alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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>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.
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.
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.