
Beyond Nokia: A love story - tellarin
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/20/a-love-story
======
vtuulos
In 2006-2007, just before iPhone was released, we tried to pitch Nokia to
adopt Python as the main language for mobile application development. We even
wrote a book about it:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-
application...](https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-applications-
platform/dp/0470515058)

Python for Symbian (S60) was amazing - arguably the best way to develop
smartphone apps at the time. It made you orders of magnitude more productive
than native, convoluted version of C++. It came with bindings to camera,
accelerometer etc. The underlying vision was to enable large masses of people
to develop mobile apps quickly and thus unlock Nokia's capable hardware that
was buried under a clunky OS.

A Python-based user-driven app ecosystem might not have killed iPhone but it
might have filled some of the vacuum that gave rise to Android. Nokia was way
ahead of its time with many ideas.

~~~
pjmlp
I was an employee on those days and Symbian C++ really required an extra dose
of love, even PIPS didn't make it much better.

Symbian architecture was quite interesting but the tooling was horrendous,
first the Codewarrior IDE, then the two iterations of Eclipse based tooling,
all having a pile of Perl and Bash scripts underneath.

This one reason why external developers went to more pleasant pastures, where
programming didn't meant a daily fight with the tools.

------
hourislate
Nokia was an amazing company. The corporate culture was first class. They had
some of the most intelligent and hard working people I ever met. The Finns are
incredibly talented. There were many folks in the Americas that were
absolutely amazing.

What a shame things worked out the way they did.

~~~
aikah
You can thank Elop and his pals who ruined to company, the same way he ruined
Macromedia before that.

~~~
xenadu02
I'm not so sure about that. I think Elop saw the writing on the wall re:
Android. If their Windows phones had done well he'd look like a genius. If
their Android phones had done well... they'd have scraped a few percentage
points of profit off the market at best? It is doubtful they could have given
Samsung a run for their money but assuming they did their profits would have
been gutted by cheap Chinese competitors.

I'm not sure why anyone signed up to make Android phones. I can only assume it
was panic about how far ahead the iPhone was when it was introduced. Microsoft
and Intel made all the profits in the PC industry, the manufacturers fought
over table scraps. The survivors like Dell quickly moved into enterprise
services where they could make actual money.

The cell phone suckers signed up for the same thing in mobile: Let Google and
the carriers make all the money while they duke it out gladiator-style to eek
out a meager profit. In that situation you're left without the R&D budget to
compete with the likes of Apple (who takes most of the profit in cell phones)
or Samsung (who has a massive conglomerate including chip fabs, a battery
business, and a display business!).

So the tl;dr is that Nokia making Android phones would have been, at best, a
shadow of its former self. It was institutionally incapable of making that
transition because it wanted to protect its former business. They also
believed their carrier relationships would save them (aka the Carrier is the
real customer for phones, not the end-user... end-users will take what the
carrier offers and like it.) Nokia was also incapable of creating their own
platform. The number of surviving companies who have successful done that can
be counted with your fingers and all of them are based on the US west coast.
It takes a software-is-king culture that neither Nokia nor Blackberry ever
had. The only way Blackberry or Nokia survive is to immediately pivot the day
the iPhone is announced, open huge software engineering offices in the Bay
Area, and start developing their own platforms ASAP. Act as if you're going
out of business immediately.

There is also a cautionary tale for startups: By the time you realize your
competitor is going to eat your lunch it may be too late to do anything about
it. You can't wait until you are losing 20% of your customers to react because
it will take you 3-12 months to turn the ship and catch up, then at least as
long again to mature features, inform customers, and hit purchasing windows.
That can be up to two years you've been focused on catching up while your
competitor was free to keep innovating. By the time you get it all sorted out
you'll be losing 80-90% of your customers, only now the market is bigger and
network effects are even stronger so you'll have to work twice as hard to get
back to where you were.

~~~
darklajid
Why are you comparing 'Nokia sells Windows phones' (happened) with 'Nokia
sells Android phones' (<\-- I don't get this).

Whenever I see someone complain about the new directions, the focus on Windows
phones I think of Maemo as the worthy alternative, not Android.

Now, even as a Maemo fan (still wearing the t-shirts to prove it) I still
understand that a completely different system might've been .. difficult
and/or scary. But for me that system was a differentiating factor, something
other than 'another Android'.

~~~
felipeerias
MeeGo was not intended to be a differentiating factor in itself. It was an
open platform with a Free SW base; only some of Nokia's applications were
proprietary. This is not too different from what Android is today.

The problem was that Nokia forgot what their strengths were. Their big problem
was the software side, but in pretty much everything else they were way above
the competition at the time: industrial design, logistics, marketing, sales
channels, etc.

So it was in their best interest to adopt an open platform, because it would
have let them focus in what they did best. But it was a mistake to try to do
it all by themselves so late in the game.

Nokia had actually been working on a touch-based mobile Linux system for
several years (the N770 came out in 2007). If they had bet on that line of
work earlier on, things might have been very different.

~~~
darklajid
I always felt that MeeGo/Maemo were _far_ more open and hack-friendly than
Android ever was.

Yes, there were closed components again, but as far as I was involved Nokia
actually interacted with the community (I was at multiple events, meeting the
Nokia guys of that time). If that happens around Android then I'm completely
unaware of that.

I agree that Nokia was mostly a hardware shop. But I believe that they
might've pulled off with Maemo (or MeeGo) what they did with Symbian.

(I also owned the N800 or N810? Can't quite remember)

------
Abishek_Muthian
I wonder how many of the Ex. Nokia employees joined the HMD (The JV between
Nokia and Foxconn) which would be making the new android powered smartphones.
Btw, India was the last market in which Nokia had a decent grip before
eventually loosing to Samsung & Micromax. Nokia still sells it's feature
phones here & if it could make it's android phones affordable , then it has a
good chance of making a come back at-least in India.

~~~
pekk
The list of competitors in Android is long. They would already be competing on
cost, even more so in India. What would be the point of Nokia making hardware
for Google's OS when there are already so many others at every market segment?

~~~
bergie
I've seen people from Kenya refer to their smartphones (of any manufacturer)
as "my Nokia". So the brand seems to have some value still...

------
whowalrus
A nice little article. I have fond memories of Nokia too:

\- Nokia 1100 was my first mobile phone (the days when you would need to
charge a mobile phone once a week!)

\- The Nokia Lumia 620 was the first smartphone I immediately fell in love
with, both for the OS and the industrial design (it felt so good to hold in my
hands!)

~~~
sjnair96
Yes, Nokia's Symbian (my first smartphone the 5530, little brother to the
5800) and Maemo OS (N900!) were great, and I somewhat miss that era.

~~~
jdright
Maemo was simple genius. Way better than anything even today.

~~~
cheiVia0
Maemo lives on in [https://neo900.org/](https://neo900.org/)

~~~
moyta
I heard about this way back in 2014, why hasn't neo900 progressed much? It
seems like Xunlong is able to turn out new boards based on the A20, H3 and H5
in a matter of weeks at a price point of $7 to $35, with the Linux sunxi
community building a fully free stack for them in rapid order.

Why has it taken so long, and additionally cost so much to produce a single
board? I feel like a project like this needs to just partner with a Chinese
business like Xunlong and specify what they want & with what chipset, like how
the OrangePi Plus 2E was built.

~~~
digi_owl
Likely the Xunlong boards are made in quantities that are 100x that of Neo900,
and are easier to offload and thus have better ROI.

~~~
moyta
If there is demand Xunlong will build a board (or if they think there is
demand), the only sunk costs they seem to have are the minimal inventory they
have on hand.

Board design is all in house, they're the original designer of quite a few
non-Raspi SBCs on the market today, that being said they have just a handful
of employees.

------
plainOldText
I recently bought a Nokia 6310i. I simply wanted to own one, as when I was a
teenager I had always looked up to the business people that had one.

Back in those days this phone even came as an accessory with certain cars,
such as Mercedes-Benz.

However, placing it next to my iPhone made me appreciate our progress and the
possibilities we've opened up by adopting the new smartphones and the whole
app ecosystem.

~~~
digi_owl
Well you are comparing S40 with iOS, so that should not be surprising. But if
you did a comparison with Symbian or Windows PocketPC the difference is
basically skin deep. The most interesting to come out in a decade seems to be
Project Tango.

------
bikamonki
Well, maybe they can collaborate remotely, form a descentralized corporation
and make a new phone :)

~~~
Nition
Some of them sort of did:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla)

~~~
krige
"out of stock" \- oh god dammit

~~~
gulpahum
You should be able to get Intex Aqua Fish phone (a manufacturer in India). It
runs Sailfish 2.0 created by Jolla. (I haven't actually ordered Aqua Fish, so
I can't say much about it). Here's one seller in eBay:

[http://www.ebay.in/itm/Intex-Aqua-Fish-4G-LTE-with-
Qualcomm-...](http://www.ebay.in/itm/Intex-Aqua-Fish-4G-LTE-with-Qualcomm-
Snapdragon-5-2GB-RAM-16-GB-8MP-/282098603976)

~~~
Nition
The original Jolla phone still runs the latest Sailfish versions as well so
it's another option. But the hardware is pretty dated compared to new phones.

------
pksadiq
My first phone was Nokia 1100.

The first time I used internet was in Nokia 3100 (which I love the most).

And what helped me learn programming was Nokia N70 (which I still own). I
still remember the (g)olden days of pys60. :)

~~~
_andromeda_
My first was Nokia 1110 and I also had the N70. I thought N70 was the coolest
device ever.

------
agumonkey
Funny I was just reading the history of most sold cellphones, and how high and
long was Nokia's reign. How quick its fall too. 400M #1 to nothing in two
years.

------
krige
Most of the phones I have ever owned were Nokias (the 3100, a brief stint on
horrible Ericsson k310i, the 6131, and the Lumia 635). I have always found
them to be very sturdy, ergonomic, and responsive.

The 635 in particular I liked so much better than my current Galaxy J3 2016, I
honestly consider switching back and the only thing holding me back is the
hassle of transferring your data between Android/Windows Mobile.

~~~
blauditore
I recently did it (the other way around):

\- Contacts are straightforward, just export/import on their web platforms.

\- Calendar is tricker; I ended up linking my old one to not miss existing
events and just create new events in the new calendar.

Everything else, like photos, mails and 3rd-party apps have not been an issue
for me because they connect to the same clouds/services as before.

Btw, since you can do most migrations from a browser, you may just try it
without buying a phone first.

------
usaphp
I remember working all summer when I was a teenager to be able to purchase a
phone, I bought Nokia 7210 and my friends who worked with me got the Samsung
c100. While the polyphony on their phone was better, mine lasted much longer
even tho I treated it badly, both of their phones dies within 2 years, my
Nokia is still in my drawer and is even turning on :))

