I don't know. At least when I was hired Nokia was 110% into making music their main priority. They bought LoudEye/OD2 because they want to get really deep into the music biz. They saw iPod as their main competitor, but didn't see iPhone coming at all. I don't remember Rokr came out, but Nokia were sure that a good music experience where you could download or stream music direct to your phone was the winning strategy. And they were partially right, but that was only a piece of the puzzle. Their handsets were just janky compared to the slick iPhone, and they had no universal design language. I worked on their software and not once did anyone at Nokia HQ say "You should make your buttons like this, or use these colors, or these widgets." It was anything goes. Every app on the phone developed by different teams who only talked to each other when something was broken.

I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.

They didn’t sell it for most networks in the USA (because your uncompetitive oligopoly cellphone market had not been shaken up yet and did not have competition rules governing it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61

This thing was in every sense a computer. Good battery life considering its screen, IMAP email, a Webkit web browser with full JS support before Apple released theirs, a music player, fully functional apps and tools to make them, 3G and wifi, office file support, VoIP support, Blackberry support if you wanted it. Great little keyboard.

Excellent device that was vastly more capable for actual work than the first several generations of iPhone (you could select and edit text, copy and paste) and available affordably to consumers in the UK.

Text selection and editing on iOS (and iPadOS!) is still more frustrating than it was on the E61.

The fact that we were already using these sorts of phones for functional work in Europe is a bit of the reason why the early Android phones with their “silly” trackballs that could actually control a text cursor did well compared to the early iPhones, and why interesting niche phones like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (that I subsequently owned, incredible device) did well here.

It took me to the iPhone 5S to even bother looking at iPhones, even though I had been a Mac user for fifteen years by then. Even then I only got it because the light sensor on my Xperia Mini Pro died; I would have carried on using that for years, it was fabulous.

Communicator devices with Symbian were pretty clear personal computers.

You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60

I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.

Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...

Apples ability to force flat-fee internet was crucial. Nokia had to customise every phone for about 1000 operators because as you say the operators had the "whip hand." It probably fell apart because of converting to a "matrix" organisation which essentially assumed that there would be 100s of different models to fit in various price segments. This made it impossible to achieve the kind of experience that could be achieved by concentrating on 1 expensive model.

Nokia was into making affordable phones but there was obviously a point where the ARM chips suddenly got a lot better and it was so optimised around squeezing performance from slow chips that it couldn't adapt. The management was aging and had become very hierarchical.

Despite all of this we were beginning to get somewhere at the end - standardising on Qt and my project got the build times under some control. Then Elop f*ked us. It was fine for the shareholders because Microsoft took the big hit for them but it was shitty for us developers who were trying to get things turned around.

>from how handsets could interact with their network

Yes? Imagine millions of devices spamming your radio and core network to death?

>because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.

? The performance just want not there until 4G LTE came around. You could only push 2G and 3G so much. 2G was built for voice, data was bolt-on. Just physics. If you have another brilliant idea on how to solve that please comment.

Different times. Companies aren't allowed to fail in 2026.

no, if they were like Nokia, they'd be desperately trying to make everything and new versions of things

instead they're refining their existing products until they can come up with a hit. although I'm not sure the iPhone Duo is gonna be a hit

there's simply not that much innovation going on these days, there was a lot more low-hanging fruit in the early 2000s

Why? Duo feels pretty nice. Wouldn’t want the first generation (but it is never a good idea to have the first generation of anything)

Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).

The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.

The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.

Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750

The N95 was the phone to have.-

point is they weren't pushing the technology, they were pushing the existing form factor, not thinking ahead.

I could be wrong, but I recall an exec at one of their events on stage doubling down and saying they know better than Apple - that people want buttons (or something like that), which basically means their decline was inevitable due to the culture

yes, it was the plethora of models even within the same OS - the build-test cycle was abominably slow because you were building 20 phone models at a time - 85GB of output.

The number of bugs greatly multiplied by the variety of configurations - dfifferent hardware and just different amounts of RAM forcing dodgy software workarounds to deal with insufficient hardware.

It was a matrix organisation that was optimised on the theory of making many models to fit different price points and that made it extremely difficult to react to the iPhone - of which beat Nokia with 1 model that poor people got into debt to buy.