Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font

Many Americans such as myself had Nokia cell phones.. they were ubiqitious in USA culture... so I don't get the American jab at all, the only real competitor between 95-2005'ish was Motorola. Blackberry came from that time, and then android around 2010'ish but I would say yes - Nokia was the main phone for over a decade IMO.

It was the main phone in Europe and the USA, but in Japan they had entirely different types like the Docomo P208, which were much smaller and pretty cool (although I never used one). I remember when I was on a business trip to Japan with a colleague from the US in 1998. He pulled out his (at that time already outdated) Motorola and the Japanese just could not believe how clunky phones could be.

The 6190 might have been the most successfully executed technological device I’ve ever had. (Also an American wondering about the assumption we didn’t have Nokia.)

I beg to disagree.

The 5210 was the best, it was indestructible, cheap, kept its charge and still was functional even if you rode over it in your bulldozer.

The 8110 was the second imo, but only for the style.

And the 3310-ish were the runners-up. Cheaper than 5k series, and almost as useful.

The Nokia branding is now owned by HMD Global, who recently announced they would stop selling Nokia smartphones.

I carry a Nokia smartphone as my main phone (G400) and I personally love it. It is really a no-nonsense kind of phone, they kept the headphone jack (which I use almost every day) it even comes with a charger, and it is one of the more affordable smartphones out there.

I really don’t understand what kind of a business decisions it is to own such a legendary brand with such as a rich and successful history and not use it.

My brother drove over his Nokia phone with a car, and it cracked the screen. It was still readable enough to place and receive calls, and it was very easy to repair, but it did take damage.

When it comes to Nokia 3310, it is a huge dealer of damage, not so much of a receiver. :D

Nokia lost a lot of the US market in the 00s. They insisted on shipping SIP clients on their phones, so US carriers stopped selling their phones, when most people were only aware of carrier sold, subsidy locked phones.

Out in the rest of the world, Nokia Symbian phones were the leading smartphone platform. In the US, almost nobody knew they existed.

What was the damage to the car? ;p

> I really don’t understand what kind of a business decisions it is to own such a legendary brand with such as a rich and successful history and not use it.

I bet $1000 that's mostly due to ridiculous patents, business contracts with term limits, poor managerial decisions, and possibly EU regulations that make it more expensive/harder to innovate.

> They insisted on shipping SIP clients on their phones, so US carriers stopped selling their phones

This is a hot take if I've ever seen one. Completely ignoring the launch of the iphone in 2007 which coincided with their downfall. We could say yeah, maybe they didn't partner with CDMA and all the weird V-cast shit Verizon was doing and that hurt their market share like crazy, but to say SIP was the dealbreaker, just lol.

Also, Android shipped a native SIP client until this decade: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-killing-native-sip...

I dropped my N900 so hard (by unsuccessfully grabbing for it as it was falling) that it cracked some the sidewalk's fairly brittle concrete. Had no effect on the phone, no case.

Nokia lost the North American market before the iPhone. Here's an article that discusses Nokia's 40%+ market share globally and less than 10% share in North America in 2007. It's hard to find US specific numbers from then. 2007 is a bad year, because the iPhone was released mid year, but I can't find a 2006 US number.

Having 10% in the US with 40% globally is a major problem. Tech journalism sells products and tech journalism is focused on the US market.

Here's a blog [2] reposting a no longer available article on smart phone marketshare in 2006. It points out that symbian was dominant worldwide, but only had 10% of market share in the US.

This is why this article says Americans might not know of Nokia. They were once a major vendor in the US, but US sales have been low since at least 2006. Symbian market share continued to grow worldwide after the release of the iPhone, but not in the US where it finished disappearing.

Of course, Nokia dropping CDMA in 2006 [3] and never releasing a Symbian CDMA phone doesn't help when half of the US was using CDMA.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563633/2007-was-a-blo...

[2] https://mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/smartphone-os-m...

[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/182913/sync_symbian.html

I don't disagree individually, but I felt like the 6190 was an excellent balance. If a 5210 (or 5190) rolled a 10 STR, the 6190 was a 9, but a 10 CHR if the 5210 was a 9. It looked good pulled out of an ubiquitous Targus laptop bag but was small enough to be carried in a pocket.

I mean, I'm not going to fault your choices. Reasonable people can disagree on the details here. We're talking about an absolutely stacked lineup here.

It's probably because HMD Global doesn't actually own the Nokia brand. It's an exclusive licensing agreement with the still-existing Nokia company that makes network infrastructure.

The details are very easy to find out on Wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global

How big were Nokia's smartphones in the US? The E and N series Symbian 60 phones?

In Nokia's heyday, very few people in the USA had cellphones. They were rare in my experience there until sometime around 02002. By contrast, in Japan and Europe, cellphones were ubiquitous. Probably less so in India and Nigeria.

SIP was useless over a mobile connection those days. 3G's latency was way too high to support a decent voice call. SIP only worked reliably over WiFi.

Very few units sold. Distribution was poor, most were GSM only and only a couple supported 850mhz. I had the E70-2 and later E61i but I never meant anyone else with one.

Yep, I presume that’s primarily what the article author meant. To Americans Nokia mostly means "feature phones" whereas in Europe Nokia smartphones were, if not ubiquitous, commonplace enough around 2007 (remember that Nokia had been making smartphones for a decade by then). The N series in particular were targeted at consumers.