During the Cambrian Explosion of cellphone form factors at the turn of the millenium, Nokia reigned supreme. If you’d like to see what they were doing behind the scenes to design these wild phones, you’ll love the Nokia Design Archive from Aalto University.
Featuring images, presentations, videos and a number of other goodies (remember transparencies?), this collection gives us some in-depth insight into how consumer products were dreamed up, designed, and brought to market. Some projects require more reading between the lines than others as the Archive is somewhat fragmented, but we think it could still be an invaluable peek into product design, especially if you’re working on projects that you want to be usable outside of a hacker audience.
The Archive also includes approximately 2000 objects including many unreleased “unknown” models and prototypes of phones that actually did make it into the wild. While we’d love to get our hands on some of these devices IRL, having images with reference colors is probably the next best thing. Having replaced a number of smartphone screens, we hope more hackers take up the buttons and indestructible casing of these elegant devices for a more civilized age.
Thanks to [Michael Fitzmayer] for the tip! Be sure to checkout his work on Nokia N-Gage phones, including an SDK if you too love to taco talk.
Frutiger Aero Finnish excellence on full glorious display. Kippis!
Talk about a badly designed webpage.
Those are the most costly
I opened the site and my PC’s fans turned up to 100%
Honestly whoever thought disabiling the back key of a visitor was acceptable??
“Cambrian Explosion”
Does that make the iphone the equivalent of an asteroid impact?
Does that mean we are in the phone equivalent of the Ediacaran period
It would perhaps be more accurate to describe Stephen Elop as the asteroid, as his impact as “Microsoft’s mole” CEO of Nokia had a similar effect on their phone division as that famed asteroid impact had on the dinosaurs.
Who could possible have thunk that shoehorning that bloated Windows Mobile onto hardware not designed for it, would be such a bad idea?
As far as I understand, it wasn’t just one guy in the end. They had the board filled up with Microsoft men well before Elop got installed, which is how they were able to pull it off. They ran the company to the ground in order for Microsoft to buy them on the cheap.
Of course one of the reasons cited for the downfall was the company culture, where they had a disconnect between the engineering departments – mainly software and hardware – where the hardware guys were working with bespoke designs for each phone model that had to conform to price and power specifications, compromising performance and features, and then the software guys had to deal with it and adapt to each different piece of hardware they were making, which turned out to be difficult in terms of achieving a unified OS and software for the entire lineup. This was something that Android solved with a virtual machine, which the Nokia phones couldn’t afford because most of them were engineered to be woefully under-powered to run such a thing.
That’s why you had all the different versions of Symbian that weren’t fully cross-compatible and didn’t function as a platform for a smartphone ecosystem. For example, you couldn’t get the same app working on two different Nokia phones unless the app vendor went through the trouble of making a version for each. They tried though. and on the basic point of it, the Symbian ecosystem was nice in the sense that even the feature phones operated much like smartphones: you could simply download an app and run it. If it wasn’t locked down by the carrier. The only thing that was missing was the CPU and memory to run the better version of Symbian to have all the apps you wanted.
I had the Opera web browser on a €50 candybar phone, which was never built to handle it, yet it could and I would use it to log in to my college dormitory website to reserve a washing machine in the laundry room. It was absolutely terrible, but it worked. For that phone, someone probably said “It has to have a camera for posting pictures on social media”, so the hardware engineers added a completely useless sub-VGA camera that was worse than a potato, and so there was a camera, for social media apps that were never included and could not be obtained because nobody made any for that particular phone…
Didn’t the Ediacaran period precede the Cambrian?
In any case, if you’re saying we’re suffering through a dearth of forms after a previous cornucopia of options, I would agree.
Apart from the website being utterly horrendous, there’s no mention at all of the N770.
I don’t know what their requirements are, but N770 is not a phone. But i did say a couple of times at the time, that they need to put a phone in the N770 to make it useful for calling and data. That alone might’ve changed the whole situation, because then it would’ve been a smart phone instead of a “internet appliance”. It’s not like they didn’t know about stuff like that, they had Communicator. They were 4 years late with that. That’s why i never got N770 or N800, even though i did consider it. I did get N900 at some point.
The idea was that the phone would be in your pocket and act as a modem for your tablet, so you wouldn’t waste your phone’s battery to operate the tablet functions. This was when phones were expected to work two weeks on standby – not two days.
If the N770 had been made into a “smartphone”, it would have had a standby time of mere hours with an active battery life of just 4-5 h as it were, so it would not have been useful as your primary phone. With the hardware limitations of the time, you were supposed to turn it off when not using it to conserve battery, but then you would not be able to receive any calls or text messages.
That meant you still needed a regular phone in your pocket, which meant you had a bluetooth/wifi modem at your disposal to connect with the N770, which meant there was no point in adding a cellular modem to the tablet. Carrying two phones, the customers would have had to pay for two cellular plans, so that was also a negative point. On the other hand, you could easily use the device in bluetooth “headset” mode to make and receive calls without getting your phone out of your pocket. It’s just that it was a tablet, not a smartphone, so it wasn’t well suited for the task.
And finally, the cellular networks at that time didn’t support “smartphone” features like video calls that well, because they were still going through the 2G-3G transition and data plans cost a lot of money with arbitrary caps and roaming fees in place. That’s why the N770, N800, and N810 were designed to take advantage of public wifi networks instead while the N900 became a proper smartphone in 2009 when 3G was well established and 4G/LTE networks started to appear.
Which is why history always needs to be seen in context to understand, why.
Point in case: the original iPhone was a 2G/EDGE phone without an appstore, only a handful of pre-loaded applications and most of them were underdeveloped, such as lacking copy/paste between your email and your contacts.
The way the original iPhone ate batteries, commentators at the time noted that it would run out of power in 7-9 hours of use and require recharging every day, which resulted in the battery running out of cycles in less than three years, and of course the battery was not user-replaceable. Apple aligned journalists called this “acceptable” while everyone else laughed at it.
It was essentially a feature phone with only the no-keypad touchscreen interface differentiating it from the typical featurephone you might have otherwise bought for 10% of the price, and it was locked to AT&T. It was borderline unusable, terrible battery life, ridiculously expensive, and not available in most markets. So when some people comment that “Nokia died because it ignored the iPhone”, they forget that the iPhone was a joke and the market was simply not ready for a modern smartphone, and the iPhone wasn’t that.
Nokia tried to engineer around the technological limitations, which resulted in offerings like the N770 or the Communicator series, but they just weren’t meeting mass market demands and use cases. The real competition turned out to be things like Blackberry and HTC which were smartphones with full keyboards just like the N900 – which Stephen Elop then destroyed by pulling the plug on Maemo.
Context of batteries:
One reason why long standby and low power use was kind of a requirement back in the day was because LiPo phone batteries 20 years ago were kinda bad and only achieved between 500-700 charge cycles until replacement, and every phone had a different charger plug and voltage/current requirement, so you couldn’t just charge anywhere. No fast charging either.
There were no power banks – only crappy “emergency chargers” that ran on AA or 9 Volt batteries that could boost you up to make a single phone call. Phones actually had a standard feature where, if you called the emergency number, they would disable the low voltage cutoff and let you run the battery down to destruction.
So you can imagine if you had a “smartphone” with a battery life of less than a day in 2007, you were also lugging a charger with you everywhere you went, or you never went more than a few hours away from home, from your only compatible charger.
As best I can tell, there are no requirements outside “Nokia” given the inclusion of Nokia’s smartwatch project that was pulled at the last second. I suspect a lot of it is what they were able to obtain moreso than being able to include whatever they wanted.
There is a 7700 in their object collection and some related “unknown” devices, which is considered a prototype for the 770s predecessor. Looks like that work came out of the “Seeds” program there, so you might try searching that?
Here’s the 7700: https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=A0311
I had a friend back in high school who was an exchange student over here. Taught me some DOS tricks. He ended up as the head of one of Nokia’s research divisions. I wonder if any of his work is in there…
I know a guy who worked in the design engineering department, as in, engineering the designs the art department came up with. Lots of funny stories there.
There’s the old story about Michelangelo sculpting David, and someone commented that the nose was too big, so he hid a bit of marble dust in his hand and went up the ladder, struck his hammer on the chisel a few times and let the dust fall off his hand, and stepped down. The commentator went “Now it’s perfect.”. Those sort of stories.