What a mess. The graph nodes slowly crawl around, as if to ensure that when you click you won't hit the thing you meant. Feels like something built in Flash during Nokia's heady days. (Unintentional irony? Nokia was known as a company with lots of Flash concepts and little software product execution.)
But the content seems really interesting. These are internal prototypes and documents from Nokia's archive, now released for the first time. I wish there was a way to browse them in chronological order without all this janky graph visualization nonsense.
There's a link in the corner that takes you to the actual archive repository:
I don't suppose you managed to grab it before we hugged it? I guess it will recover and I'll check back, but if you happened to have grabbed it locally I'd love to dig through it today :) (je @ h4x.club if you're able - thank you!:)
The UI for this does seem a bit "Baby's first force-directed graph". It's quite hard to use for navigation - if it sprang to life on load but then stayed static (other than hover highlighting) I think that would be much better.
I came across something interesting titled "Apple iPhone was launched, presentation (2007-12-31)"[0].
It mentions Nokia N800 and implicitly implies a lineage of devices (N770 > N800 > N810 > N900 > N9).
Sometimes I wonder what Nokia might have been like in a timeline without Jobs and Ballmer.
> Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena
It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm.
They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
N800 and other Open Source Software Operations' devices were not allowed to have cellular connection because of Nokia internal politics. N9 development was also hindred by the Maemo->MeeGo and the GTK->Qt transitions. And it was killed in its infancy in the Microsoft takeover.
There's no denying that Nokia screwed up but it was mostly because of stupid politics, not technology.
Both Maemo and WebOS were better UIs than iPhone and Android, and eventually both iPhone and Android had pretty much adopted a Frankensteined combination of the two. Android's process "card" UI is indistinguishable from WebOS, and I think it was designed by the same person.
Nokia could have competed, they were just internally a mess. So, the board wanted to sell to Microsoft, and brought in a guy whose job was to wreck Nokia and shepherd the deal (and pretend like it wasn't intentional.) The N900 showed too much potential, so I assume part of the wrecking was to force them to rewrite Maemo into Meego for the N9, which would be buried on release.
The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
You had an N900. How was the screen worse than any contemporary (or current) capacitive screen? I still an N900 as an mp3 player daily, and I still don't understand.
I had a N810 and a N900. Had a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 before that, and an iRiver H340. The iRiver was fantastic, but heavy (due to HDD), single purpose, and offline. Also, 40 GB ended up being too little but back then it was _huge_. Nowadays, I use Airsonic Advanced [1] on my server with gigabit fiber. Client can be whatever, for example Android smartphone over 5G (won't saturate the gigabit fiber). Caching works well, as does it with other streaming services. I could also use Jellyfin on it. I self-host as much as I can, including agenda, but I cannot be angry at people who to Google, Apple, or Microsoft cloud because it Just Works (tm).
On N810, GPS was meh. The keyboard was OKish although I believe Psion Series 5 devices had the better (bigger keys). If you got small fingers (esp. young people) you may like the smaller keys more or are OK with it. Back then, websites weren't written yet for capacitive touchscreen (responsive started to after iPhone release). As a DAP, I find N-series Maemo lousy. Turns out physical buttons are great on the move. But the beauty of the these Maemo devices as well as Sharp Zaurus was that you could use them for so much. In theory... cause in practice, you did not have 24/7 internet (until N900 or if you tethered). Battery life was meh. Many websites worked badly. Storage was limited.
> The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
Resistive and capacitive each have their pros and cons. On N900, the gestures (like in Fennec) were innovative but still at infancy. N9 was better gesture-based, as is SailfishOS, though I never used either as daily driver. A resistive UI requires a pen, or large UI whereas a capacitive screen can be used at any time with finger (those 'special' gloves and pens are sold everywhere these days, and is only an issue when its cold). What was needed, for the mobile market to massively succeed, was a different UI than desktop: a user-friendly, capacitive UI with larger interface, and gestures.
It looked like Nokia felt shaken by the iPhone and had the right mindset at the time, but their actions didn't match what was presented, the world would have been different indeed if Nokia had stepped up their game in this time.
Hm, for a site specialized in Nokia phones, it sure has a lot of "unknown models". I assume those are design mockups or prototypes of phones that didn't make it to mass production? At least this N-Gage lookalike https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a5... clearly has a dummy screen...
I visited a lunch spot popular with Nokia R&D employees. It was extremely common for people to have a prototype phone in a fabric bag at the lunch table, so you couldn't see what they were putting to the test of daily use. Lots of very funky phones were glimpsed, only few of them later became commercial products with definite model numbers.
I really wish the old Nokia was still around but without the cruft of their internal politics.
Something that Nokia was slow to get is also the appeal of the App Store / Play Store as a way of downloading apps easily which was always a problem in the older mobile operating systems.
This is in relation to a concept of phone "body" combined with a replacable faceplate which would expose different functionality (additional buttons, slide-out keyboard). One year later they introduced "Xpress-on" covers, which seem to boil down to having different colors. A bit more mundane.
There is some really interesting media in there, I'm not a huge fan of how it's surfaced with this network visualization tbh - the small viewport version you get on mobile or when shrinking the window down is actually nicer imo, you can just flip through the individual entries
To me it's a very confusing website, that's also a stuttery mess(Chrome, Win10, Ryzen 4000 6 core). I would much prefer the web page styles of the 90's with just hyperlinks and pictures instead of these fancy orbital sci-fi neural net styles so that some fron-end designers can flex their skills. It looks cool but the UX is bad.
Is this the future of European tech? Online museums to show digital tourists our glorious long gone tech past similar to our IRL museums? The irony is not lost on me.
They were being thrown away/deleted so some researches from the university decided to save them. I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
> The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.
By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language, that was sent to your terminal using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
This is all 1960s era concepts.
Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
That's not it. Those had roll wheels or something and no touch screens.
I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
SGI Irix was ahead of its time, and so were the Nokia Communicator.
Battery quality/video quality wasn't up to par for mobile devices. Some DVB-T smartphones were released. Also, WWW wasn't made for touchscreen (where capacitive touch requires more modification than resistive).
I'd say on the Linux-side, Maemo and the internet tablet (NIT) were ahead of their time, still limited given power efficiency, but better than Intel.
What a mess. The graph nodes slowly crawl around, as if to ensure that when you click you won't hit the thing you meant. Feels like something built in Flash during Nokia's heady days. (Unintentional irony? Nokia was known as a company with lots of Flash concepts and little software product execution.)
But the content seems really interesting. These are internal prototypes and documents from Nokia's archive, now released for the first time. I wish there was a way to browse them in chronological order without all this janky graph visualization nonsense.
There's a link in the corner that takes you to the actual archive repository:
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
This seems like it might be a less brain-melting way to browse the content.
I don't suppose you managed to grab it before we hugged it? I guess it will recover and I'll check back, but if you happened to have grabbed it locally I'd love to dig through it today :) (je @ h4x.club if you're able - thank you!:)
I agree the usability is a nightmare
What a mess of a webpage. Probably there is interesting content there but the presentation made me close it down immediatley.
I think this is a traditional interface to the same archive:
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
Yeah, I don't understand what's going on.
I was curious, but that mess of a webpage made me close it right away.
The UI for this does seem a bit "Baby's first force-directed graph". It's quite hard to use for navigation - if it sprang to life on load but then stayed static (other than hover highlighting) I think that would be much better.
No mention of my fav Nokia of all time, the N9; also no mention of MeeGo and Maemo
I came across something interesting titled "Apple iPhone was launched, presentation (2007-12-31)"[0]. It mentions Nokia N800 and implicitly implies a lineage of devices (N770 > N800 > N810 > N900 > N9). Sometimes I wonder what Nokia might have been like in a timeline without Jobs and Ballmer.
> Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena
[0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
I had the N770, the N800 and also the N900.
It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm.
They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
N800 and other Open Source Software Operations' devices were not allowed to have cellular connection because of Nokia internal politics. N9 development was also hindred by the Maemo->MeeGo and the GTK->Qt transitions. And it was killed in its infancy in the Microsoft takeover.
There's no denying that Nokia screwed up but it was mostly because of stupid politics, not technology.
Both Maemo and WebOS were better UIs than iPhone and Android, and eventually both iPhone and Android had pretty much adopted a Frankensteined combination of the two. Android's process "card" UI is indistinguishable from WebOS, and I think it was designed by the same person.
Nokia could have competed, they were just internally a mess. So, the board wanted to sell to Microsoft, and brought in a guy whose job was to wreck Nokia and shepherd the deal (and pretend like it wasn't intentional.) The N900 showed too much potential, so I assume part of the wrecking was to force them to rewrite Maemo into Meego for the N9, which would be buried on release.
The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
You had an N900. How was the screen worse than any contemporary (or current) capacitive screen? I still an N900 as an mp3 player daily, and I still don't understand.
I had a N810 and a N900. Had a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 before that, and an iRiver H340. The iRiver was fantastic, but heavy (due to HDD), single purpose, and offline. Also, 40 GB ended up being too little but back then it was _huge_. Nowadays, I use Airsonic Advanced [1] on my server with gigabit fiber. Client can be whatever, for example Android smartphone over 5G (won't saturate the gigabit fiber). Caching works well, as does it with other streaming services. I could also use Jellyfin on it. I self-host as much as I can, including agenda, but I cannot be angry at people who to Google, Apple, or Microsoft cloud because it Just Works (tm).
On N810, GPS was meh. The keyboard was OKish although I believe Psion Series 5 devices had the better (bigger keys). If you got small fingers (esp. young people) you may like the smaller keys more or are OK with it. Back then, websites weren't written yet for capacitive touchscreen (responsive started to after iPhone release). As a DAP, I find N-series Maemo lousy. Turns out physical buttons are great on the move. But the beauty of the these Maemo devices as well as Sharp Zaurus was that you could use them for so much. In theory... cause in practice, you did not have 24/7 internet (until N900 or if you tethered). Battery life was meh. Many websites worked badly. Storage was limited.
> The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?
Resistive and capacitive each have their pros and cons. On N900, the gestures (like in Fennec) were innovative but still at infancy. N9 was better gesture-based, as is SailfishOS, though I never used either as daily driver. A resistive UI requires a pen, or large UI whereas a capacitive screen can be used at any time with finger (those 'special' gloves and pens are sold everywhere these days, and is only an issue when its cold). What was needed, for the mobile market to massively succeed, was a different UI than desktop: a user-friendly, capacitive UI with larger interface, and gestures.
[1] https://github.com/airsonic-advanced/airsonic-advanced
It looked like Nokia felt shaken by the iPhone and had the right mindset at the time, but their actions didn't match what was presented, the world would have been different indeed if Nokia had stepped up their game in this time.
Don't forget Elop! He hitched Nokia's wagon to Microsoft's horses and then rode it straight off a cliff.
Anyone remember the Morph concept?
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs
Blew me away back then, but forgot the name. This archive helped to recover the bits in my head. Thank you!
Hm, for a site specialized in Nokia phones, it sure has a lot of "unknown models". I assume those are design mockups or prototypes of phones that didn't make it to mass production? At least this N-Gage lookalike https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a5... clearly has a dummy screen...
I visited a lunch spot popular with Nokia R&D employees. It was extremely common for people to have a prototype phone in a fabric bag at the lunch table, so you couldn't see what they were putting to the test of daily use. Lots of very funky phones were glimpsed, only few of them later became commercial products with definite model numbers.
It's an internal Nokia design archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 So there are a lot of internal designs and prototypes
I really wish the old Nokia was still around but without the cruft of their internal politics.
Something that Nokia was slow to get is also the appeal of the App Store / Play Store as a way of downloading apps easily which was always a problem in the older mobile operating systems.
"My First Nokia" designs were funny in this presentation: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_47c69f41-6009-4520-9e...
This is in relation to a concept of phone "body" combined with a replacable faceplate which would expose different functionality (additional buttons, slide-out keyboard). One year later they introduced "Xpress-on" covers, which seem to boil down to having different colors. A bit more mundane.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad...
Is this a Nokia Watch or rather a Nokia Cuff?
They had both! This one looks like a tamer variant of their cuff design. The cuff that got more attention was called Morph.
I wonder if the software empowering this data is an open source project?
I just want to know how it was made. It looks like the entire presentation is encapsulated inside of a "canvas" tag.
Also looks like, Nokia worked on this archive intensively starting 2023. Seems like a whole retrospective project. Amazingly inspiring.
There is some really interesting media in there, I'm not a huge fan of how it's surfaced with this network visualization tbh - the small viewport version you get on mobile or when shrinking the window down is actually nicer imo, you can just flip through the individual entries
Guys, what are we doing here?
To me it's a very confusing website, that's also a stuttery mess(Chrome, Win10, Ryzen 4000 6 core). I would much prefer the web page styles of the 90's with just hyperlinks and pictures instead of these fancy orbital sci-fi neural net styles so that some fron-end designers can flex their skills. It looks cool but the UX is bad.
Is this the future of European tech? Online museums to show digital tourists our glorious long gone tech past similar to our IRL museums? The irony is not lost on me.
Here: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-a...
This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
Thanks
They were being thrown away/deleted so some researches from the university decided to save them. I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
>I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
These are not pulled from some random website. These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia (well Microsoft Mobile Oy these days)
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html
> The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.
You can look at the uncurated collection at aalto university repo https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... (not sure if all of the materials digitized/online though)
How exactly would wayback machine allow you to have a collection of related items and their connection to each other?
How do you go from e.g. Vision 99 (if you manage to find it in Wayback machine) to all related entires? https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027
By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language, that was sent to your terminal using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
This is all 1960s era concepts.
Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
> By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language
Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need
> Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
And does wayback machine have this "any wiki"?
Meanwhile the site in question is literally the wiki with hyperlinks you're talking about
I feel genuinely stupid trying to use a website like this.
Here you go the 90's style web page with folder structure :
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
Can anyone find the Nokia touch screen prototype that came 7 years before iPhone around 2000 but was rejected by management.
This is probably the one you mean, the oval-shaped "3G concept" touchscreen device from 1999-2000:
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001
You can hover over the "related entries" links to view the images.
That's not it. Those had roll wheels or something and no touch screens.
I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
This archive is all about the R&D prototypes. Unfortunately the website makes it impossible to find anything.
No it's not. It's a design archive. It includes design concepts, some involving prototypes, but only in relation to design.
Industrial design and engineering R&D are different things.
Found a sketch here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history...
Can't find it from this archive, but the concept appears on this PDF
https://www.aalto.fi/sites/default/files/2020-11/Haikio2.pdf
"Pocket office"
"Phone, computer, television, video, all are becoming one"
http://twitpic.com/btc934 "Taskuterminaali 2002", the concept is from 1996 envisioning what would be released in 2002.
I guess the technology components were not yet on that level by then.
SGI Irix was ahead of its time, and so were the Nokia Communicator.
Battery quality/video quality wasn't up to par for mobile devices. Some DVB-T smartphones were released. Also, WWW wasn't made for touchscreen (where capacitive touch requires more modification than resistive).
I'd say on the Linux-side, Maemo and the internet tablet (NIT) were ahead of their time, still limited given power efficiency, but better than Intel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/comment/m7gor...
"low power" has zero hits. I guess low power is implied.
This archive more about the aesthetics design, not technical stuffs.
Needs an imgur with 800 photos.
The interface is a mess, but the data is phenomenal.
RIP back button
[dead]