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Nokia N950
Nokia N950 origins

The Nokia N950 was designed at a weird time. Nokia’s position as the premier smartphone maker was under siege from Android and iPhone after seeing off the Palm OS and numerous iterations of Windows Phone. Nokia had missed the boat on devices with capacitive touch displays. It was using a smartphone operating system that was starting to show its age, a bit like PalmOS did previously. Like Palm, Nokia wasted far too much time coming up with its next generation OS, which gave Google and Apple the opportunity gap that they needed.

Part of the problem was that Nokia was wrong for the right reasons:
- Different consumers do need different types of phones, which is why HMD have managed to resurrect modern versions of classic Nokia feature phone designs
- Phones are better if they can be operated one-handed. Whereas Google and Apple busied themselves designing computers that happened to be phones
- Phones needed to be made down to a cost. So the handsets were different on the outside but had common ‘guts’, which meant that premium products could be underpowered
Nokia had their own answer to Android and iOS in MeeGo which grew out of work that Intel and Nokia had separately done on mobile Linux. Nokia was partnering with Intel partly because it believed that Intel was the future of mobile.

The Nokia N950 was a development handset showcasing this operating system in action. It was similar and related to the N9.

The N9 was released in a limited amount of markets were it was successful. However the N9 success story was overshadowed by the larger business problems Nokia faced in its transition from Symbian and feature phones to Windows Phone.

There were an estimated 5,000 Nokia N950 handsets made in total, which went to the Nokia global developer community. Technically there are loaned devices rather than given to developers. They occasionally appear on eBay going for 1,000GBP+

Up close with the Nokia N950

At first glance the Nokia N950 looked like a chimera of the N9 and the N8 with a slide out keyboard riffing on the Communicator form factor that Nokia pioneered.

It makes sense to list the differences with the N9 first of all:
- The Nokia N950 had a TFT LCD screen roughly the same size as a Nokia E90 Communicator, but with a higher resolution. The N9 had an AMOLED screen which is slightly smaller and has a slightly higher resolution
- The N9 was made from the same machined polycarbonate body that then made its appearance on Nokia Lumia models. The Nokia N950 has a case made from a mix of machined and stamped aluminium parts and came only in black (though I have seen pictures of un-anodised devices as well. These were probably pre-production prototypes)
- They had different camera modules that performed broadly the same
- The Nokia N950 had a pop under keyboard similar to the N8 and E7. More on that a bit later on
- The Nokia N950 had 8.5GB of usable storage compared to up to 64GB of memory in the N9
- The N9 has a slightly larger battery than the N950, but the difference wouldn’t have been noticeable due to the difference in screen technology
What you end up with is a phone that still looks modern (partly due to its anodised black case making the screen edge harder to spot.

The device is slow compared to modern devices but is speedy for its time. The device flipped from landscape to portrait mode, but this wasn’t perfectly implemented.

It had a pop under keyboard which allows the device to have a really shallow design in comparison to Communicator devices. However it does leave the screen exposed to damage. The past decade of Gorilla Glass™ screens on iPhones and Android handsets proves that the Corning wonder material is not invulnerable.

The problem with the design means that you end up with a shallow area for the keyboard. The Nokia N950 like the E7 and N8 don’t have as full a featured keyboard as the Communicator devices.

Here’s a keyboard from the E90 by comparison. When you were using the Nokia N950 you end up with a virtual keyboard on the screen providing the tab, ctrl, esc and alt keys, as well as very commonly used symbols. Which begs the question of how useful the keyboard would really be for developers?

Compared to the modern iPhone, the N950 meets the goal of a mobile computing device much better. You can write longer emails and documents on the keyboard than the iPhone. The camera is adequate for most people’s needs and it shows in some respects how little the smartphone concept has moved on over the past seven years.

Could the Nokia N950 been the future?

Historically Nokia’s Symbian phones had been built on TI’s OMAP processors; but these didn’t have a roadmap for 4G wireless. Nokia had two choices bet on Qualcomm or Intel. Qualcomm had come out on top in IP related disputes, which probably made Intel seem more attractive. Intel was also championing WiMax as a 4G standard.

WiMax had limited adoption at best, Nokia was on the wrong side of networking standards and eventually was forced to use Qualcomm processors in Windows Phone reference designs.

`Nokia could have gone to Snapdragon processors but its joint relationship with Intel on the software side of things would have been tainted. There is also no guarantee that Qualcomm would have been a helpful partner given the history between the two companies and that both Android and iOS devices used Qualcomm products.

Secondly, Nokia bet all the marketing budget on the Lumia device launch which left nothing for the MeeGo devices.

Finally, Nokia would not have been able to get out of the legal contract that they had with Microsoft. The only way MeeGo would have stood a chance is if the Nokia board had not approved Stephen Elop’s proposal to go with Windows, rival schemes to go with Android and bet on the home team.
- At the time the internal Nokia option would have looked high risk. Board members would have been familiar with historic project problems on Meamo and then MeeGo
- Secondly Nokia had a history of buying in new generation operating systems. It licensed GEOS for the Nokia Communicator 9000 and 9110. It licensed and then bought into Psion’s OS business unit, which became Symbian
- Nokia’s feature phones ran on homegrown technology built on Intelligent System Architecture (ISA), also called the Nokia Operating System (NOS)
More information

TIMELINE: Qualcomm vs Nokia patents battle | Reuters
Qualcomm loses GSM patent fight with Nokia in German court | Ars Technica
Why Qualcomm Folded to Nokia | Bloomberg BusinessWeek (paywall)
The ‘I Wish I Had Known This’ List about 101 Things Wrong With Windows Phone Smartphones Like Nokia Lumia | Communities Dominate Brands
How Many Lumia Sales? As Nokia (and Microsoft) ashamed to reveal number, lets count – and compare to N9 MeeGo sales | Communities Dominate Brands
Nokia N8 review | GSMArena
November 29, 2018
Fall of Nokia & other things this week

BBC 4 ran a great hour long documentary film: The Rise and Fall of Nokia is an oral history on the fall of Nokia from Nokia veterans. You can’t give a good comprehensive telling on the rise and fall of Nokia story in just one hour, but you can get a sense of what Nokia was. Some of the culture change that came with success was really, really dark. More on Nokia here.

Danny Dyer nailed the zeitgeist on Brexit last week. Which led some the B3ta community to put together the Danny Dyer Presents: “Pwopa Nawty Noises!” (B3ta.com) – livens up conference calls no end.

I was a big fan of HBO’s The Newsroom drama; it was more of the intelligent dramas over the past few years. The intro to the first episode seems even more prescient now

I am very late to this but Techcrunch’s Bubbleproof drama from last year neatly skewers the current state of technology start-up culture (in the west at least).

I’ll leave you with this amazing animated film from Hong Kong. It’s on KickStarter for funding and looks amazing with hints of traditional martial arts films, science fiction and psychedelia. More information on the film website.

July 13, 2018
Nokia 8110 & other things

Nokia 8110

A cheap facsimile of the classic Nokia 8110 managed to upstage the launch of of a range of premium Android phones at MWC. Nostalgia is powerful, but I don’t think what’s going on here. I could see the Nokia 8110 as a weekend phone allowing consumers to wind down at the weekend and go cold turkey on the app economy.

I think that the Nokia 8110 shows that the model of a single form factor based on common reference designs is broken. Apple managed to elevate the build quality of all smartphones as contract manufacturers moved towards an armada of CNC machines and advanced manufacturing. But in the process, the common designs, common components and new baseline in product integrity has homogenised and commoditised Android handsets to such a decree that only scale and advertising budgets are differentiators. More related content here.

Hong Kong cinematic sound tracks

Amazing selection of music from the sound tracks of classic kung fu movies over at Shaolin Chamber 36.

Roni Size

Roni Size talks about the music that influenced him. There is a lot of old school breaks that would be familiar to the breakdancing scene in his list of influential works. He also talks about the seminal film Wild Style and its influential soundtrack.

Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert talks about creating the science fiction epic Dune. Dune is an amazing piece of work and hearing Herbert talk about the origins of Dune makes that work even more impressive if that was possible.

Xinyuan Wang

digitalethnography | Field Note Painting Booklet – done by Xinyuan Wang, a UCL social anthroplogist in a lower tier Chinese city. Ms Wang wrote a really good monograph on social media in industrial China. She captures a moment in time that is invaluable for marketers looking at China and trying to understand the mobile environment.

March 2, 2018
The New Nokia
The New Nokia can rise from the ashes of the old. Microsoft finally let go of its licence for the Nokia brand license on May 19, 2016.

There is a lot of logic to this move:
- Microsoft has already written down the full value of the business acquisition
- It has got the most valuable technical savvy out of the team and moved it into the Surface business
- It removes problematic factories and legacy products
For the businesses that have acquired the rights to use the Nokia name and the factories the upsides are harder to see.

The factories may be of use, however there is over supply in the Shenzhen eco-system and bottlenecks aren’t usually at final manufacture, but in the component supply chain.

There is still some brand equity left in the Nokia phone brand. I analysed Nokia along with a number of other international Greater China smartphone eco-system brands using Google Trend data.

There has been a decline in brand interest over the past 12 months for Nokia of 37%

Nokia still has comparable brand equity to other legacy mobile brands such as BlackBerry and Motorola

The brand equity is comparable to other value mobile brands. Honor; Huawei’s value brand has had a lot of money and effort pumped into it to achieve its current position.

But it’s brand equity doesn’t stack up well against premium handset brands from Greater China. The reason for this is that smartphone marketing and fast moving consumer goods marketing now have similar dynamics – both are in mature little differentiated markets. Brands need to have deep pockets and invest in regular advertising to remain top-of-mind across as large an audience as possible. Reach and frequency are more important than social media metrics like engagement.

In addition to advertising spend needs to be put into training and incentivising channel partners including carriers.

They are entering a hyper-competitive market and it isn’t clear what their point of advantage will be. Given the lock down that Google puts on Android and commoditised version of handset manufacture, the best option would be to look for manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies – like Dell did in the PC industry. But that’s easier said than done.

Garnering the kind of investment required to seriously support an international phone brand is a hard sell to the finance director or potential external investors.

Growth is tapering out.

The average selling price is in steady decline

This is partly because the emerging markets are making the majority new phone purchases.

Consumers in developed markets are likely holding on to the their phones for longer due to a mix economic conditions and a lack of compelling reason to upgrade.

All of the consumers that likely want and can afford a phone in developed markets have one. Sales are likely to be on a replacement cycle as they wear out. Manufacturers have done a lot to improve quality and reliability of devices.

Even the old household insurance fraud standby of dropping a phone that the consumer was bored with down the toilet doesn’t work on the latest premium Android handsets due to water-proofing.

More information

The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement
Gartner highlights a more challenging smartphone sector for Nokia than when it “quit” in 2013 | TelecomTV
Nokia is coming back to phones and tablets | The Verge
So the Nokia brand returns.. with a Vengeance | Communities Dominate Brands

Supporting data slides in full

1605 new nokia smartphone deck from Ged Carroll
May 23, 2016
Nokia N900

This throwback gadget the Nokia N900 comes from before Nokia decided to go with Windows Mobile as its smartphone operating system. It had started to develop Maemo as a successor operating system to Symbian Series 60. Meamo was a Linux kernel based mobile operating system which owed its heritage to the Debian Linux distribution.

The N900 was the first phone which showed Nokia’s ideas in developing an alternative to the Android and iPhone eco-systems. Symbian was a powerful operating system, with true multitasking but there were issues that just tidying up the UI and introducing capacitive touch wouldn’t address. For a mature operating system, I had to reboot my Nokia phones surprisingly often, basic apps like the address book didn’t work if you had over a thousand contacts – so most sales people out there.

The predecessor of the Nokia N900 was the 770 internet tablet which was launched back at the end of 2005, which was the iPad before the iPad.

Trying to trial this device is a bit hard as it relied on web services such as an app store that no longer exists. Secondly it offers an experience comparable to an Android or iPhone powered by a processor that is several generations older, so you have to make allowances for the fact that the Nokia N900 can feel slow at times.

Let’s start with the industrial design. The phone is relatively thick, partly due to its keyboard and replaceable battery design feels good to hold.

The Danger Sidekick-esque slide-out keyboard which would be handy for the world of OTT messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat and LINE. It isn’t a full keyboard like the Nokia E90 Communicator that I used to own but it is more usable than say a Blackberry Bold. The keyboard feels solid and stable.

The camera surround on the back has a stand that pops out for when you want to use the phone to watch content or as a glorified desk clock.

The dialler on the phone is easier to use than the iPhone and did what it came on the tin – its slight gradient feels like Apple pre-iOS7. Nokia’s HERE mapping service was responsive, it seems to be the one thing on the phone still supported.

Nokia’s Mozilla-based browser still works and provided an experience similar to modern smartphones, but slower (this is partly due to the processor inside the phone).

Now the Nokia N900 stands a testament to lost potential, the following Nokia N9 and N950, looked like polished products. Stephen Elop saw things differently and despite the Nokia N9 selling well in the few markets that he allowed it to sell, put the company on its fateful relationship with Microsoft. Presumably Elop and his team felt that they couldn’t sustain the innovation of Maemo, which would have required a move to Qualcomm processors away from Intel. Nokia had backed WiMax rather than LTE with Intel, so the company was on the wrong foot. The decline is now a matter of well recorded history with Microsoft having eventually taken over a much diminished phone business. Some of the N9 team went on to build Jolla – a small phone company that built a smartphone and tablet to showcase their SailfishOS operating system. It remains to be seen if other phone manufacturers will launch products using it. But it does offer consumers outside North America a more secure option to an Android handset. More gadget related content here.

May 6, 2015

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