The Crazy Nokia Designs That Never Saw the Light of Day
The Crazy Nokia Designs That Never Saw the Light of Day
66 comments
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They thought about making a Switch in 2004 ...
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_eabfd363-1d3d-4ba0-8604-7df4f05376c7/
Page 12
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Nice find!
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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.
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How have I not seen this before lmao
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You hold your sandwiches like this? Weirdo…
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Broadly yeah, pinched between my thumb and fingers, though of course I don't eat it vertically lol
🤌🥪
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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.
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We called it "Sidetalkin'".
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Nokia was cool when phones were fun.
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My mom has some weird combination of disorders, hard to determine since she becomes aggressive when advised to visit a psychiatrist. I suppose it's just NPD though. Point is - she makes technical things up and acts insulted when I explain it's nonsense, and doesn't learn. Thus she's so bad with tech that I wouldn't give her an Android phone simply because she won't be able to use it.
So - she still asks from time to time if she can use her old Nokia.
From time to time - because that small unimportant thing about cell standards being phased out, that I blabber, she doesn't even try to catch.
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That one is even more goatse looking than the N-Gage
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Nokia was the Casio of mobile phones. Sad it couldn't keep up with the smartphone era.
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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.
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Classic Microsoft. Never trust a Microsoft anything really.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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”
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The one in the thumbnail looks like it became the N-Gage taco phone.
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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?
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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).
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Too small.
I'd want a "tablet" looking like an A4 rollable metal sheet with a screen on one side (projected at that, so no calamity at that sheet will break it), a fat part on the side with the actual hardware and a few hercon buttons (so that they'd live longer too), a battery that lasts a month and that hardware shouldn't be too powerful. Very limited in fact - like Star Wars datapads are. I, ahem, only think about this because I want a Star Wars datapad.
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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.
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The biggest problem with that is sadly the most functional design also happens to be the most boring.
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It's not the most functional for everyone with every balance of power possible. It's the optimal for casual (dumb) usage with surveillance economy, ads and content consumption, but not production, and when that content is mostly not text.
Idiocracy machine.
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A bendy screen is useless IMHO. Even a flip phone with two screens is better.
Steve Apple isn't the only one to blame for it, Apple just used to great success a few cultural cliches about future technology.
Still, unifying the control device and the display device is very stupid. I understand something with a normal screen for displaying information and a touchscreen for displaying controls.
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Direct Link to the archive: https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/
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Torille
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They released a crude version of the model in the thumbnail. It was the 5510.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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With Android - not cool. With some SBC like RPi in such a box - very cool.
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I wish Nokia was still a big player in the phone business. My favourite (and most unique) phones were Nokia:
N95 - still looks gorgeous and classy and the "slide both ways" design blew my mind at the time. If they would release a new version I would probably buy it.
N-Gage - it was a cool and gimmicky phone, I admit it, only bought it for playing games, but loved how weird it was.
Lumia 920 - I loved windows phones, actually this was my second one and for me it was the best I could wish for. It had great camera, it was fast and looked super cool compared to the android competitors at the time. A shame the era of windows phones didn't last long.
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Fellow WP enthusiast here, bought a wp7 on day 1. MS just couldn't keep from fucking it up. Such a great opportunity with great phones, and soooo much more responsive than the androids at the time. But they couldn't draw in the apps they needed, pushed to the wrong group of people targeting business types weirdly, and then they just kept ruining it with the updates. I miss the early WP days, and music wise I loved zune, it was so much nicer to use than the garbage that was itunes, but once wp got to 10 it started to lose a lot of the charm. I held on to the bitter end and then a little after. So fucking depressing.
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The first phone I bought myself (I had others before, but they where hand-me-downs) was the N900, which should have been the next generation of smartphones/devices. But because of Microsoft and Stephen Elop it wasn't.
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Thank you for the unpaywalled link.
That feature photo device is a text-er’s dream. You could probably get some serious speed out of it.
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Would that thing run any kind of Unix (I'd prefer one of the BSDs, but Linux is fine), I think on such a keyboard I could really use it for many things. As cool as PSP Slim, but more universal.
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Nokia Jaws was the best.
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Paywall, so I can't see the others, but the one on the thumbnail isn't that different to the N-Gage
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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.
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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
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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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That's called "diversification of investments". And what Apple and other companies today are doing is called "putting all resources onto one critical point" (or "milking the golden cow till it's dead", I guess).
Good strategy is to do both. Finding a critical point gives you advantage, but things change and oligopolies gained by past successes don't last forever.
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Those look like real life windows media player skins from the early 2000s.
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I miss my Lumia 820. The UI was so smooth and the free music app in it was amazing for my needs. Sadly it ended before windows phone OS. Now I’ve been using a dumbphone (Nokia too) for 7 years.
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I miss my Nokias. I was rocking a N810 with bluetooth internet sharing to my flip phone when the IPhone came out. It was so much better in every way, especially being able to use the actual www. Same with window phones. we were rocking the full internet and top notch cameras for a decade before iphone finally upped their game.
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I owned the N-Gage and the 5510. I probably would have bought this.
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I tried using the Leaf for a couple weeks. It was interesting.
66 comments