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:
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.
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.
Interestingly, the Jolla phone - arguably the descendant of Nokia's smartphone programs - uses Python as one of the native app languages. So it finally made it, albeit outside of Nokia's ecosystem.
You were working on that? I was using that for a prototype app and REALLY liked the productivity after a few years of S60 "C++" programming. So: Thanks!
But I think it was kinda hard to get installation instructions clear enough for our partners to install the Python app. Not that I really remember anymore what the installation steps were...
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.
There's one time, the Nokia C5, a 'feature phone' iirc, the UI was abysmally Bad. 4 nested layers of generic metacategories, until you reach something too cramped to read. Made me feel physically angry.
No. Elop tried to save the handset business, but it was too late. The demise happened during the time when Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was CEO (2006-2010), though I think it actually started already before that, in 2004-2005.
This is a thing I see many people bickering about, but I think they are misguided. Elop tried what he could, and in fact the sale of handset business to Microsoft - which he negotiated - was a very good deal for Nokia, the company (and its shareholders). The price was good. Nokia, the company, is still very much alive and kicking.
The platform for handset business was indeed burning when Elop made the famous speech. His mistake was to signal so strongly to the public the ramp-down of Symbian, which accelerated its demise and loss of sales. But what was laying in the future was clear for anyone to see. The writing was on the wall.
I felt the things were going wrong in about 2005, when Nokia was the market leader, and complacency crept in. Managers and executives forgot about the outside world, and in their comfortable market-leader position the logistics side (always strong in Nokia) was allowed to run things. New phones had under-powered processors, for instance - just to save a few cents a piece, which is huge money when you make millions of devices, but in the end it meant that the user experience suffered and new UX innovations were dumped.
Too much trust in the "we're the gorilla now" position.
It looks a little bit like Apple is now in the same situation. Their cash flow seems unstoppable, but what new are have they recently brought in?
EDIT: FWIW, I was in the infra side (which is still there, although I was made redundant), not in the handset business. I had a lot of friends and former colleagues in the handset side. So I had some visibility and insight to what happened, but no personal axe to grind.
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.
If Windows Phone had done well their profits would have been gutted by cheap Chinese competitors installing Windows Phone, with Microsoft making all the profits in the phone industry like they did in the PC industry. The bold risky strategy with a big payoff was developing their own platform, the safe strategy with a low payoff was Android. Windows Phone was the bold risky strategy without any payoff.
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'.
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.
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)
They'd been working on Maemo for years and it was still at the level of being a tech demo. A fairly basic Linux distro ported to a mobile platform, but no real unified development framework like iOS, Android and WP. They needed something world class immediately, but just flat out didn't have the relevant resources internally to do it.
Blasted thing was a featurephone with a fancy screen.
If it had been anyone but Apple that tried to pitch it, the press had been laughing loudly.
Nah, thing about Android was that it was a free smartphone OS while Windows PocketPC/Mobile had a pr device license.
And Google also offered the OEMs the ability to modify the look and feel of Android way beyond what Microsoft had allowed (the flip clock that HTC uses to this day on their devices started out as part of their custom launcher on WinMob).
>iPhone, far ahead???
>Blasted thing was a featurephone with a fancy screen.
Which is why they never caught on. All the competitors had to do was put equally fancy screens on their phones as well and the iPhone was toast. Or something.
Ah yes, the brand has still been in that use. But that S40 or Asha phone is not manufactured or sold by Nokia corporation. I think the brand license has now expired, so even if Microsoft would make them or hand over the rights to someone else, those devices are no longer made with Nokia name.
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.
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?
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!)
It's a pity Elop killed it, and then sabotaged Nokia with move to Windows Phone. They should have never hired him to begin with. But Nokia's problems started before him. They were torn by internal politics. Instead of pouring all resources into Maemo / Meego, teams were bickering about whether Symbian should get precedence and so on. That was the root of their problems.
The leadership knew Symbian was getting frazzled around the edges, and was Maemo was their experiment with an alternative (the first Maemo interface was effectively their S90 interface ported to GTK), but they didn't want to sink Symbian before they knew they could transition their revenue over.
Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop.
Between that and how HP pretty much installed a revolving door on the CEO office, i wonder if boardroom meddling is a massive curse on tech companies. This because a board will focus on quarterly increases in profits, even if the company is solvent and likely to remain so for a decade or more. Consider Dell taking his namesake company private again so that he could enact long term goals without the board constantly interfering.
Maemo was nice, but setting up the SDK was a nightmare. That coupled with the breaking changes between each major version saw the app pool get smaller and smaller. I left the scene around the time the N810 was about 1 year old as the N900 was going to make all prior hardware obsolete- literally, as in the OS was not targeting it. I still have an N810 in storage somewhere. It was shockingly underpowered when I last used it.
This was a repeating theme in Nokia - get a good technology and fumble it. They did something similar with a cloud enabled RFID based application my company at the time was planning to use. They EOL'd it suddenly just as we'd had all the training and were doing initial R&D to bring it up in our product.
The Qt based stack they had working when I was developing for the N900 was actually pretty nice. The platform-specific documentation was generally horrible, and queries to Nokia tended to be answered with "it's on the wiki somewhere", but overall it was fairly developer-friendly.
As you say, of course, the fact that I was working on rewriting the original Gtk version of the app was a pretty big warning sign.
The soft spot in my heart for "simple genius" remains WebOS. Palm WebOS prefigured pretty much the last 5 years of "innovations" in both android and ios.
In a way, WebOS was reminiscent of Smalltalk or Lisp Machines, it was the future of software hampered by hardware.
This link was apparently posted to HN two days ago when
it was published but with the boring title
"Neo900 2016 Week 47". I think there is probably someone
on HN interested in looking over it, so I posted it to
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613
with a better title hoping someone who should see it sees it,
though the time of day might be bad and even though
I tried to use a better title it might still be too
vague to attract any attention. I looked over the
schematics myself but I don't have any input for the
Neo900 guys, being just a second year EE student
(also, though I'm interested in electronics and
microelectronics I'm still going to go the path
of the power subdisipline as has been my plan
since before I started).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jolla's had a fair bit of financial trouble so unfortunately they've stopped making their own hardware for the moment. Instead they've been concentrating on the OS and trying to get third parties interested (the Intex Aqua Fish is one third party phone running Sailfish).
However they have recently released just a few units of a new phone called the Jolla C. So they're not totally out of the hardware arena.
It'll be interesting to see how they go and if they manage to hang on. I had a Nokia N9 and then a Jolla (which is still my phone now), and I do really like the interface. Although the slightly curved screen on the N9 worked beautifully with the swipe-based Meego interface and the flat screen on the Jolla isn't quite the same.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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 :))
https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Python-prototyping-application...
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.