Nokia’s 14 Years of Mobile-Phone Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon

Recommendable! A chronicle of fast moving technological change!

What about Motorola?

"In 2005, Nokia sold its billionth mobile phone, a budget-friendly device that went to a customer in Nigeria. By then, the company, based in Espoo, Finland, was making one of every three cellphones globally.

But just nine years later, the mobile-device maker offloaded its entire handset division to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar, compared to what it had been worth at its peak. ...

On 9 January 2007, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs made a characteristically bold claim. “Today, Apple is reinventing the phone,” he said, soon pulling one of the first iPhones out of his pocket. ...

multitouch [screen] technology ..

And yet it took Nokia years to develop a phone that used multitouch. “Remember, Nokia is based in Finland,” he says. “It’s very cold in Finland. They wear gloves for six months of the year, including the executives. They didn’t think a device like that would work.” ...

That similar product ended up being the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, known as the Tube, released in 2008. “The idea was to focus on streaming videos and television,” Partanen says. “So we made a phone with a similar form factor to the iPhone [that was] optimized for streaming content.” But the 5800 was “delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed,” he says. “It didn’t materialize in the way it was planned. It was released as a watered-down version.” ...

The 1200 kept the 1100’s dust-proofing, flashlight, and long-lasting battery, and added features aimed squarely at the developing world. ...

In September 2008, the first Android phone went on sale—the HTC Dream, which was also sold as the T-Mobile G1. ...

Released in 2009, the Nokia 5230 attempted to be a low-priced, touchscreen (though not multitouch) competitor to both the iPhone and Android. It sold an impressive 150 million units, doing especially well in developing countries.

But the 5230 didn’t have Wi-Fi—one of the biggest complaints at the time. In the developing world, Wi-Fi connections were still rare, so the lack of Wi-Fi made some sense. ..."

How Nokia’s Feature Phones Lost to the Smartphone Era - IEEE Spectrum "How the iPhone and then Android killed the feature phone"