you as possible. If there were two new pieces of tech they’d release two phones, with each of them having one of the new pieces of tech. Back in those days they just refused to make the absolute best phone possible. That’s one of the biggest changes that came from the iPhone.
You not think it could’ve been a cost saving measure too though and that putting the two new pieces of tech in one phone would’ve made it too expensive for anyone to buy
As a Nokia Mobile Phones employee in the mid 2000s, I can confirm this was indeed the case. The US wouldn’t pay over $100 for a handset, and Nokia was already losing money on hardware in the phone sale to have it subsidized by network providers. Nokia wanted to add tech and capability, but the high end stuff didn’t sell at a profit and carriers wouldn’t sell phones that were more expensive than their customers would pay. Apple was an exception due to marketing as “premium”.
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I had one in high school. The design was kinda gimmicky but the phone had good features for its time. it had an FM radio receiver, and I remember you could even transfer MP3 files onto it, although it was a hassle to do so.
The beat feature was the “0” button being in the corner of the device, and it would dial 000 several times per week while in my pocket. There was no way to lock the keypad.
That one seems like it would be easy to remake with current day components. Keep the display the same to extend battery life, give it smarter internals and slimmer design. That could be the work phone, the texting phone, the going hiking phone, the daily driver that has several days of battery life.
But the more I think about it, a Bluetooth keyboard paired with a normal smartphone would not need its own phone plan and would provide the physical buttons for typing. It just won’t be as cool as that thing.
The one in the thumbnail looks like it became the N-Gage taco phone.
Paywall, so I can’t see the others, but the one on the thumbnail isn’t that different to the N-Gage
Thanks, was just going to post this. I’ve added the non-paywall link to the post.
Nokia Jaws was the best.
![The Crazy Nokia Designs That Never Saw the Light of Day [Wired]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7bae5b80-f6c7-4a81-b44a-e9763245b5ac.webp){kind=link}