Paywall, so I can’t see the others, but the one on the thumbnail isn’t that different to the N-Gage
Nokia was the Casio of mobile phones. Sad it couldn’t keep up with the smartphone era.
Nokia was purposely sabotaged by Stephen Elop.
Elop was a Microsoft employee who moved to Nokia to become their CEO.
Elop scrapped Meego as well as the rapidly-improving and highly promising Symbian OS that Nokia had, killed internal projects that used Android, and went all in on Windows Phone 7, a completely unproven platform that just happened to be from his ex employer.
After the market really didn’t like that, Microsoft was able to buy Nokia for a bargain price (€5.4bn), and Elop was given a €18.8m bonus.
Curiosly, that bonus works out as €1 million for every €1 billion that was wiped off Nokia’s market cap during his time as CEO. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…
When he was asked for the good of the company to take a smaller bonus, Elop said that he “couldn’t”.
After the deal to buy Nokia went through, Elop moved to a different cushty position within Microsoft.
Nokia didn’t really fumble smartphones. They were purposely ran into the ground by Microsoft so they could use a powerful brand name as the the thin end of a wedge to take over the phone market, without having to pay much for it. Then Microsoft fumbled it from then on out.
Nokia were crazy back in the day but I think people may remember them a bit too fondly. I remember how whenever there was some new tech or idea they would absolutely trickle them out just to try and squeeze as much money out of you as possible. If there were two new pieces of tech they’d release two phones, with each of them having one of the new pieces of tech. Back in those days they just refused to make the absolute best phone possible. That’s one of the biggest changes that came from the iPhone.
You not think it could’ve been a cost saving measure too though and that putting the two new pieces of tech in one phone would’ve made it too expensive for anyone to buy
As a Nokia Mobile Phones employee in the mid 2000s, I can confirm this was indeed the case. The US wouldn’t pay over $100 for a handset, and Nokia was already losing money on hardware in the phone sale to have it subsidized by network providers. Nokia wanted to add tech and capability, but the high end stuff didn’t sell at a profit and carriers wouldn’t sell phones that were more expensive than their customers would pay. Apple was an exception due to marketing as “premium”.
![The Crazy Nokia Designs That Never Saw the Light of Day [Wired]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7bae5b80-f6c7-4a81-b44a-e9763245b5ac.webp){kind=link}