Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Ten years ago Microsoft absorbed the handset division of Nokia. The world's biggest operating systems vendor was going mobile in a big way, and buying the erstwhile world leader in mobile phones to ensure its success. It was Microsoft's last push into the mobile market, and Nokia's last grasp at the smartphone market – and it …

[DS999]

Myth of charging Nokias once a week

Sure that was true if it was on standby and you weren't spending more than a few minutes a day on phone calls. But the same is true with modern smartphones. We just never experience it because we use our smartphones for so much else that phone calls account for a minority of the usage minutes for most people these days.

[Dave Pickles]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

You could also use the alarm function without the phone needing to be switched on. I still use a Nokia mobile as a travel alarm clock; it needs charging maybe once a year.

[heyrick]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

My old Samsung S5 Mini is my backup alarm clock. I think I charge it every three weeks. It uses very little power with no radios on and not doing anything other than "shall l make annoying noises now?".

[blindsided]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

my E72 i still use as a notebook

Nokia Notes a fantastic utility

rock solid

WHO NEEDS A CLOUD

when you have a Nokia E72

[Wexford]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

I recall a backpacking trip in 1999 with three friends, all of us Nokia owners. With heavy use (mostly playing Snake while on long rail or bus journeys between cities) we would get four solid days' use from them before needing to find a power point at a hostel, which was part of the fun challenge of travel at the time.

10 years later most backpackers seemed to have a phone, a digital camera and a netbook. The snakes of charging cables were a thing to behold in hostel dorm rooms at the time. I imagine now they'd be back to one single device.

[doublelayer]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

That might have been true of Snake, but looking up some specs from the time, it probably wasn't true of calling. The Nokia 3210 from 1999 advertised a talk time of 3 to 4.5 hours. That was sales time, so I'm inclined to divide it a bit, but let's take that at face value. Every smartphone manages a lot more talk time than that unless the battery is seriously broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

IIRC "talk time" was limited to the 100 minutes a month your package came with, unless you were bill gates and could afford an extra 10 minutes...

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

First contract; I remember it well.

Motorola MR1 on Orange

Talk15 tariff, £35p/m, 15 minutes included

Thereafter 35p per minute, 15p off peak

No charge for SMS, as the MR1 could receive, but not send.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

I tried this with my iPhone 11 Pro. Turned off every radio except basic cellular, disabled every 'auto' function like screen activation, logged out of every online service, and used it for a week in the same way I used to use my old Nokia 6310i; a few calls, some SMSs and calendar/reminders/alarm.

It lasted 3 days.

[juice]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

> Turned off every radio except basic cellular

The cellular connection is pretty energy intensive. I've got an Android phone I use as a backup, which is set to "airplane mode, but with wifi enabled"; that lasts around a week between charges.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

"The cellular connection is pretty energy intensive"

How would you propose using a phone without a cellular connection?

[werdsmith]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

Battery life with cellular only activity is dependent on being able to reach the cell with transmission, if the connection is weak then the phone uses more power on transmit. Even old Nokia bricks didn’t last long if the signal was weak.

There were loads of people mystified after having left their fully charged phone switched on in metal lockers, they found they had a flat battery after a few short hours.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

"Battery life with cellular only activity is dependent on being able to reach the cell with transmission, if the connection is weak then the phone uses more power on transmit. Even old Nokia bricks didn’t last long if the signal was weak.

There were loads of people mystified after having left their fully charged phone switched on in metal lockers, they found they had a flat battery after a few short hours."

Well done. Not the point.

The point was to set up a modern smartphone as close as possible to an old Nokia, and see if it compares in terms of battery longevity. It doesn't, even when you strip everything modern off it.

[werdsmith]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

The point was to set up a modern smartphone as close as possible to an old Nokia, and see if it compares in terms of battery longevity. It doesn't, even when you strip everything modern off it.

oooh whingeypants.

Did your "as close as possible" include using it at the same distance from the same cell with the same cell technology that was available in the 6310 era?

Totally meaningess comparison.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

"Did your "as close as possible" include using it at the same distance from the same cell with the same cell technology that was available in the 6310 era?"

As I said, "...as close as possible".

You're just snippy because you missed the point but are too proud to admit it, and now have to backtrack.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

I can triple the battery life on my (HMD) Nokia smartphone by turning mobile data off.

[doublelayer]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

I tried an Android device provided by an employer with a different low-power configuration: screen off, no apps in use, hotspot on broadcasting a WiFi signal, three devices connected to the hotspot for 24 hours a day, transmitting over the data connection frequently. It lasted five days. When I turned the hotspot off and didn't use much other than messages and MFA apps, it lasted two and a half weeks. So this probably varies based on the device, but it does happen.

[werdsmith]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

I keep an old iPhone 8 with no SIM card, only for its 2FA app that I can’t be bother to migrate. It lasts about 5 days.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: the same is true with modern smartphones

You have got to be kidding me.

I put my Galaxy S22 in airplane mode before going to bed at night. If it is at 100% battery before going to sleep, when I wake up the next day, it's at 90%.

That's 10% lost doing fuck all for eight hours. On that rythm, the battery will die in two and a half days.

A week my ass.

[Zolko]

Re: the same is true with modern smartphones

I've also tried that and my phone goes from 43% to 41% overnight. 100% to 90% is not linear, there is a sharp drop

[iron]

Re: the same is true with modern smartphones

My S22 lasts 3 days on a charge, with use.

My network provider keeps telling me I can have a replacement battery for free and I keep telling them I don't need it.

[Steve Graham]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

My Pixel 5a needs charging less than once a week. It currently shows 26% and estimates 3 days and 22 hours left.

With some experimentation, I discovered that wifi was by far the most voracious battery-eater. So unless actively using it, I turn wifi off. Bluetooth on or off didn't make much difference. It's running LineageOS/MicroG, so isn't wasting energy sending stuff to Google.

Previously, I used a Nokia (HMD) 5, which was a very good budget smartphone. It ran their stock Android, and I was intrigued to see that even when I turned wifi off, my home router showed a permanent 1Mhz association with the device. Not that I'm paranoid or anything.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

"My Pixel 5a needs charging less than once a week."

A stock Pixel 5a would never be able to get even close to this; so your battery saving measures and reflashed OS will be what makes the difference here.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Pixel-5a-battery-test-results-monster-in-disguise_id134849

[juice]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

> Sure that was true if it was on standby and you weren't spending more than a few minutes a day on phone calls

You know you feel old when you see (presumably) young people making this sort of comment...

Admittedly, phones back then were "just" phones - you could make calls, send SMSs and maybe play snake. Or try and look through some WAP text-only websites - which I did quite a lot while sat on the bus to work!

But even with an always-on 2G/GPRS connection, you could still get some amazing battery life.

F'instance, back in the peak Nokia days, I had an Ericsson T39 flip-phone. Ugly wee thing in several ways, but it was tri-band, which proved useful when visiting family in the USA. And with the default "thin" battery, it could go for about a week between charges.

Or, with the "medium" battery, it'd last about two weeks.

However, I opted for the "large" battery; this may have doubled the thickness of the phone, but it also meant that the phone could go for about a month between charges[*]!

Oh, how we laughed when the first WinCE phones appeared, with their daily recharging routines...

Admittedly, smart phones battery lives have improved quite a lot since then. But still, barring a revolution in battery and/or eInk tech, I don't think we'll ever get back to being able to go for a month between charges!

[*] A quick check online suggests that the default battery was 600mah; I'd guess the fat battery was maybe 1500mah?

[doublelayer]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

And how long would it last when using the features? A page online suggests that that largest battery gave you eleven hours of call time, which is great compared to the 4 hours from a 1999 Nokia I discussed in a different comment, but it still limits the applicability of your numbers.

It's hard to figure out how much per-day calling you could get because I don't know how much it drained in standby mode, but we're talking at most 20 minutes per day and likely significantly less. Maybe you just needed the ability to call but didn't use it much. However, a lot of people used a lot more calling than that, either because they received or made business calls on the thing or they just enjoyed talking to their friends. If they did, I'm pretty sure it didn't last a month.

[Martin-73]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

Radiophones.... Radio being short for Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, coming at you from Wish.com

[blindsided]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

Nokia E72 battery vastly superior to iPhone 13 battery

E72 will run at least 30 days without needing a charge

if not connected to network

[Blackjack]

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

It was true on the 1100 and older models, as long as yoi just left it turned on and did nothing with it.

[Dan 55]

"The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

Yes. Well. Nokia worked on turning Maemo into MeeGo but a certain new boss charged in and launched 1 (one) contractually obliged phone in "selected markets" only before killing it off. Yet everyone who tried it loved it.

And then the look (just the look, not the feel) was ripped off wholesale by Samsung.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

I've reused the ringtone and message alert tone from my N9 on all the other handsets I've used since. Just like the phone UI, no gimmicks, just clear and functional. Navigation was also good, provided by "Nokia Maps", before that morphed into Here/Wego

[JimboSmith]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

I went to a launch demonstration of the Windows Phone and I was surprised when they mentioned the very close integration with Farcebook. They showed the contacts (People) and how all the facebook friends from the linked account were now in there. This was touted as a very hip thing to have and something users (doubtless younger than me) would clamour for. Someone pointed out that some of these people (I think it was a dummy account as all the phone numbers I saw had the 555 area code) didn't have any contact details attached to them. Someone else asked what the options were for removing these entries from the phonebook/contacts list, citing a large number of their farcebook friends who had sensibly not given farcebook any contact details. There seemed to be some confusion when deleting them didn't work at all and the girl had to go and ask someone else for help.

A nice bloke came over and explained that no you can't delete them to much concern from our group. He then says not to worry though, you can hide them so they don't appear in the app. He demonstrates this and everyone is happy until the girl then shows the search function and the name that had just been hidden came back. So the same bloke comes back and explains that they are only hidden from the main view, but will show up in a search. If you wanted to remove them permanently from your contacts, you had to unfriend the person on Farcebook. and The "removal" man asked what he was supposed to do with the 600 Fbook friends he had and the response was use the Fbook website not the built in app.

Then I asked about the pictures that were flashing up on the (live?) tile of the People app and asked if the pictures being shown were of people with social media updates. Nope they're just randomly selected which seemed to me to be a missed opportunity. There was no cut & paste which was a huge thing again with the group I was in (this was eventually added). There was also a large black bar down the right hand side with only one thing in it a an arrow in a circle. That seemed like an awful waste of space and that combined with the advertising planned on live tiles that was touted and the lack of expandable storage, made me think at the time that this was an OS that hadn’t been tested on actual users in everyday use. I did buy a Nokia Lumia 1020 second hand to use as a camera. Given on that phone how large the stored raw pictures are on the phone the lack of expandable storage is a serious issue.

I know people who loved and people who hated Windows Phone. What was interesting was how some of the windows fans in that group hated the ‘tiles’ on the phone and yet loved them on their computers in Windows 8 TIFKAM.

[Terry 6]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

Whereas I really liked my Win Phone, and loathed the Win 8 PC OS. The layout worked well for me as a phone,with a limited number of things I needed to do. But not on my actual computer with so many more programmes and stuff.

[43300]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

We had Windows phones at work - I liked them, and for the basic requirements of most users (email, bit of web browsing, calls and texts) they were fine, and the GUI was easier to use than the versions of Android at the time.

It unfortunately became clear that Microsoft wasn't putting any effort into developing it, and that it was probably going to get the chop. As indeed happened.

[Cruachan]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

I liked it too, nice clean interface and the multiple email accounts handling in different icons was really useful to me. MS (not for the first time!) really screwed devs though, with the constant changing both of platforms and development tools. If they'd launched with UWP it might have taken off, at least as a business phone anyway. Was never likely that the consumer apps would have had the same selection as iOS or Android (hence the bridges, which never really worked by the time it was killed off).

[JimboSmith]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

Someone has just very kindly reminded me that whilst the Windows Phone OS had issues at launch, so did the others.

Android and the system bug, where typing a system command ran that command. The infamous example is typing reboot into a text field on the phone, rebooted the phone. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2008-11-08-epic-android-bug-inteprets-your-typing-as-system-commands.html

The iPhone at the launch event where Steve Jobs had to follow a prescribed sequence of steps in the demonstration on stage or the whole thing would have crashed spectacularly. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-rigged-first-iphone-152527272.html

Etc.

[williamyf]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

There are a few reasons for that:

1.) No one wanted to license Maemo. Nokia really wanted to use an OS that was used by other players. Heck even Symbian was Licensed (To SonyE//, Moto and Samsung). Since no one wanted to License MAemo, it was a probably-no-go

2.) Before Elop's arrival, there was an internal feud in Nokia, where the Symbian Guys wanted to nip every flowering OS in the bud, while the New OS guys wanted to Nuke Symbian from orbit. There were more OSs before MAemo and Meego (is just that they never left Nokia)

3.) Elop had four choices:

a.) Stay with Symbian, get done with the civil war, and refine it like there is no tomorrow (belle is a good example of that directon). Symbian was sparse in the use of resources, so a good fit in low income markets. Think of AndroidGO or KaiOS

b.) Make Meego the OS of the future, and go at it completele alone, and using your own money for EVERYTHING (R&D, Coding, Marketing, Mainetenance)

c.) Go android and have no diferentiating factor whatsoever

d.) Go Windows and get a Cool 4.x MI££IARD$ for marketing, and not having to deal with SW R&D, Maintenance and coding costs...

Hindsight is 20/20, but, if I were Elop, with the Info I had at the time, Option 4 looks tempting... I can give you 4 Mi££liard reasons why.

But, I might add, Elop sold himself as a Microsoft Insider, so, perhaphs he should have known that the succesiove versions of the OS would arrive late and buggy, and that the NT kernel would supplant the CE one sooner rather than latter, and prepare accordingly...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

"Elop sold himself as a Microsoft Insider, so, perhaphs he should have known that the succesiove versions of the OS would arrive late and buggy"

Yes, but he'd also have considered that not just acceptable but normal.

[fuzzie]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

Maemo/Meego also suffered from the "partnership" with Intel. Intel got involved, because they wanted desperately to get into the mobile platform market.

At the time, Texas Instruments, owned most of the non-bottom of the market with their OMAP platform/SoC. Those were the days when Intel wanted to get x86 mobile to complete with ever-growing ARM.

Aside: if I understand correctly, OMAP was created for Nokia by TI, because Nokia needed a standard, more integrated platform for cheaper and more reliable phones and to more easily spin out new design at multiple price/performance points.

So Intel and Nokia parted ways and Maemo become MeeGo. And, in the fullness of time, of the grudge release of the Noke N9, MeeGo went open source and SailishOS grew from the ashes of that.

Maemo/MeeGo, apart from a much more modern gesture-based UI, also addressed the painful C++-ish programming model Symbian had.

Nokia had bought Trolltech to get Qt and, under Nokia's stewardship QML came to be. A lot of the mode moden Symbian apps were written with Qt/QML. There was even a Python runtime. Qt/QML was the preferred development programming environment for both modern Symbian and the Maemo/MeeGo/SailfishOS (and even for Ubuntu Touch with Mir/Unity and KDE). So there definitely was a software development path forward from Symbian.

Aside: Symbian Anna/Belle got pretty close to the then-current Android experience and might have been able to tide them over during the switch to Maemon/MeeGo. Save for Elop's "Burning Platform" memo which essentially Osborne'd there entire product line

Aside: Symbian was also (successfully) kept out of the US market by the mobile operators. They crapped themselves when they realised Symbian supported VoIP natively. That could cannibalise their voice revenue streams. It also supported Bluetooth tethering which allowed customers to use their phones as mobile data gateways. Wifi hotspots became the stock workaround for that operator block.

[Greybearded old scrote]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

What I never understood about that was Intel and Nokia both had Linux OSes that used deb packaging and GTK+ widgets. Then Meego was going to be RPM and QT, because nothing delivers your product faster than re-engineering 2/3rds of it.

I had the first of the Maemo tablets, and really liked it. If the internal warfare hadn't prevented it also being a 'phone they could have been in the running.

I remember El Reg referring to the MS/Nokia thing as the loser's alliance.

[captain veg]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

> Nokia worked on turning Maemo into MeeGo but a certain new boss charged in and launched 1 (one) contractually obliged phone in "selected markets" only before killing it off. Yet everyone who tried it loved it.

After losing my beloved N900 I was able to get a colleague in Helsinki to buy an N9 on my behalf. Several strangers (in France) spotted it and asked where I got it from.

-A.

[werdsmith]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

Maemo tech went into Saifish which is still smouldering away in the niche corner. There is also a Russian version that forked off it.

[MarkTriumphant]

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

I loved my N9, and still miss its brilliant usability.

[Joe W]

Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

We liked the Nokia phones, even the low end ones. They were cheap and cheerful, true, but the quite minimalistic (i.e. not a resource hog like Android, or most "modern" software) OS was extremely resource efficient. Even after a few years the phone still felt snappy - better than a mid range Android handset after only two or three years today (at a third of the price!). The UI was intuitive, even my barely computer literate mom figured out most of the stuff by herself. The tiles were a extremely efficient start page, especially live tiles were brilliant. I loved this phone, I loved the OS, and still miss it.

And this is form a guy who has had linux machines only for the last... dunno... 25 years or so.

So neither the OS nor the phones were as bad as the article seems to imply at times.

What killed the phone was the (as mentioned in the article) constant move to ever different kernels and thus the lack of apps (don't piss off your developers). It was mostly good enough for me, but when local public transport or 2FA-apps took off this was pretty annoying. And then my phone died, to be replaced by a stupid Android phone (I tried iPhones as well, I hated the UI even more...).

[simonlb]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

I found the OS really simple and intuitive to use - much, much better than Android was at that time - but it was the lack of apps which was frustrating and eventually forced me to go to an Android handset. After five years of using WinPhone, Android seemed to be a lot better but is still a little clunky in places even now, and I do still wonder what could have been if MS had actually made the commitment to continue to develop it.

[parrot]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

The interface was the bit Microsoft got right in my opinion, tiles customisable for regularly used functions on the front, everything else in an alphabetical list at the back. Simple.

I would love to go back to it, if only it were possible, I find iOS and Android cluttered and unintuitive in comparison.

[Geoff (inMelbourne)]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

I loved the Nokia Windows Phones. I'd buy another one in a heartbeat if that was possible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

Speaking as another Linux fanboi, I really liked windows phones. I never owned one though, at that point in time I was using various cheap candybar phones which did everything I needed.

[mtness]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

You should try Launcher 10 then - saves my sanity every day - I will never get used to Android or ios interface.

[parrot]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

Thank you, that looks great. Currently using an iPhone but will be looking at this when I eventually switch.

[0laf]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

I'd agree the Windows mobile ecosystem might have been a disaster but the UI was excellent and much better than anything before or since imho.

The phones were also very good. I had an excellent Lumia 920 and coveted the 1080.

But MS pretty much abandoned the whole thing at birth, produced 8.2 of the OS which either didn't work on handsets more than a year old or broke them (Sounds a bit like W11).

Plus it wasn't really supported in the wild like iOS and other devices wouldn't play well with it.

Ended up going to Apple. iPhones generally just work well with everything, one assumes because there are fewer versions to deal with. Plus I disliked Android's compulsive need to steal every bit of data it could. I Know apple does too but it feels like they at least warm their hands up before they get started.

[Terry 6]

Re: Hm. From a user perspective (my family...)

Between the Windows phones that I loved and the current iPhone I had 1Plus phones. With a vastly (imho) improved interface and inbuilt app set compared to stock Android. But every s/w update seemed to chip away at the unique features until it was completely Googlified. And I jumped ship.

[Pete 2]

Compatibubble

> But where Nokia failed was on the software side of things

So, much like Microsoft then?

[blindsided]

Re: Compatibubble

Nokia fine

theres too much software now BLOATWARE

[Luke Worm]

Software updates

One thing Nokia never did, or extremely seldom: software updates to existing phones.

"Why give free updates, when users can buy a new phone", Anssi Vanjoki is claimed to have said.

Fortunately, Apple, for example, does not think like that.

[Dan 55]

Re: Software updates

I don't remember it like that. Phones could be updated over the air updates or by connecting it to a computer running Nokia Suite.

Fortunately, Apple, for example, does not think like that.

Because Apple did everything first, right?

[Dave559]

Re: Software updates

But, back then, most people bought their phones direct from their mobile network, with the cost of the phone merged into your mobile tariff monthly bill (If you had suggested paying a few hundred £/€/$ up-front to buy your mobile phone back then, we would have all thought you were mad: far easier for a tenner's-worth of your bill to be paying off the phone cost). Furthermore, unfortunately, the mobile networks wanted to add their own layer of cruft (or feature crippling) to Symbian or Series 40 or whatever on "their" phones, and, so, if there even were any software updates from upstream, you'd be unlikely to ever see them, as the networks didn't update their custom versions, and they also most certainly were very keen to sell you a new contract and a new phone when your current contract term came to an end after a year…

[Dan 55]

Re: Software updates

Networks often didn't bother approve a new firmware version but to get round that Nokia pushed updates to each app instead.

There were also ways to reflash operator-branded firmware with the SIM free version.

I always bought mine SIM free... and it did work out cheaper.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Software updates

"But, back then, most people bought their phones direct from their mobile network, with the cost of the phone merged into your mobile tariff monthly bill (If you had suggested paying a few hundred £/€/$ up-front to buy your mobile phone back then, we would have all thought you were mad: far easier for a tenner's-worth of your bill to be paying off the phone cost)."

With the exception of my very very first mobile back in the mid-90s (which wasn't available SIM-free), every phone I've ever bought was paid for outright. Rolling the costs into a monthly subscription was, and is, a mug's game; you inevitably ended up paying more that way.

[Dave559]

Re: Software updates

"Rolling the costs into a monthly subscription was, and is, a mug's game; you inevitably ended up paying more that way."

Oh, I agree, and especially with the prices of iPhones or other high-end smartphones nowadays, it can make quite a difference.

But, back then, very few people were buying anything other than low or mid category phones (now: only ~20% don't have a smart phone in developed countries; then: very much less than 20% would have actually had a smartphone or high-end feature phone), and a few pounds of the contract price to cover the costs of those sorts of phones wasn't really a particularly big deal. And for many people (including me at that point in time) something like Sam Vimes' Boots Theory applied - I wasn't able to afford to pay the full cost of a phone up-front, but I still needed a phone…

[43300]

Re: Software updates

"With the exception of my very very first mobile back in the mid-90s (which wasn't available SIM-free), every phone I've ever bought was paid for outright. Rolling the costs into a monthly subscription was, and is, a mug's game; you inevitably ended up paying more that way."

Yep, always the same whenever I price it up. Same with business contracts too - I deal with those at work and every time I review it when the contract's up for renewal, the basic SIM-only contract (and buy the handsets outright from Ebyuer, etc) always works out cheaper - usually by a fair amount too.

People do seem willing to spend a lot on phones (mostly via contracts) though. Over the years I've seen a number of colleagues who won't be earning large salaries but have top-end iPhones. A fair chunk of their income must be going on that mobile contract!

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Software updates

Same with cars. A crazy number of new and second hand cars are sold now on PCP and will never actually be 'owned'; it's cheaper on a monthly basis and you don't have to stump up for an all-out purchase meaning you can drive a far nicer car on a far lower income than you would expect, but ultimately it's dead money.

[CountCadaver]

Re: Software updates

I dunno I bought the cheapest car I could get new on PCP (Dacia sandero essential) pre COVID and even without taking into account the rise in used values when I sold it to a different dealer after settling the finance - I still somehow spent £2k less over the 4 years than I did driving a used car previously and that was doing my own repairs

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Software updates

"I still somehow spent £2k less over the 4 years than I did driving a used car previously and that was doing my own repairs"

Too many unknown variables there to make a comparison; used cars can be horrifically expensive even if (and sometimes because) you repair them yourself. My mate at uni back in the 80s bought an ex-taxi Mercedes S class (450 SEL if I remember correctly); had done a million miles and cost him about 30p to buy. First time it needed servicing it cost 4 grand in parts; he scrapped the car and called it quits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Software updates

"Rolling the costs into a monthly subscription was, and is, a mug's game; you inevitably ended up paying more that way."

That's been true for some time now but wasn't always the case. For a while network operators were getting a very healthy discount on the phone hardware they were bundling, and were also willing to pass this discount on to the end customer if it meant keeping the valuable airtime contract going. My wife had a couple of Samsung Galaxy phones (S3 and S5, maybe? it was a while back) on bundled phone+airtime deals that cost less over the lifetime of the contract than the new handset would have cost on it's own.

[Shuki26]

Re: Software updates

If you could successfully install and use Nokia Suite. Unfortunately, I was not able ever...

[fuzzie]

Re: Software updates

Firmware updates wasn't non-existent, just rarer. Even my old Siemens (remember when they still made phone) could be updated, though it was over a serial cable.

Most people just seldom updated, because the Internet wasn't as universal as it is today. Also, I imagine even the idea of having/wanting to update a phone was pretty foreign to non-tech people.

Often you could get firmware updates by going to your mobile provider and they'd do it for you.

Granted, with Symbian, the updates often had to go via the mobile operator, because they often specced the feature set and if they couldn't be bothered, you'd be stuffed. Exactly the same happened with Android until Google started doing the operator run-around by moving more and more things into Google Play Services.

[UnknownUnknown]

Re: Software updates

Or update your phone via the bucket of shite that was iTunes. Like playing roulette.

[williamyf]

Re: Software updates

Nokia was in a similar boat to android, OtA updates were gated by the operator. But, if you knew what you were doing, you could flash/update your Symbian device. I did so many times to My E71. Having said that, it was a VERY involved process.

The tie up with microsoft actually IMPROVED on that situation, OtA updates were still gated by the operators, but updatying yourself manually was significantly easier than before. As a matter of fact, easier than android at the time.

[Joe W]

Re: Software updates

I had a cheap Lumia, the cheapest one (or second-cheapest?). It received several software updates over its lifetime - more than my Motorola and my LG combined (I think).

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Software updates

"One thing Nokia never did, or extremely seldom: software updates to existing phones.

"Why give free updates, when users can buy a new phone", Anssi Vanjoki is claimed to have said.

Fortunately, Apple, for example, does not think like that."

I really don't know whether to up- or downvote your post. On the one hand, exhaustively testing a phone before release means you can in theory get away without needing to update it. But in reality that's impractical, there will ALWAYS be factors you weren't able to consider during testing; usually security related. Ergo: never updating a reasonably connected device is going to get you in trouble.

On the other hand, being able to remotely update a product is often abused by manufacturers who see it as a free pass to sell poorly thought out, insecure buggy messes; under the banner of "well we'll fix it in post and push out an update". This is objectively A Bad Thing.

[werdsmith]

Re: Software updates

In the days when phones had less access to wifi and data over slow 2G or 3G was expensive there was less desire for frequent updates, especially ota. And most end users weren’t about to get a windows app, cable, account etc to update - though this worked for GPS units where it was essential, phones didn’t need it so much,

[Dave123]

Re: Software updates

Nokia benefitted from being leader in both network and handset. They didn't need to update the handset software as they knew it would work as they had tested it in house against the incumbent network vendor, themselves.

Lesser handset manufacturers were faced with having to pay mobile networks to patch their networks whenever they had screwed up, as it was near impossible to rollout patches to handsets.

For me, the irony was Nokia laid off most of Nokia Networks (including me) in 1999 to focus on the profitable handsets side. To then have to pivot back to networks after the handsets side shrivelled away.

[hammarbtyp]

"Users found Windows Mobile power hungry and difficult to use."

Well there's an understatement. I had one and it was pretty awful. The engineers basically tried to port a windows desktop onto a screen the size of 2 by 1 inches. Clearly it was never going to work and redesign was need, but MS was fanatical about desktop synergy. They could not see how the phone would usurp the desktop, and just thought of it as an addendum.

I was working for Ericsson at about the same time. Ericsson phones were never as popular as Nokias. They basically missed two things. One Nokia had managed to hide the aerial (Ericsson best had a shark fin). It does not seem much, but the ability to stick a phone in a back pocket and not snap off the aerial was quite big. Secondly Nokia had interchangeable covers. Again seems petty, but users really don't care about things like voice quality, but being able to change the colour of your phone was seen as cool. Ericsson was too corporate to do that, so there phones were well engineered but dull.

At one point it was announced that MS would partner Ericsson in phones. It never went anywhere but i remember a picture of a phone with CTRL-ALT-DEL buttons on it appeared on poster boards in Sweden

While Elop may of been right, the west coast approach was never going to work in Finland. There was too much of a culture clash between the software and hardware teams. The facty that MS basically cut Nokia knees off with Windows 8, showed there was just no synergy, and it was always going to end badly

[Dave559]

Ericsson

@hammarbtyp Ericsson definitely deserve some kudos for the T610 [1]! By then, they had managed to avoid the need for the aerial to protrude, and it was a really stylish phone with some great features (including a web browser and Bluetooth). I must have had and used mine for at least 5 or 6 years, because there just didn't seem to be anything newer coming along which really had any noticeably better features that I felt were worth paying for. Eventually, the likes of the Nokia N95 appeared, but at what seemed (at the time) an unbelievably expensive price (if only we knew…), and, although very cool, I still didn't need anything that flashy. I finally eventually replaced my T610 with a Nokia 6120 classic, which was a compact Symbian smartphone at an affordable price (on contract).

[1] And the Ericsson Symbian smartphones were pretty cool as well, but well out of my price range and not really intended for ordinary people just at the start of their working life…

[jemmyww]

Re: Ericsson

The K*i phones by Sony Ericsson were awesome. They had no aerial. I had them from 2005-2007 when I had moved to a country that didn't have those models and had dropped and broke my last one.

[Joe W]

What? Power hungry and difficult to use?

Ok, maybe we are talking about different versions of Windows Phone - the Win 8 layout (the tiles) suck allmighty on non-touchscreen devices, which is most desktop machines. They wok quite well on the small (and those phones were indeed small, or rather: sensibly sized) touch screen of those phones. The MS engineers tried to port the mobile UI (TIFKAM the interface formerly known as metro) to the desktop, which annoyed most people (I remember rather scathing remarks in this forum...).

Also: If my mom can figure the phone out it is easy to use.

[Lord Elpuss]

I actually loved the shark fin. I forget the model number but I had a tiny little SE with a shark fin back in the 00's - had a blue backlight, active keypad flip with (I think?) a button to release it on the side, a magnesium body (still remember it being cold to the touch when I took the battery off) and was supplied with 2 batteries; a wafer-thin LiPo, and a slightly thicker all-day battery.

Adored the phone from a hardware perspective, but always preferred the Nokia UI.

[Charlie Clark]

My first ever mobile phone was a Hagenuk with no visible aerial and this was quite a few years before this became mainstream. I think the maths behind were quite complex and it obviously wasn't a priority for most consumers until it became ubiquitous. I did have a couple of Ericssons and found them easier to use (both in the hand and software) than Nokia's. But by then Nokia had discovered the importance of "fashion" and was getting customers following the Swatch approach but also through software enabled features like logos and ringtones.

[Anonymous Coward]

While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

Windows mobile was an (occasionally) splendored thing. HTC realized the middle versions potential with it's excellent Raphael platform, though Nokia level battery life was not on of it's hallmarks.

The people I knew with Lumias loved them, if you just wanted a nicely operating phone they were solid.

It's interesting how the collective memory drifts. WinCE was pretty good until it came up in the expert testimony for the M$ antitrust suits. Balmer in particular was reportedly not pleased, likely neither was Bill, and the Win CE team was put on the back bench and left to watch year after year of cuts and interference for the legal embarrassment. It was good, then it sucked more with each release. Then when the mobile space heated up they just tried to throw some polish on what they broke in a multi-year tantrum. So M$ squandered the first chance to beat blackberry and palm to the punch.

They then chased android and the iPhone. And after the M$ loss in antitrust court and decades of appeals, Google was riding high knowing they could dump their "Free" phone OS and if M$ tried to match them they'd get in hot water. Not to mention that M$ had already burned the ODMs with WinCE and blown it's credibility. So everyone expected them to dump Win8/Lumia even when they were flushing billions down the loo to prove they weren't dumping Lumia. Or Zune.

Nokia started an internal war with itself, pushing two competing OS teams. Big surprise that team "old clunker" choked out team "snot nosed punks". Old age and treachery. But the "safe" choice couldn't evolve to keep pace with the market, and until Jobs broke the market, the carriers were buying handsets based on checkbox lists. Only a few flagships moved the needle in design or function. Worse, not only Nokia but the whole rest of the market seemed happy to forget it's successes. A killer phone would be ruined in an update and then be cancelled, and good features in one design would be butchered in the next. And Moblin was murdered in a catch and kill where they merged with Nokia's failing project and got sucked down with it instead of becoming a fully open source Android alternative.

The first gen iPhone was a hot mess in many ways, but the market had to chase it. So was the blackberry. Nokia had it's golden age, but it took it's eye off the ball. M$ could have seized the narrative back with the best of the side-slider HTCs, but gave the form factor that most favored it to Android. And the Androids dumped it to become iPhone clones. The market was defined as much by it's constant failures of vision as it's successes. Apple went overboard on minimalism Skeuomorphism and then about faced and overloaded it's touch controls with too many overlapping controls and gestures.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

"The first gen iPhone was a hot mess in many ways"

In which ways? Comparing it to other phones of the day?

[werdsmith]

Re: While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

It was 2G only, when other phones were 3G. It depended con awful itunes which is still awful to this day.

And the decision to control app development limited to web apps was quickly proven to be nuts.

I didn’t jump onto iPhone until 4S. Before that, the fancy UI was the only thing going for it.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

"It was 2G only, when other phones were 3G"

Some were. Many weren't.

"It depended con awful itunes which is still awful to this day."

Only to register it. And for music if you cared, but even then the combo and integration at the time of launch was superior to every other phone of the day. It was only as time moved on and better solutions emerged that iTunes became a millstone around the iPhone's neck.

"And the decision to control app development limited to web apps was quickly proven to be nuts."

Again - compared to other phones of the day it was a fine solution. Judging it by modern standards is like comparing the first automobile to a horse-drawn carriage and criticizing it because 'petrol's a bit hard to find'. It was still light years ahead of the competition at the time of launch.

"Before that, the fancy UI was the only thing going for it."

Really. REALLY. You're saying the only thing the original iPhone had going for it was a 'fancy UI'?

[jeffdyer]

Re: While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

I think I remember the first iPhones couldn't run more than one application at a time while Symbian S60 certainly could

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

iPhones could (and did) technically multitask from the very first generation, but the list of apps that had this enabled was very small - and they were all Apple apps. Example: the iPod app continued in the background while you were working in other apps.

'True' multitasking as we know it today, where you can switch between apps and they continued to run without necessarily having focus, was introduced in iOS4.

[Slions]

Stupid execs

They only had to stick to Symbian and its large install base instead of trying out 4 other platforms who never ever took off...

Such incompetence is mind blowing.

[Dave559]

Re: Stupid execs

Symbian was a product of much earlier times, and, arguably, was starting to be getting a bit long in the tooth by then (or so the story goes, it was still pretty much good enough for me as a user). But Nokia should have been looking more to the future and not resting on its laurels so much, and it should have kicked Maemo/MeeGo development up a gear, once it became clear that Apple was becoming a serious player.

They probably could have kept Symbian going for another couple of years at most, while getting MeeGo properly ready for widespread release, but naïvely thinking that (m)any Symbian users would ever willingly jump ship to Windows Phone was just never going to happen.

[Dan 55]

Re: Stupid execs

The plan was compiling very similar code for Symbian and MeeGo using Qt Mobility for the GUI and uploading it to both app stores. Then Elop came in and burnt everything down.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Stupid execs

Psion showed what was possible with EPOC. Symbian, as Andrew Orlowski covered in detail, was not really hampered by being per se difficult to write for, but by the fact that Nokia wanted to license the OS to competitors and thus felt the need to differentiate it through the GUI. Had it open-sourced Symbian so that there was just one GUI to target, things could have been very different. This is what Google could afford to do with Android.

Maemo was not ready for the mass market and probably never would have been without the kind of tightly integrated GUI that Symbian and Android could offer. Those who bought the phones with it loved it but they (all two of them) wanted Linux on a phone.

[Slions]

Re: Stupid execs

Fair points, thankfully Symbian was open sourced but much too late. I can even compile most of it on Windows and even target Android. Very true that their UI strategy is what most certainly failed them in the end. UIQ, S60 was there S80 too at some point for the communicators then Belle which was based on S60 though if I recall.

[doublelayer]

Re: Stupid execs

"They only had to stick to Symbian and its large install base instead of trying out 4 other platforms who never ever took off..."

That doesn't work forever. Eventually, people want new features and if one manufacturer isn't providing them, they'll buy from a different one. This is especially true for things that don't have much connected to them. Switching from Windows to something else means finding new applications. Switching from Symbian to Android only meant that for those users who had many applications running on their phones, and while some existed, there were fewer of them and fewer people using their phones for such things than there are today. That means that a lot of users looking at the two only had to consider learning a new interface when switching.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Stupid execs

And yet CEOs are the american heros everywhere you look.

Its one of lifes great mysteries why such utterly useless bullshitters are made into heros and paid millions or billions aswell for being the most usless in their respective companes.

[STOP_FORTH]

Nokia menus

Nobody has ever approached the simplicity of Nokia's menus.

If you received an SMS the reply option was one click/press/keystroke away.

I was given a Motorola at work to replace my Nokia because it had to work in the USA, Europe, China and some other weird places. (Triband?)

It was about 8 presses to reply to an SMS.

[sarusa]

Re: Nokia menus

On my Android and iOS phones, replying to a text is one click away. But for a non-touch screen feature phone I guess they had it about as friction free as it could be.

[STOP_FORTH]

Re: Nokia menus

Yes, I was specifically referring to button boxes. Hence choice of icon.

You could drop an old Nokia on the floor, run it over with a taxi, hammer nails into wood etc. So it wasn't just battery life and menus, they were absolute units. (As I believe the kids say.)

And they had decent microphones.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Nokia menus

Cheap and cheerful certainly doesn't describe the older Nokias such as my original Communicator. The later one was definitely not so good. There's an eerie parallel to HP.here.

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: Nokia menus

I distinctly remember counting the button presses on my Motorola to set an alarm, probably shortly before I ranted loudly and at length to anyone in earshot about how ridiculous the UI was. I also remember the day my contract was up, snapping it in half and dropping it into a pint. Never bought Motorola again.

[STOP_FORTH]

Re: Nokia menus

My latest Android 'phone is a Motorola. It's fine.

Their button devices however .......

[Jon 37]

Re: Nokia menus

The advantage of Android, is it gives a decent standard UI.

That makes it slightly harder for the incompetents at Motorola to screw it up, compared to if you let them write a whole UI from scratch.

(I wouldn't know about their Android phones. I had one of their button phones and will never buy one of their phones again, the UI was that terrible).

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Nokia menus

To be a little bit fair to Motorola, my first mobile phone was an MR1; the 2-line UI was fine for the six or so functions that it offered.

My second (and last) Motorola was a Timeport L7089; competent if unremarkable UI, but it did have voice recognition and an awesome poison-green backlight.

[ITMA]

Re: Nokia menus

"I also remember the day my contract was up, snapping it in half and dropping it into a pint..."

Heathen! What a waste of a pint....

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Nokia menus

Depends on whose pint it was

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Nokia menus

He didn't say he didn't drink it afterwards...

[STOP_FORTH]

Re: Nokia menus

I had the same issue with setting the alarm on a Motorola. Frightful menu structure.

You couldn't snap a Nokia in half!

When triband Nokia's arrived I reverted.

Then the three sausage company took us over and gave us all Sony-Ericssons.

Then I stopped travelling and they took it away.

Crap 'phone problem solved.

[Shuki26]

Re: Nokia menus

Definitely! and I think on the Nokia 2100 series you could progress through the menu by using a series of numbers instead of needing to go through the lists each time e.g. main butto-3-5-7

[JimboSmith]

Re: Nokia menus

Back in the Nokia days I had an ex school mate who was now flogging phones for a living. His party trick was to change the language on your phone to something other than English without looking at the phone. He could also change it back without looking too, if he liked you

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Nokia menus

Motorola is a bad example to use to make your point because they were truely awful (Siemens were also similarly clunky and this persists today in their household devices). Initially, many of the phones were made to demonstrate the network and boy, did it show! But Ericssons menus were also pretty easy to work with, but by then Nokia had mastered low-cost manufacturing and was using this to get volumes as phone ownership really took off around the millennium.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nokia menus

LOL - that made me laugh! Brought back memories of my one and only Motorola (a flip phone). Couldn’t wait to get rid of it. Have an upvote!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see.

"We have the most popular phones in the world. So let's bin those and just do windows phone. "

What could possibly go wrong?

[aerogems]

I'll give you a hint: It's bald and is alleged to have thrown chairs at people.

[sarusa]

On the way down

This was after the nGage, and after Nokia fought hard against doing anything touch screen because that's a fad (there was the 7710, but that was meh, and they obviously believed much more in things like the N95), so yeah, they were on the way down. And then add Microsoft desperately trying to claw back into smartphones and you've got a 'you got your poop in my puke!' 'no, you got your puke in my poop!' situation.

(There are Nokia branded Android smartphones since, but very meh).

[aerogems]

Windows Phone 8 was great. Maybe the best mobile OS that has yet been created. Someone took the time to really think about how people interact with a touch screen and designed a UI around that instead of just trying to use the same desktop metaphor bullshit Apple and Google were doing, the Xerox coattails everyone's been riding for the past 30+ years because perish the notion that someone have an original idea. There are still things you could do in Windows Phone 8 that you can't with Android or iOS. All the things people claim to love about the Windows 10 Start Menu (now anyway, when Windows 10 came out, everyone claimed they hated it, but that's another topic for another time) came directly from Windows Phone 8. The problem is it was far too late to do any real good. Android and iOS had pretty well stitched up the entire market so app developers didn't really want to bother with it. Then Microsoft made the ill-fated (it probably seemed like a good idea without the benefit of hindsight) to pay people to create apps for their platform, which just resulted in a lot of really low effort garbage.

Then it seems Windows Phone got stuck in the development hell of Microsoft's effort to unify all their disparate platforms under a common kernel and they weren't going to be ready anywhere near in time for the launch of the Surface Duo, so it got the axe in favor of Android. I could swear El Reg did a piece on the video of the pre-release software that someone got their hands on, which had some interesting concepts in it, but was also about as stable as someone one pint away from alcohol poisoning.

[Terry 6]

The app thing also created a kind of melting snowball. Because there were too few available and the reviews made a point of stating this, so it put the punters off, so there weren't the sales to attract software development, so no decent new apps came along in the early months after release. And so on.

[UnknownUnknown]

Why Microsoft could not just write the Windows Mobile App’s that were missing themselves. Not like they weren’t a big global software house.

Hey XYZ - do you want 6 engineers for 6 months to port your popular app to our platform - gratis.

The equally App starved (and also power hungry) bastard half brother Windows RT seems not even to deserve a mention. Odd.

Even extensive Windows Mobile product placement on NCIS did not help.

[aerogems]

The Gates & Ballmer* years of Microsoft had a well deserved reputation for using dirty tricks to undercut any actual or perceived competition. So, there'd be a real (and justified) fear that if MS seconded a couple software engineers to port your app, it might end up being that MS made their own almost identical app, or the key bits were integrated into the OS rendering your app useless. Plus, it's not like they had an infinite supply of software developers, and trying to read and/or understand someone else's code is no small thing.

* The Nadella regime is far from perfect, but doesn't seem to be doing a lot of the underhanded shit Gates and Ballmer did, and is focused more on going to where customers are instead of forcing customers to come to them

[Jamessta]

I was working for Microsoft at the time, and this was perhaps the most asked question. My memory was a combination of reasons. The internal divisions cannot be overstated with Sinofsky, Nadella (Office vs O/S) and a corporate jealousy that all these apps were being written for ios with such passion by the dev community. Microsoft just wasn't a company to be very proud of in those days, too many GMs trading on "I shipped Windows blah blah..."

[shraap]

Strong agree! Although (with hindsight, and well-outlined in this article) there were a bunch of reasons it was probably too late already, that combo of Win Phone 8 and a Lumia 1020 still remain my favourite phone and OS combo ever.

.

Exactly like you say, the thinking about 'live tiles' and the way to surface data matched how I actually think about data/contacts/etc. and how I instinctively use a phone, and nothing since has come close. For me, both the main phone OSes are a case of "learn to live with" rather than "this is so nice to use".

(And like you, most ppl I know who've used WinMo either love it or despise it)

[Joe W]

I wish there was a sensible successor to this... I really liked my Lumia 520 (or whatever it was).

[Dan 55]

Windows Phone 6.5 apps couldn't be run on Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7 apps couldn't be run on Windows Phone 8. By the second time around there was no reason to stick with Windows Phone if it was just as incompatible as Android or iOS. If you really wanted to kill off your own platform, that would be the way to go about it.

And Nokia of course couldn't do anything about it... if they'd have stuck with the Symbian to MeeGo transition plan it would have been more compatible than Windows Phone. But that would have required a boss who wasn't a trojan horse.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Public Service Announcement

Despite goofing up so badly that billions of valuta went into a black hole, a highly regarded corporation went extinct and thousands lost their jobs, Ballmer, Elop, and Kallasvuo still have more money than you or I could spend in several lifetimes.

[williamyf]

Re: Public Service Announcement

IF by "ha highly regarded corporation went extinct" you are talking about nokia, well, nokia is alive and well.

They reinvented themselves many times, and the loss of the HAndset arm sparked a new reinvention as the third largest Telecom provider on earth (Huawey and E// alternate the 1 & 2 Spots, ZTE is the perennial #4)

Nokia still exists, it is still very big, it just hiding from consummer electronics and such. But those who know, know.

[blindsided]

Re: Public Service Announcement

still very big, just like Apple I guess...

[RLWatkins]

Re: Public Service Announcement

Not only did Nokia not go extinct, when they sold their mobile phone division to Microsoft, they kept their towers and they kept their entire portfolio of basic patents.

I thought it kind of ironic: they hired a Microsoft exec, he wrecked their mobile phone division, so they sold its corpse to Microsoft for a lot of money. Not just ironic, not just poetic justice, but down right hilarious.

Nokia is doing just fine.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Public Service Announcement

As a business which is doing fine but with their name used by HMD - what if they were to buy up HMD, bring manufacturing back in house with the build quality of the originals?

[Dan 55]

Re: Public Service Announcement

It seems the relationship between Nokia and HMD is growing further apart, HMD have decided to sell phones under their own brand name now as well as Nokia's.

[doublerot13]

Ok... this could be b*llocks...

I spoke to a former Motorola engineer (who was actually really sh*t) years ago who claimed Motorola and Ericsson only helped Google develop Android on the condition Nokia were not allowed to use it.

I always wondered if there was some truth to this, given a vanilla Android phone with Nokia build quality would have been amazing back then.

[A. Coatsworth]

Re: Ok... this could be b*llocks...

Too little too late, but vanilla Android with Nokia build quality is what I got from HMD, nigh 6 years ago!

[Henry Wertz 1]

Nokia's problems

It's true about Symbian -- my understanding is it had no memory protection, no preemptive multitasking (it had cooperative task switching -- which Apple inaccurately called "cooperative multitasking" when they did it in MacOS 7-9 but this does not meet the computer science definition of multitasking... this just relies on each program explicitly saying it's done running, and if it doesn't your system locks up). It was basically like Windows 3.0-level technology internally. So it was small, fast, and worked fine for the phones it was used for. But you were not going to have a modern browser and the kind of apps Android and IOS had on a technology base like that.

The big issue I recall from the time -- Nokia was developing THREE Linux-based OSes to replace Symbian! From what I recall, one group was using a Linux kernel to run a Symbian ABI on top -- which solved the issues of memory protection and multitasking, but still ended up with an antiquated API that was difficult to write more modern applications for. One group was planning on a "clean break", they were possibly going to have an app to run existing Symbian apps but this was no priority. The third group was doing something in between. Some were doing their own UI toolkit, some were using Qt. And apparently these were like skunkworks, they were duplicating TONS of effort (like all 3 even independently ported Linux to the hardware, not doing it once then sharing the result). There was large overlap between the two "not just modernized Symbian" efforts, and the other 2 were not taking anything from the "lets run Symbian on Linux" group to help their "run an old Symbian app" app get going.

So! They apparently waited WAY too long to ax these projects, or combine them, or at least get them to share code and information in cases where they were essentially working on the same thing 2-3 times. They actually got to the point they shipped phones with at least 2 out of 3 of these OSes, before axing them (apparently just scrapping the work, not folding what makes sense into the remaining OS.) Rather perveresely, apparently the last remaining OS (Maemo) was pretty decent, but they honestly didn't ship phones with Maemo long enough to see if it'd catch on, they almost immediately decided to scrap THAT too for Windows mobile. THEN they decided they might as well sell to Microsoft.

So, they got bought by Microsoft and Windows was put onto these phones that they had designed to run Linux. This is no problem in and of itself; but apparently (despite Nokia then being part of Microsoft, so you'd think they'd make sure a port supported all the hardware), they REALLY half-assed it. I recall the bitter complaintts from Nokia owners that they had a 16megapixel camera in there (like 4096x4096 or so) but Windows had a hard limit of like 2000x2000 or so, so the camera app could NOT take a full resolution photo! I recall the first version couldn't take advantage at all, and later on they had it so at least you could use "digital zoom" (i.e. crop off the edges of the total picture) and get a 2000x2000 picture of whatever you zoomed in to. I mean, that's pretty half-assed to not raise an arbitrary size limit so you can use the full resolution of the camera already on the phone!

I'll note, the size limit in and of itself wasn't ridiculous -- back when a good digital camera was like 1 megapixel if that, putting size limit around 2048x2048 was not unheard of at all. I used old versions of imagemagick that had some size limit like that -- the assumption was that a jpeg with like 10000x15000 pixels or something had probably had the headers tampered with to attempt a buffer overflow or denial of service (by using up all system RAM). It's just ridiculous they would not or could not lift those size limits once they had the software in a phone with a camera that already exceeded that limit.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Nokia's problems

Not sure why this is downvoted, it's all true.

[aerogems]

Re: Nokia's problems

It's probably Vatnik Eel's chance to use the prison computer. Every time you see a whole mess of downvotes for no real discernable reason, it's probably because at some point they (correctly) twat shamed the vatnick eel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nokia's problems

Hate to break it to you, but given the sycophantic Microsoft fan-boi stuff you come out with, there are a lot more people down voting you than just one vatnik.

[perkele]

Re: Nokia's problems

Yes, senior management at Nokia struggled to organise a F... in a brothel, were too interested in empire building and not cooperating with other "lesser" units.

Greetings from NOKIA land :) A new set of clothes are on the old body, but no rubber boots.

[Dan 55]

Re: Nokia's problems

It may have been cooperative multitasking between apps but the whole phone only needed one ARM CPU and one OS to control the radio and modem in real time. Nowadays Qualcomm has kindly provided a hackable black box to do that.

Elop entered scene left half-way through your third paragraph which accounts for the fact that once Nokia had finally come up with a plan of action and had started to execute it, they immediately trashed it all.

Your final two paragraphs were basically because they tried to stuff Windows Phone on a three-year-old Nokia 808 PureView and call it a Lumia 950. Windows Phone of course was having none of it.

[Bendacious]

Replaceable parts

I loved my Nokia Lumia with Windows Phone. Not a big app user though, so that helped, as there weren’t many by the end. I used it long after they stopped supporting it. Don’t understand the comments on battery life in this article as it was great. Three days on standby (again - no apps). One factor that made it an amazing phone was it took seconds to replace the battery if needed. I once dropped it and badly damaged the rear camera. I knew the IT department at work had a drawer full of retired phones. Took the back off mine and found that the camera was a separate unit - not soldered on. Popped it out of its port and slotted in a camera from a retired phone. Worked perfectly. Can you imagine doing that with an Apple device? Made me love the phone even more. Really miss it now.

[Gene Cash]

Beancounter in charge

> Then-CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, appointed in 2005, was a legal and finance guy, and oversaw a precipitous drop in Nokia's market share.

Who else has put the beancounters in charge, and now doors are falling off their airplanes?

In 50 years, this has been the best indicator of a company's future that I've ever run across.

Beancounters in charge == they're fucked, then...

[gratou]

Re: Beancounter in charge

Intel too

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Beancounter in charge

HP

[JohnCr]

A tale of two Microsofts

For the first decade or two of its existence Microsoft was notorious for its "borrowing" ideas and products from the competition. They'd reverse engineer products, buy firms, do interesting things to put other firms out of business. The anti-trust case only skimmed the surface of Microsoft's mischief. Once Microsoft became THE dominate force in the industry they adopted an NIH (not invented here) mentality. If Microsoft didn't think of it, it couldn't be important. Mobile phones and devices are an excellent example of this. Just as the GUI transformed personal computing, the iPhone transformed the mobile industry. Anyone who took a serious look at the offerings of the day from Nokia, Sanyo, Samsung, and Apple would quickly realize this. Microsoft failed to see a watershed event in technology and chose to ignore it. Worse, they discouraged everyone working at Microsoft from getting an iPhone.

In 2015 while traveling in Europe I went to get an in-country cellular service for our phones. My USA carrier didn't properly unlock my phone and I ended up getting a cheap "burner" phone for our trip. For €79 I could get either an Android or Windows phone. I asked for the Android model. The phone shop then offered the Windows phone for €35, then free. I still got the Android model. We activated the phone. I logged into my Google account and all my contact and trip information downloaded flawlessly. We were ready to go. The store was impressed and acknowledged this wouldn't have worked on the Windows phone. They offered me a Windows phone, just to play with. I declined. They smiled and said 'we understand. we can't give these phones away.' This little (true) story speaks volumes about Microsoft. The poor quality of their phone OS was obvious, even to the casual bystander. How did things get so bad at Microsoft?

Now let's consider an interesting hypothetical... What if Microsoft had gone to Google and licensed Android? Can you imagine the quality of the integration between Android mobile devices and Windows personal computing that could have been? It would have secured Microsoft's place in desktop computing for decades to come. We could have had a high quality, fully integrated Android VM as part of the Windows OS. Nokia engineering with an Android OS and with Microsoft's full support would have resulted in a truly great product. Fortunately Samsung had a better vision and better management -- and they seized some of the opportunity.

It is important to study the competition, observe market trends, and talk to one's customers. A NIH business culture tunes out feedback and keeps important visionary information from reaching the corporate decision makers.

[Jon 37]

Re: A tale of two Microsofts

Microsoft licensing Android would have been great for Android. I don't see how it would benefit Microsoft, long term.

> Now let's consider an interesting hypothetical... What if Microsoft had gone to Google and licensed Android? ... We could have had a high quality, fully integrated Android VM as part of the Windows OS.

Which would allow app makers to target Android, and run that really well on Windows. Which would be followed by app makers targeting Android instead of Windows, because people can just run the apps in the Android VM, which is less effort for the app maker and just the same for the end-users. Which would be followed by a release of the Android Desktop OS. Which would run all your apps, because all your apps are Android apps now. Which would be followed by the death of Windows.

Microsoft could predict that, so they're not going to do it. They're not going to give up their desktop monopoly for anything.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

"It was called Android – you may have heard of it"

Then in 2003 a group of engineers had an idea for a mobile phone operating system that was more flexible than Symbian or RIM and more app-focused. It was called Android – you may have heard of it.

Android was originally pitched as a digital camera OS. It wasn't until about a year after they founded the company that they realised that idea was a dead end.

[Gene Cash]

God, if only Microsoft had done what they did with xbox

Microsoft was like "WE WILL be a force in game consoles and we will spend whatever's necessary to accomplish that"

They spent literally billions and now they're up there with Sony and Nintendo. They're not great, but they're there.

I wish there was some sort of third force in the mobile industry. I only buy Android because it's not Apple. I wish I had another choice, even if it was just Microsoft (and I'm speaking as someone forced use Windows at work, and that's it)

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: God, if only Microsoft had done what they did with xbox

I believe the Xbox hardware is still a loss-leader. The PS5 has been in the black for a few years now and the Switch was never sold at a loss.

Different strategies of course, but from the outside it makes it look like Microsoft is still trying to buy its way in.

[katrinab]

Re: God, if only Microsoft had done what they did with xbox

They are up there with Sony. Nintendo is targeting a different segment of the market.

[Dan 55]

Re: God, if only Microsoft had done what they did with xbox

They spent literally billions and now they're up there with Sony and Nintendo. They're not great, but they're there.

Lately it seems they're fine with just selling XBox Live subscriptions and not bother with the hardware. From a beancounter's point of view it's all good as this means no money spent developing hardware and selling it at a loss.

[deevee]

Windows mobile failed because it was nobbled, and worse they tried to nobble the Windows desktop operating system, so it would be the same on a phone and on a desktop.

Sinofksy has a lot to answer for, he almost killed Microsoft.

That set them back the best part of a decade, with Windows 11 now "ALMOST" as good as Windows 7, and "ALMOST" with a proper start menu back.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sinofksy has a lot to answer for, he almost killed Microsoft."

If only he'd succeeded...

[hammarbtyp]

Stack ranking

One other thing to mention about the MS/Nokia relationships

This was a time when stack ranking was still a thing in MS. It meant that all the divisions were basically competing with each other to survive. At the time it was a toxic swamp of little fiefdoms. Companies like Nokia were about long term relationships, building consensus etc.

MS had a long deserved reputation for partnering firms, taking, what they needed and stuffing them. In an alternate universe, Nokia would use its mobile experience to mold windows 8 into something marketable. Instead MS took the lead and flayed about. This worked in the desktop because basically a monopoly, but in mobile they needed a long term consistent strategy and couldn't force there product on anyone

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Stack ranking

"Nokia would use its mobile experience to mold windows 8 into something marketable"

They might have moulded a mobile version of Windows into something marketable but trying to put a mobile UI on the desktop was always going to be the calamity we saw.

[Blacklight]

Underhanded....

Don't forget Microsoft's treatment of Sendo.

They could have had something but sold it out to HTC (Canary/Tanager).

Motorola also lagged as they went all in on the Z8, and it landed just as iPhone did.

[Shuki26]

Great article Reg!

I love these types of deep downs.

[PhilipN]

Good write-up, thanks, but ..

Slight re-interpretation :

"failed to see the shifting sands".. Nope. MS and Ballmer were very GOOD at seeing the shifting sands since it told them which was the next development/company/competing product they had to kill.

[Torben Mogensen]

Symbian

Symbian was essentially just a renaming of Psion's EPOC32 OS, developed for their Organiser series. Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola formed a joint venture around the OS and Psion was renamed to Symbian Ltd (which was later bought by Nokia).

[tp2]

Re: Symbian

psion just didn't have user interface. The existing user interface was completely broken for phone usage and didn't even work with the correct screen resolutions.

[Lomax]

I don't agree

If any of you (including the author) had owned and used the superb N9 with the MeeGo OS you would not be repeating the incorrect claim perpetuated by Elop & co that Nokia had no answer to the iPhone. They were in fact ahead in many ways with a faster and more elegant OS that had many features later copied by Apple and Google. Unfortunately Microsoft were determined to never let you experience it, which has allowed this lie to persist relatively unchallenged.

[Zola]

Re: I don't agree

Indeed.

I had/have a Nokia N950 (the "developer" version of the N9 - basically an N9 with hardware keyboard).

Hardware and software-wise the N950 and N9 were by far the best Nokia phones the company ever made.

The hardware and software was absolutely stunning, years ahead of Android back in 2010.

The Harmattan UI that ran on the N9/N950 had the kind of gesture interactions that only came to Android 8 or 9 (and eventually iOS) something like 7+ years later.

Nokia had a vision to take Symbian and Meego forward with a common Qt base. It was all there. It could have worked.

If only they hadn't hired Elop, who killed it all. Tragic.

[Bartholomew]

Without Nokia, there would be Dom Joly "Big Phone" joke!

Without that Nokia ringtone, the joke would just not work, I raise a pint to Dom!

YOUTUBE: Trigger Happy TV - Dom Joly Big Phone Compilation Part 1

YOUTUBE: Trigger Happy TV - Dom Joly Big Phone Compilation Part 2

[blindsided]

Nokia E72 the best phone ever

E72 battery runs for days without recharge

never crashes

rock solid OS

has few of the vulnerabilities of current phones

I STILL USE THE NOTE FUNCTION

rock solid

[blindsided]

than goodness Nokia decided to make more than just gumboots

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

RIP Nokia

[blindsided]

Scandinavian corporate ethics

Scandinavian corporate ethics are much kinder to consumers

than some large American companies

sustainability for instance

a complicated situation indeed

a new "must have" phone released regularly

etc etc

consumer culture at its worst

burning up the planet

[Geoff (inMelbourne)]

Why not make a Windows Phone now?

Hmm. As a person who fondly remembers my Windows Phones (that UI!), this does get me thinking.

Every phone handset - iOS and Android - uses ARM processors.

Microsoft has a version of Windows 11 for ARM processors. It's good, it works, and it's been around for years with no significant issues (mostly on the Surface Pro X).

The actual phone functionality is simply an App - and Microsoft already has it from the Windows Phone days anyway.

The UI they had was the best available at the time, and frankly would still be that today. (Resizable tiles! Live tiles! Every App in a simple, scrollable alphabetical list on the second screen!)

Microsoft has an Android subsystem for Windows, so running Android Apps on a Windows Phone could be done for that one 'must have' App (a significant factor for Windows Phone back in the day). The emulation layer for ARM processors on x86 hardware would not be needed as much (or perhaps not at all), so it would be cleaner and lighter. Running Android Apps on a PC isn't very useful, but running Android Apps on a phone certainly is.

So, Microsoft: Why not make a Windows Phone now?

[JDX]

Windows Mobile wasn't so bad

As a pure OS it was actually rather nice after the first versions had major bugs. A valid 3rd way to Android/iOS.

El Reg wrote articles praising the typographically focused UI and tiles, if anyone cares to go find them; it is slightly revisionist to simply say "it was rubbish".

The biggest issue was lack of app support for a minority platform which was a vicious cycle. And yes the hardware was pretty nice. I loved my bright yellow 1020 :)

[Mobile Mole]

Mobile OS proliferation

If you thought all this was painful, spare a thought for the teams at Motorola who had to deal with a schizophrenic strategy that insisted we ride all horses and ended up utilising Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android, JUIX (Linux) and good old P2K (and more) as well as collaborating (ahem) with Apple on a couple of iTunes projects.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Nokia coordinated offensive use of their patents (2011)

Microsoft v Barnes & Noble, inc.

‘On information and belief, as part of Microsoft’s recently announced agreement with Nokia to replace Nokia’s Symbian operating system with Microsoft’s own mobile device operating system, Microsoft and Nokia discussed and apparently agreed upon a strategy for coordinated offensive use of their patents. Indeed, in videotaped remarks made two days after the Microsoft-Nokia agreement was announced, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop confirmed that Microsoft and Nokia had discussed how their combined intellectual property portfolio is “remarkably strong” and that Microsoft and Nokia intended to use this combined portfolio both defensively and offensively.’