I wish Nokia was still a big player in the phone business. My favourite (and most unique) phones were Nokia:
N95 - still looks gorgeous and classy and the “slide both ways” design blew my mind at the time. If they would release a new version I would probably buy it.
N-Gage - it was a cool and gimmicky phone, I admit it, only bought it for playing games, but loved how weird it was.
Lumia 920 - I loved windows phones, actually this was my second one and for me it was the best I could wish for. It had great camera, it was fast and looked super cool compared to the android competitors at the time. A shame the era of windows phones didn’t last long.
Fellow WP enthusiast here, bought a wp7 on day 1. MS just couldn’t keep from fucking it up. Such a great opportunity with great phones, and soooo much more responsive than the androids at the time. But they couldn’t draw in the apps they needed, pushed to the wrong group of people targeting business types weirdly, and then they just kept ruining it with the updates. I miss the early WP days, and music wise I loved zune, it was so much nicer to use than the garbage that was itunes, but once wp got to 10 it started to lose a lot of the charm. I held on to the bitter end and then a little after. So fucking depressing.
Nokia was cool when phones were fun.
I especially like the alien design.
Nokia Jaws was the best.
They thought about making a Switch in 2004 …
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_eabfd363-1d3d-4ba0-8604-7df4f05376c7/
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Nice find!
Direct Link to the archive: https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/
Torille
Reminds me of my old N-Gage
Taking phone calls on that thing was so strange. You had to hold it like you’d hold a sandwich.
The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.
The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.
The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.
We called it “Sidetalkin’”.
You hold your sandwiches like this? Weirdo…
This creepy-ass liminal space mock-up of how one of their stores might look…
Paywall, so I can’t see the others, but the one on the thumbnail isn’t that different to the N-Gage
Thanks, was just going to post this. I’ve added the non-paywall link to the post.
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 one in the thumbnail looks like it became the N-Gage taco phone.
Those look like real life windows media player skins from the early 2000s.
I owned the N-Gage and the 5510. I probably would have bought this.
Thank you for the unpaywalled link.
That feature photo device is a text-er’s dream. You could probably get some serious speed out of it.
Would that thing run any kind of Unix (I’d prefer one of the BSDs, but Linux is fine), I think on such a keyboard I could really use it for many things. As cool as PSP Slim, but more universal.
Yep. That would be great for gaming. Just swap out the rocker on the right side for a stubby joystick and you’d be off and running.
When I was a horny young man, I had this bad boy and a connection with “unlimited SMS to five chosen numbers” (you could then change those numbers but it’d cost you a little). It was only “unlimited” for the month it came out and the next month and then schools began and all us teenagers were texting each other in class under the table for absolutely no reason.
And the next month the “unlimited” became 1000 sms, to each of your five numbers or total I forget.
What a monster. Yeah, I definitely don’t miss the old days of the cellular companies vying to offer consumers the least shitty rates and constantly manipulating plans.
And you know what this thing could do?
It had FM radio and you had the capacity to record songs off the fking radio. In 2003. That was beyond crazy. I mean you can do that at home with a cassette player, but since this had a radio and recorder, it was basically one of those boomboxes people’s carried around in the 80’s. Functionally, if only because you had earphones and listened to it yourself.
Although the quality would horrify the HiFi people, especially anyone under 30 or so. They weren’t mp3, more like AMR/ACR whatever have you. (A proprietary format called LSE).
I vividly remember the sights and smells of walking and listening to Eminem - Lose Yourself on a very specific path I used to walk in the woods.
Gods I miss being a kid.
Edit to make it clear about the phone, it was essentially an improved 3310 (the classic unbreakable nokia) with a different case so it had qwerty and a few other improved features (like I think even WAP basically which was like a very crude mobile internet) and a few added games, like the 3330 (which was this improved version but in a standard Nokia 3310 case, with very minor alteration of a few mm)
I miss when phones weren’t all black obelisks. I mean, the features today are incredible and far surpass anything available 20 years ago, but the variety of tactile features and colors was incredible back then.
Ok, but that webpad genuinely seems way ahead of it’s time. I want a webpad, and I’m 1000000% sure it’s software is so out of date it would be like running windows 3.1 today.
Still though. How awesome does the webpad look?
Nokia were doing insanely awesome things with their hardware, beyond basically building phones which were impervious to standard human idiocy (hi, I am an average human idiot).
Screens were still breakable by idiots.
EDIT: I had one such phone, liked it. An idiot at school broke that screen. It was a girl, so can’t even be too angry.
True, especially with the xPressMusic ones. They felt as though they had slightly thinner plastic. Had one of the very thin ones, a friend of mine squeezed it between the door and its frame enough to turn it into a flip phone.
On the other hand, had a 6303i I threw at a wall to see what would happen and what happenes was an uncomfortable gash left in one of our clasroom’s walls. Phone was chillin’.
Too small.
I’d want a “tablet” looking like an A4 rollable metal sheet with a screen on one side (projected at that, so no calamity at that sheet will break it), a fat part on the side with the actual hardware and a few hercon buttons (so that they’d live longer too), a battery that lasts a month and that hardware shouldn’t be too powerful. Very limited in fact - like Star Wars datapads are. I, ahem, only think about this because I want a Star Wars datapad.
![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}