Nokia N900 (2009)

Nokia N900

Launched August 2009

Ten years ago this month, Nokia had the opportunity to bend the high-end smartphone market to its own will with the launch of the Nokia N900. Instead it failed to make the impact it needed, and it set off a chain of events that would smash Nokia’s dominance of the industry and nearly wipe its handsets out of existence altogether.

We’ve examined the failure of the N900 before, on the fifth anniversary of the launch of the device. Half a decade on has – if anything – made it more obvious that Nokia’s failed strategy left a huge smartphone-shape crater in the landscape.

It wasn’t a bad device, not at all. Nokia’s fourth-generation device running the Linux-based Maemo OS was mature and certainly capable enough to compete with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. A big screen and decent overall specs made this an attractive device, and of course Nokia had a lot of market goodwill. It should have been a success, yet it wasn’t.

Although it was probably better than the first-generation Android devices it was up against, the N900 certainly lacked the sleekness and polish of the iPhone. With the slide-out keyboard it was physically bulky, the resistive touchscreen was significantly less capable than Apple’s and the user interface lacked the elegance of iOS even though it was more capable. Not quite a killer device, but somewhere close.

But perhaps crucially, Nokia kept referring to the N900 as stage “4 of 5” of the development of the Maemo platform. While this would forgive the feeling that the N900 was something of a work-in-progress, it left customers with the impression that an even better device was in the works. Given that the N900 wasn’t cheap, waiting for stage “5 of 5” seemed like a decent option.

But Nokia never launched another Maemo device. There was no stage “5 of 5” around the corner. Nokia partly sabotaged their own product launch, and then failed to improve on it. Instead, Nokia’s highly anticipated announcement about the future of Maemo in February 2010 turned out not to be a new handset, but an announcement of the eventually disastrous merger with Intel’s Moblin OS to create a new platform called MeeGo.

MeeGo did eventually bear fruit with the excellent Nokia N9, but by mid-2011 – nearly two years after the launch of the N900 – it was an irrelevance and had already effectively been cancelled.

Bad planning, a lack of resources and a basic absence of common business sense killed off the product line, and it was such an important product line for Nokia too. CEO Stephen Elop ditched both MeeGo and the popular Symbian OS and bet everything on Windows. It failed.

Nokia also declined to get involved with Android which was the operating system that would eventually eat Nokia’s market share. A short-lived dalliance with Android in 2014 was shuttered when Microsoft bought Nokia’s handset business – and that too was closed down with the remnants spun off into a new venture called HMD Global who make Nokia-branded Android phones. HMD have been moderately successful in terms of sales, but perhaps more importantly they demonstrated that Nokia could perhaps have succeeded in the crowd of Android manufacturers that sprung up.

These days the N900 is a quite collectable handset, with prices for good and unlocked models being about £200 or so. Oddly enough that’s a lot more than the highly successful iPhone 3GS from the same era.

Image credits: Nokia

Jolla Smartphone (2013)

Jolla Smartphone (2013)

Announced May 2013

A brief history lesson – back in May 2005 Nokia announced their Linux-based 770 Internet Tablet, running an operating system called Maemo. This had most of the ingredients of the modern smartphone apart from the actual phone, and it went through several revisions such as the N800 and N810 before being turned into a pretty capable smartphone in 2009 with the N900. But then a disastrous attempt to merge Maemo with Intel’s Moblin OS to create a new OS called MeeGo caused the project to stall and at a key part of the smartphone wars, Nokia found itself without a competitive product. The follow-up to the N900, the Nokia N9 was launched 2 years afterwards, but by this time Nokia had already given up on MeeGo and had decided to base future smartphones on Windows.

The N9 caused quite a stir, but Nokia deliberately restricted its launch to smaller markets, presumably to meet a contractual obligation rather than just cancelling it. The N9 was the phone that Nokia didn’t want you to buy, and yet people did and they found that this latest incarnation of the Maemo / MeeGo operating system was rather elegant and had potential.

Sailfish OS screenshot

Nokia’s cancellation of the N9 was a death-knell for MeeGo, and that operating system was eventually merged with another Linux-based OS called LiMo to become Tizen which eventually found a niche as an embedded systems OS, especially with Samsung.

To some, the effectively cancellation of MeeGo seemed to be a squandering of something valuable. So, a group of engineering (most former Nokia employees) created a company called Jolla to develop the MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS. And in May 2013 they announced the Jolla smartphone (just called "Jolla" and pronounced "Yo-La")).

The Jolla shared a similar design philosophy to the N9, with simple and clean lines and a brightly coloured back. The operating system was as powerful as anything else on the market, but with a swipe-based user interface that made it stand out from Android and iOS offerings. The Jolla smartphone appealed to Nokia and Linux fans in particular, and it ended up being a niche success.

An attempt to launch a Jolla Tablet nearly ended in disaster when the company couldn’t bring it to market in time and had to offer refunds to customers who had crowdfunded it. However the company persisted and the Sailfish OS continues to be ported to other devices, and is still around 5 years later.

Jolla and Sailfish haven’t quite had the breakthrough success that they need, however the Sailfish OS is finding its way into devices for emerging markets and more specialist applications such as the highly secure Turing Phone. It seems that seven years after Nokia abandoned this particular platform, it is still going strong.

Image credits: Jolla and Towel401 via Wikimedia Commons

Video: Jolla Smartphone Preview

Video: Jolla Tablet

Nokia Lumia 800 (2011)

Launched October 2011

If you wanted to sum up the demise of Nokia in one object, the Nokia Lumia 800 is probably it. Announced five years ago this month, the Lumia 800 represented a change in direction for the Finnish giant which ultimately ended in failure.

A potted recap - faced with sliding sales (primarily against Android devices), incoming Nokia CEO Stephen Elop switched Nokia's smartphone platform to Windows, effectively killing off Symbian and the stalled MeeGo project. Just five years previously, the Nokia-led Symbian OS and Microsoft's Windows were the two dominant smartphone platforms, but Microsoft had suffered badly (mostly at the hands of Apple), with Nokia starting to see the same sort of decline in competition with Google.

The fruits of the new Nokia/Microsoft partnership were announced in October 2011. The Nokia Lumia 800 had a lot going for it, the physical design was beautiful and the new Windows 7 operating system made everything else look very old fashioned. The price was extremely competitive too, and the whole launch was accompanied by a ton of media coverage because in tech terms this was a Very Big Thing.

There were some drawbacks, and the main one was a lack of downloadable applications compared to the vast array available for iOS and Android. On the other hand, there was quite a rich feature set included in the maturing Windows 7.5 OS. The user interface took a bit of getting used to, being stripped down and very modern-looking, it was certainly very different from rivals and predecessors. Cortana, arguably the best feature with modern Windows phones, would not become available for three years.

As for the hardware itself, the Lumia 800 had a first-rate 3.7" WVGA AMOLED screen, an 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, a 1.4GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage, plus all the usual smartphone features. The brightly-coloured plastic cases were also distinctive and had been lifted from the MeeGo-based N9.

The Lumia 800 wasn't a sale success, nor was it a complete disaster. Nokia made several successors including the superlative Lumia 1020, but Nokia continued to fade, selling the whole phone business to Microsoft in 2014 but they couldn't turn it around either, essentially shuttering the operation in mid 2016. The final Lumia device was the 650, released in February 2016.

It is perhaps one of the more intriguing "what ifs" of tech history to ask, "what if Nokia had gone for Android rather than Windows"? Elop's fear was that Nokia would just end up as a "me too" manufacturer if it went down the Android path, but if it could succeed with Windows then it would dominate a true alternative platform to Android and iOS. Elop chose the path with the highest risk and potential reward, but of course it failed. The alternative would have been a company probably playing second fiddle to Samsung, which would still not be like the Nokia of old. It is probably the case that Nokia was in a no-win situation back in 2011 and was largely doomed whichever way it moved.

Although the Lumia 800 is an old device from a technological perspective, it doesn't FEEL like an old device. Unlocked Lumia 800s in good condition sell for around €50, with "new old" stock commanding prices of €200 or even more. However, just €120 will buy you a brand new Lumia 650 instead. Although the Lumia brand is effectively dead, Microsoft are rumoured to be looking at producing handsets branded with the more success "Surface" name instead.

Nokia N9 (2011)

Launched June 2011

2011 was a time of turmoil for Nokia. Having announced in February that they were going to switch their smartphone platform to Windows, the writing was on the wall for the those smartphones running on other environments. Symbian was one obvious casualty, but Nokia's MeeGo (formerly Maemo) operating system was another.

The Nokia N9 was the final handset in a series of devices running the Linux-based Maemo OS that had kicked off in 2005 with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and ending up with the promising Nokia N900 in 2009. Despite some flaws, the N900 was a pretty decent effort and timely development could well have made a very competitive handset that could have fended off Android and the iPhone. But a disastrous decision to merge Maemo with Intel's Moblin operating system stalled development of any new devices, and the planned follow-up to the N900 never happened.

By 2011 the die had already been cast in favour of Nokia's rivals. Despite this, the nearly two-year gestation period for the N9 was coming to an end and Nokia were too far into the project to cancel it. Just as the N9 was about to be launched, Nokia slashed staff in the MeeGo division and it was clear that whatever was going to be produced was likely to be not only the first, but also the last MeeGo consumer device from Nokia.

Despite being primed to disappoint, the N9 instead created quite a stir. Housed in a brightly-coloured plastic unibody case, the N9 set the design standards that were then picked up by the Lumia range. On the front was a relatively large 3.9" 480 x 854 pixel AMOLED display, on the back was an 8 megapixel camera and inside was a 1GHz processor with 1GB of RAM. The operating system was the main feature though, and MeeGo was different from everything else on the market with a highly polished swipe-based interface that still managed to have a traditional Nokia look and feel. The N9 was beautiful but doomed.

Despite the wait, Nokia fans were keen to get their hands on the device. But Nokia had other ideas, and deliberately didn't make the N9 available in major markets such as the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain or Italy. Instead, the N9 was launched in secondary markets only. Why would they produce such an interesting device and then deny access to it? Well, Nokia were also working on their first Windows device (the Lumia 800) which was physically very similar to the N9, and presumably they wanted to ensure success by not having the N9 to compete. Well, we know how that turned out.

A strange thing happened though - people still wanted the N9, so there was a lively market on eBay with devices selling for €400 or more. Prices have subsided a little since then,  with prices ranging between about €80 to €300 depending on condition. Much rarer is the Nokia N950, a phone given to developers that has a QWERTY keyboard which can command prices of €1000 or even more.

There are perhaps few devices that highlight the failures within Nokia as well as the N9 does. A brilliant device in many ways, it came out far too late and was killed off at birth by a company that had moved on to a different.. and ultimately unsuccessful strategy. Had this launched a year or 18 months earlier then it would have had an easier time up against the somewhat uneven Android platform that was eating Nokia's sales. But as it is, the Nokia N9 is an interesting and rather sad footnote in the tale of the decline of Nokia.

Retro 5|10: February 2005 and 2010

The Mobile World Congress usually takes place in February, and as a result this is the biggest month in the calendar for new releases. We look at some of the more memorable devices announced five and ten years ago this month.

February 2005

The T-Mobile MDA IV (otherwise known as the HTC Universal and a wide variety of other names) was one of the first smartphones that really did try to offer everything including the kitchen sink. It had a 3.6" VGA-resolution display, QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, dual cameras and expandable memory. The Universal ran Windows Mobile 5.0 and it was probably the most powerful smartphone launched up until that point. It never sold in great numbers and is quite rare today.

T-Mobile MDA IV

Motorola announced several devices this month, but not all of them came to market. The Motorola SLVR L7 was an attempt to bring RAZR-type design to a monoblock phone. Although we noted at the time that the SLVR had a ramshackle launch, it went on to sell quite well. Alongside it was the Motorola PEBL which tool the same basic package and put it into a pebble-like clamshell, although what eventually got to market was not as interesting as the device that was originally shown.

Motorola SLVR

Motorola PEBL

The Motorola E1120 was one of a series of phones that were announced and eventually cancelled. This device had 3G, a QVGA display, expandable memory and a 3 megapixel camera with a photo light, and it ever it had come to market it would have easily out-specified most of the competition. Announced alongside it was the Motorola E1060 which was basically a cheaper but still useful 3G phone, but this was also cancelled. The promising-looking Motorola A1010 smartphone would also have been highly competitive, but this too was canned. Instead, Motorola concentrated on underpowered feature phones such as the RAZR, SLVR and PEBL which eventually led to catastrophe.

Motorola E1120

Motorola E1060

Motorola A1010

Nokia were beginning to develop some very competitive 3G devices, and the Nokia 6680 ran Symbian (which made it a smartphone, even if it didn't have a touchscreen), supported video calling and also had expandable memory. At this moment in time, Nokia had the edge in usability and the 6680 (and the 2G 6681 and 6682) sold rather well.

Nokia 6680, 6681 and 6682

Symbian again featured in the British Sendo X2, a device that would have competed well with everything in its class, except that Sendo went bust and many of their technologies ended up with Motorola instead.

Sendo X2

Also at MWC we saw the Sony Ericsson K600, a 3G phone in a rather elegant package, the almost impossibly compact 3G Samsung Z500 and the almost impossibly rugged Siemens M75.

Sony Ericsson K600

Samsung Z500

Siemens M75

February 2010 The HTC Desire was a highly successful Android smartphone with a 3.7" OLED WVGA screen, 1GHz processor and it was very elegantly designed. The Desire was one of the first Android 2.1 phones on the market, so it shipped with a much more polished and stable OS than earlier Android devices. The cheaper HTC Legend was launched alongside it, featuring a more elegant metal design but the modest specifications meant that it never really became a legend at all. HTC Desire HTC Legend Featuring an absurdly long pair of names, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini and the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro were two very tiny Android devices, each featuring a 2.55" QVGA screen and a full Android feature set. The Pro version came with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and the standard version weighed just 88 grams. Although they were quite popular, the tiny screen also rendered them fairly useless except for really basic tasks which a feature phone might have done better, and they were quite unlike the superlative full-sized XPERIA X10 in every way. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro Following on from the Vivaz launched in January, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro added a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and looked promising on paper, but the cheap touchscreen and general consumer indifference towards its Symbian operating system meant that it was something of a failure, and this was Sony Ericsson's final Symbian device. Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro Where the Vivaz marked something of the end of an era for Sony Ericsson, the Sagem Puma phone was the end of an era for this particular niche French manufacturer. The final Sagem handset to market, this touchscreen feature phone was made in conjunction with sportswear company Puma. Despite some interesting features (such a solar panel), it was not exactly a game changer. Sagem Puma Phone Five years ago manufacturers were still trying to sell touchscreen feature phones, with the very elegant and compact LG GD880 featured alongside the LG Cookie Plus, a replacement for the popular Cookie. In the end, smartphones simply got cheaper and wiped this sort of device out. LG GD880 LG Cookie Plus A detour into kitschiness, the Samsung Diva was an attempt to make a "girly" compact touchscreen phone, with a quilted back and a jewel-shaped navigation key on the front. But the feature set was very disappointing, and frankly the whole thing was rather patronising. Samsung Diva Toshiba are well-known for their Windows laptops, but they had struggled to make an impact in the smartphone market. The Windows-based Toshiba TG02 and K01 attempted to build on the slightly successful TG01. Although the package had some powerful features, it came at a time when Windows sales were tanking, and the tiny 1000 mAh battery meant that it would run out of juice quite quickly. Toshiba K01 Toshiba TG02 Like the Siemens M75 from five years before, the Sonim XP2 Spirit was designed to be very tough, but Sonim took toughness to an entirely new level. Housed in a tough, waterproof chassis the XP2 Spirit could probably survive just about any environment that you would want to use a phone in. Sonim XP2 Spirit The competition from Android meant that sales of Windows phones had almost collapsed, but Microsoft was not prepared to give up. Instead, they went away and completely rethought how a smartphone should work and they came up with the radical Windows Phone 7 instead. In particular, the user interface was very different from rivals and it felt much more modern, and it was very usable on a small device. However, when Microsoft attempted to add this modern UI to their desktop operating systems then things started to go wrong. Windows Phone 7 The Maemo-based Nokia N900 had been announced the previous year, and many people were expecting Nokia to announce a follow-up device at MWC. What happened instead was that Nokia announced that they would merge their Maemo OS with Intel's Moblin OS and come up with a new platform called MeeGo. This was a catastrophic decision as it meant that there was no follow-up to the N900 at a crucial time, and Nokia didn't manage to ship a MeeGo phone until late in 2011. This disruptive merger is probably a major reason why Nokia no longer exists as an independent mobile phone manufacturer today, however MeeGo still lives on, having been absorbed into the Tizen and Jolla operating systems. MeeGo

Biggest handset disasters.. Part 2

A few months ago we looked at what we considered to be the ten biggest handset disasters of all time. Well, there's no shortage of devices that failed in the market, either because they were ill-conceived, weird or just too far ahead of their time.

 

11. Nokia N9 / N950 (2011) Nokia's one-and-only commercially available MeeGo handset, the Nokia N9 is actually a pretty desirable bit of kit with a well-regarded operating system and a highly influential hardware design that was copied by Nokia's Lumia range and helped to popularise brightly-coloured plastics. Also available to developers only was the Nokia N950, a handset that is quite rare and is highly sought-after.   The N9 represents Nokia's utter failure to come up with a home-grown rival to the iPhone. Coming two years after its predecessor, the N900, the N9 was too late to make a difference, partly because of a foolish decision to try to merge platforms with Intel. It was obvious even before launch that the N9 was going to be doomed, and even before it was launched in a few minor markets the project was killed, and Nokia went with the Windows platform instead. The bottom line? The world doesn't need another mobile phone OS, no matter how good it is.   Buyer's guide: N950s are available from time-to-time, but are expensive.. prices range from €700 all the way up to €2300. Strictly speaking, they are all property of Nokia and were sent to developers only. The Nokia N9 is more commonly available for between €260 to €330 depending on model.

12. Nokia 7700 / 7710 (2003 / 2004) Nokia's first attempt at a touchscreen for was the Nokia 7700 which was a strikingly designed device, but it was far too big to be practical and features Nokia's infamous "side talking" system where you had to speak into side of the phone rather than the front. The 7700 was also crippled by a lack of memory, so that particular device was cancelled and replaced with the slimmed down and slightly upgraded Nokia 7710.   The 7710 lacked the essentials of 3G and WiFi, and consumers weren't really interested in touchscreen phones anyway. Instead of sticking with it, Nokia ditched the idea of touchscreen smartphones.. which was to prove a mistake.   Buyer's guide: the Nokia 7700 is one of the rarest Nokias around with prices starting at about €700, but they are so rarely available that one could cost much more. The 7710 is a lot cheaper but still uncommon, at around €20 to €150 depending on condition.

13. Nokia N-Gage (2003) A handheld gaming console from Nokia, the Nokia N-Gage should have been a winner. But Nokia got it badly wrong - it was too bulky to use as a phone, too limited to be used for games - so it was never very popular. An attempt to improve the platform with the 2004 N-Gage QD wasn't much of a success either.   Buyer's guide: there seems to be quite a lively trade in the N-Gage and cartridge games. Prices range from €10 or less to €30 for the handset itself.

14. Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (2011) The lack of success for the N-Gage meant that there were no other high-profile phone/games console hybrids until 2011, with the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. Where the N-Gage was underpowered, the Xperia Play was much more powerful (although hardly high-end). Despite this, the Xperia Play wasn't a success and no attempt was made to revive the format.   Buyer's guide: officially the Xperia Play is stuck with Android 2.3 although there are some custom ROMs available with later versions. It is an inexpensive device on the second-hand market, typically coming in at €40 or less.

15. Sony Ericsson Vivaz (2010) Sony Ericsson's Symbian swansong, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz featured a pretty unpleasant resistive touchscreen when almost everything else had moved to superior capacitive displays. The handset might have done better in 2008 than 2010.   The Vivaz and its sibing the Vivaz Pro were commercial failures, and Sony Ericsson never made another Symbian handset after that.   Buyer's guide: there are not many of these on the market, but those that are tend to be very cheap indeed.

16. Sony Ericsson P1i (2007) Sony Ericsson was a pioneer with Symbian touchscreen devices, but the Sony Ericsson P1i represented a step in the wrong direction for their P-Series of smartphones.   Although in many ways it was superior to the original Apple iPhone launched at roughly the same time, the small stylus-drive screen and physical QWERTY keyboard were not the sort of things that consumers wanted.   Buyer's guide: a quirky and quite interesting device, it also falls into the "rare but cheap" category of handsets that can be hard to find, but come in at less than €50 or so.

17. Samsung i8510 (2008) In 2008 Symbian was by far the best-selling smartphone platform around, even though the iPhone was coming into its second generation. In order to try to get a slice of the pie that was dominated by Nokia, Samsung released the Samsung i8510 (also known as the INNOV8).   A well-designed, well-engineered device with a good feature set it seemed like an attractive proposition, but it turned out that customers preferred their Nokias to be made by Nokia after all.   Buyer's guide: like the Vivaz, this probably only appeals to collectors of non-Nokia Symbian devices, and it is another uncommon but inexpensive handset coming in at less than €30.

18. Nokia N97 (2009) It should have been a winner - a touchscreen phone like the Nokia 5800 combined with a QWERTY keyboard like the Nokia Communicator, and a feature set that looked great on paper. But the Nokia N97 was slow, buggy and had several design flaws that made consumers unhappy. Most of these were fixed with the rather better N97 Mini launched later in the year. But keyboards were on the way out anyway, and in retrospect the entire concept was not likely to be a winner.   Buyer's guide: The N97 (in mini and non-mini versions) sells for around €25 to €50.

19. Nokia X7 (2011) Symbian had already been given its death sentence by the time the Nokia X7 was announced which led to a speedy collapse of that product line. The coffin-like design of the X7 didn't help either, although as with all late Symbian devices it is actually a pretty good phone. Consumers don't like buying into a dead end product, and the X7 was certainly one of those.   Buyer's guide: Resale values are quite high, expect to pay between €60 to €120 for an unlocked version.

20. Nokia 5000 (2008) With a product number like this, you would expect the Nokia 5000 to be something special. A good-looking and inexpensive device, one of the key features was that it had an MP3 player. But with no expandable memory and just 12MB of internal storage, you could probably only fit in about three tracks which was a bit useless. And you also had to be careful about how many photos you took with the 1.3 megapixel camera too. Adding a microSD slot would have transformed the product, as it was it was almost completely useless.   Buyer's guide: if you collect chocolate teapots then the Nokia 5000 might be the phone for you. Good ones can be had for next to nothing.