Nokia Design Archive (2025)

Nokia Design Archive (2025)repo.aalto.fi

251 points•pillars•7 days ago•132 comments•

#design #archive #nokia #nokia design #design archive #nokia design archive

132 comments

I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate. Sure, they made mistakes, but it wasn't entirely unfeasible to assume that the mobile phone market had matured in terms of features, and the next big thing was going to be "phones as fashion statements." When you think about it, prior to the phone, everything people carried on them everyday was some sort of fashion statement. Clothes, glasses, jewllery, watches, handbags, backpacks etc. I think they assumed that the phone was like the watch; peaked functionally, but room to grow in terms of form.

onli7 days ago

And in a way that actually happened with the iPhone. Yes, that was also a functionality boost, but it was also a fashion object. I did a (for university, small scale) observation study at the time and found it notable that some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus - that was a shift, a thing formerly seen as a functional device became a fashion accessory.

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.

creaturemachine7 days ago

Nothing tops the middle-aged man I spotted in the iphone 3g days, sporting his on his belt, screen out and always on to show off the fact that he had all the apps.

eru7 days ago

> some young women started wearing their iPhone on their purse while leaving the bus

Sorry, what does this mean? Could you explain?

PorciiVorbesc7 days ago

>I don't think Nokia deserves all this hate.

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.

alightsoul7 days ago

Nokia didn't adapt because of cost cutting. Their engineers wanted to get into smartphones asap. Android could have died at the hands of Symbian which phone manufacturers preferred, but it was led by nokia and it was fragile

itsamario7 days ago

I noticed nokia pop up in telecom infrastructure around the same time I noticed nokia phone users using something else.

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.

rickdeckard6 days ago

Like Ericsson and Alcatel, Nokia originally only built the phones to sell the infrastructure.

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."

wil4217 days ago

They were doing phone switching in the 70s. The Nokia DX 200 had a couple of firsts on the wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_DX_200

ddudas7 days ago

I think it's funny how most of the pictures are about people doing usual things (talking with friends physically present, having dinner, having a meeting, etc.) and there is also a phone in their hand, like it's nothing. It feels weird to see people doing something on the phone while also being so present in other activities, and also interesting that some photos from 90' nailed it how it will be in the the 20'

cf100clunk7 days ago

At one of our big Nokia meetings back then, one of the board members, quite elderly, joked enviously that all the imagery in our advertising and internal documentation showed young people ''jumping over things'' while holding a mobile phone. It was a heady time of paradigm shifts from phoning a location's land line in order to reach someone, to actually phoning them directly (call the person, not their location). So much of that imagery was very prescient.

eelinki6 days ago

I find Nokia's reaction to the iPhone release always interesting: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...

qingcharles6 days ago

Hah. Yeah, they really didn't see it coming. I worked on music player stuff for Nokia's janky 2007 handsets [0] in 2004-2006 and it wasn't on the radar. The security around the iPhone project must have been really good. When Apple was working on the iPod I was getting intel for at least a year in advance because they were talking to so many people in the music biz about it.

[0] https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_764fa227-8853-45dd-91...

rickdeckard6 days ago

Interesting. I worked with another competitor at that time, we got intel that they're working on an exclusive device with AT&T, after Verizon rejected their conditions.

But it was nothing special. It was Apple building a premium touch screen phone (no apps yet, only iTunes and Browser), struggling alot with the connectivity part of it (barely able to assure a stable cellular modem connection for one carrier, let alone a full region of them). Huge 3.x" display, battery runtime less than 24h (in a world where cellphone standby was still measured in days)

What we didn't know at that time was that Steve Jobs managed to push AT&T into a revenue-share deal along with a mandatory data-flatrate bundle, both ensuring a constant revenue-stream beyond the initial launch which would skew the entire competitive field forever.

Because while everyone else earned money only through sales, Apple had not only its above-average sales-margin and their iTunes revenue, but also an incremental monthly revenue-share from AT&T that grew with each device sold.

Within 6 months AT&T paid Apple a per-device share for a million devices each month. We never got the exact figure they paid per device but it was rumored to be more than 10 USD.

So by end of 2007 Apple had a constant influx of more than 10M USD/month on top of ~600M in HW sales-margin, excluding any additional iTunes-profit they made with that always-online iPod (e.g. the only way to get a custom ringtone was to buy one on iTunes at a hefty premium)

lelandfe6 days ago

Slide 10:

> Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success

> Even though Steve Jobs emphasized iPhone superiority to “Buttons”, it is to be expected that the Consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed

saidinesh56 days ago

Back then everyone believed that. Even Android vendors. Motorola Droid did sell well. Touch screen typing was really annoying until Swype really took off.

mrheosuper6 days ago

> There was little mention of security on the iPhone. Perhaps it lacks VPN, secure e-mail.

Turn out average people care little about that.

martin_balsam7 days ago

Opened a random one: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_b81c4b91-a275-40b5-9b...

third slide...

teekert7 days ago

Well, that aged differently, on different fronts...

All set aside, I did always wonder, why the screen has to fold (be flexible), surely a very thin line between 2 hard screens is very workable, perhaps it is even possible to make it (almost) invisible with some optical tricks at the touching edges.

Another point: It is easy to think of such things, it's the manufacturing and specifically manufacturing at scale that is the real work. That's why I think patents can really hold us back, by blocking the market from trying stuff because a company made some nice drawings (coming from a guy that was in a company that wanted to "blanket some markets" with patents). Perhaps we could have had our flying cars ;)

Btw, that last slide is very much like the communicator from Earth: Final Conflict [0], but then again, what can you make with a rolling screen?

[0] https://earthfinalconflict.fandom.com/wiki/Global

p_l7 days ago

The most insane flexible screen proposal from Nokia was the "nanotech" one - Nokia Morph [1], where the phone "normal" candybar shape was formed out of folding it twice with a clip for speakers - you would pull the clip and unfold it into something akin to A5 or A4 paper. Future sounded bright with software defined tactile buttons and the like.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs

cube007 days ago

That's some nice cbf spelling of always and recognition on that slide.

myfonj6 days ago

"allways" (sic) feels quite 'normal' (as in very frequent for non-native speakers), but "regoqnition" (sic) is truly creative. Appreciated!

There is also "stulys" (sic), supposedly instead of "stylus". That seems almost deliberate…

tiborsaas7 days ago

Surely, foldable screens are not new desires

girvo7 days ago

I miss my Nokia N9 so much. As far as I’m concerned it (with Meego) was the best phone ever made, with an awesome design that the OS itself was built around: the curved pillow shape of the screen was used for the core gestures that you used to operate it

Ahead of its time, IMO. I wonder how Jolla is gong these days.

Matl6 days ago

> I wonder how Jolla is gong these days

I have their latest phone and it's great UX wise. However they simply lack the funds to put in the best cameras and the dev community for native apps is small, be it most of the actively developed native apps are great.

IMO Sailfish has the best gesture-based controls out of any smartphone OS.

netless6 days ago

had blue N9, people would randomly ask me what model is that?

https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2011/12/15/portable-cathed...

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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