But the content seems really interesting. These are internal prototypes and documents from Nokia's archive, now released for the first time. I wish there was a way to browse them in chronological order without all this janky graph visualization nonsense.
There's a link in the corner that takes you to the actual archive repository:
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
This seems like it might be a less brain-melting way to browse the content.
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
I was curious, but that mess of a webpage made me close it right away.
> Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena
[0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm.
They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
There's no denying that Nokia screwed up but it was mostly because of stupid politics, not technology.
Nokia could have competed, they were just internally a mess. So, the board wanted to sell to Microsoft, and brought in a guy whose job was to wreck Nokia and shepherd the deal (and pretend like it wasn't intentional.) The N900 showed too much potential, so I assume part of the wrecking was to force them to rewrite Maemo into Meego for the N9, which would be buried on release.
The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
You had an N900. How was the screen worse than any contemporary (or current) capacitive screen? I still an N900 as an mp3 player daily, and I still don't understand.
On N810, GPS was meh. The keyboard was OKish although I believe Psion Series 5 devices had the better (bigger keys). If you got small fingers (esp. young people) you may like the smaller keys more or are OK with it. Back then, websites weren't written yet for capacitive touchscreen (responsive started to after iPhone release). As a DAP, I find N-series Maemo lousy. Turns out physical buttons are great on the move. But the beauty of the these Maemo devices as well as Sharp Zaurus was that you could use them for so much. In theory... cause in practice, you did not have 24/7 internet (until N900 or if you tethered). Battery life was meh. Many websites worked badly. Storage was limited.
> The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
Resistive and capacitive each have their pros and cons. On N900, the gestures (like in Fennec) were innovative but still at infancy. N9 was better gesture-based, as is SailfishOS, though I never used either as daily driver. A resistive UI requires a pen, or large UI whereas a capacitive screen can be used at any time with finger (those 'special' gloves and pens are sold everywhere these days, and is only an issue when its cold). What was needed, for the mobile market to massively succeed, was a different UI than desktop: a user-friendly, capacitive UI with larger interface, and gestures.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs
Blew me away back then, but forgot the name. This archive helped to recover the bits in my head. Thank you!
Something that Nokia was slow to get is also the appeal of the App Store / Play Store as a way of downloading apps easily which was always a problem in the older mobile operating systems.
This means also, that the expected lifetime of a phone is more than 20 years. It must be updateable and durable.
Is this a Nokia Watch or rather a Nokia Cuff?
To me it's a very confusing website, that's also a stuttery mess(Chrome, Win10, Ryzen 4000 6 core). I would much prefer the web page styles of the 90's with just hyperlinks and pictures instead of these fancy orbital sci-fi neural net styles so that some fron-end designers can flex their skills. It looks cool but the UX is bad.
Is this the future of European tech? Online museums to show digital tourists our glorious long gone tech past similar to our IRL museums? The irony is not lost on me.
This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html
> The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.
You can look at the uncurated collection at aalto university repo https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... (not sure if all of the materials digitized/online though)
How do you go from e.g. Vision 99 (if you manage to find it in Wayback machine) to all related entires? https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027
This is all 1960s era concepts.
Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need
> Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
And does wayback machine have this "any wiki"?
Meanwhile the site in question is literally the wiki with hyperlinks you're talking about
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001
You can hover over the "related entries" links to view the images.
I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
Industrial design and engineering R&D are different things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history...
https://www.aalto.fi/sites/default/files/2020-11/Haikio2.pdf
"Pocket office"
"Phone, computer, television, video, all are becoming one"
I guess the technology components were not yet on that level by then.
Battery quality/video quality wasn't up to par for mobile devices. Some DVB-T smartphones were released. Also, WWW wasn't made for touchscreen (where capacitive touch requires more modification than resistive).
I'd say on the Linux-side, Maemo and the internet tablet (NIT) were ahead of their time, still limited given power efficiency, but better than Intel.