Think about how different the target group for blackberry for example had been, or how little glamour the (mostly) cheap and small nokia phones of the past years had been.
Sorry, what does this mean? Could you explain?
It seemed important. Instead of hiding a technical artefact it was presented to outside world by someone obviously placing a lot of importance on their looks.
I remember specifically being surprised that she didn't put the phone inside the bag.
Where do you see the hate? Everyone seems to have fond memories of Nokia, on the HW, camera and especially their adventurous fashion and industrial design side that's sorely missing these days in the boring smartphone world.
They didn't fail because it was hated, they failed because Apple and Android beat them fair and square before they could adapt to the new world driven by taking a 30% cut of sales of high-level apps in walled garden apps-store ecosystems, instead of one driven by sales of embedded hardware in plastic cases with no money on app sales.
The first iPhone was the opposite of vertical integration. BOM was the same HW parts Nokia, Ericsson and the rest had access to. Samsung ARM SoC, Qualcomm modem, SK NAND, Sharp LCD, basic stuff. Apple had the OS, UX, SW and stuff like full feature HTML browser down to the T in ways that made Nokia and the rest feel like dinosaurs.
Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.
The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.
Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.
In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice
1. Battery runtime
2. Durability
3. Tactile user-input
just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.
For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.
Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.
That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.
Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.
Nokia's real problem was that they didn't have anything to counter the Galaxy S series which was the benchmark in the Android world for many years, so they lost the high-end market by mid-2010 and as Android phones got cheaper they lost the low-end not long after.
Do you have a source for this? I think phone manufacturers prefer whatever sells best, has lowest cost and highest margins, preferably all at once.
And compared to Android, Symbian lagged on all those fronts. At its origins it was still a low-level embedded OS that was forced to mutate into an app-based OS and it showed in UX sluggishness, the convoluted soruce-code, dated build toolchain that took days to compile, and in the lack of cheap and easy ways for indie devs to develop and ship apps to consumers. By the time Symbian opened its source code and app build tools it was too late to compete with Android and iOS.
They tried to persuade us to use Qt to write apps (as alternative to iOS)... and they haven't shipped a single phone with Qt available as toolkit. They told us they might ship an update for N95 and perhaps one other model to pre install the library. At the time when they had literally hundreds of models.
When we finally put an app on their store, they failed to approve it in 6 months (!). Apparently because we chose the whole Europe as launch target so each country's Nokia office had to approve it separately. Silly us.
Afterwards we moved to Android (1.5, with 1.6 coming) and iPhoneOS.
My guess is they didn't realize what telecom was preparing for and decided a foothold in that industry was an investment in telephone future.
They pushed devices with new telecom features into the market to create the benefit for carriers to buy new infrastructure, e.g. "with this new revision of GSM, devices can negotiate the polling period with the network to double the battery runtime. But only if you have the infra to actually answer the device."
It's often forgotten that Microsoft didn't buy "Nokia", they bought the NMP division, and the Networks bit is alive and kicking to this day.
They built telecom infrastructure already in the 1970s, the Nokia Mobile Phones company was created as an independent arm only in ~1989.
(which by no coincidence is the era the GSM standard was created: A global cellular telephony standard allowing interoperability across countries and suppliers)
Nokia's rise started in 1990 when Ollila, who had been the mobile phone lead, was promoted to CEO. This was still very early on (Nokia's first GSM phone only came out in 1992) and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots.
The point is that Nokia was in the telecom sector for DECADES before the Microsoft acquisition of the Handset Division you mentioned.
> "and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots."
Citation needed. Equally I have no idea what that has to do with my initial point that the device business was used to drive the infrastructure business.