Nokia Rejected iPhone Concept Early On
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What if you could go back in time and beat Apple to market with an iPhone device. Would you do it? Every smartphone maker on the planet would say 'yes,' including Nokia, which would probably like to take a mulligan on saying 'no' when it had the chance.
According to a fascinating report in The New York Times, research engineers at Nokia prepped a prototype of an Internet-ready, touchscreen handset with a big display a few years before Apple launched its iPhone. Who knows if it would have been a success, because management killed the project on fears that it would flop and cost the company too much money, claims former employee Ari Hakkarainen.
"It was very early days, and no one really knew anything about the touchscreen's potential," Hakkarainen said. "And it was an expensive device to produce, so there was more risk involved for Nokia. So management did the usual. They killed it."
During that same year (2004), Nokia also rejected an early design for an online app store, another decision that ultimately hurt Nokia in the long run. Fast forward to today and Nokia is playing catch up, not just with Apple, but with every major player in the smartphone market.
"I am sure there are things we could have done better and innovations we missed," said Arja Souminen, a spokeswoman for Nokia. "But that happens to all companies. We have been very successful with some other innovations."
Read the full report here.
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bart3385
September 29, 2010 at 3:42am
Nokia should first get off its addiction to the hopeless "Symbian" OS. That's when Nokia can ever start to go somewhere.
riopato
September 28, 2010 at 12:54pm
because none of their latest devices shows that they planned to do anything with touchscreen interfaces. It seems that Nokia hasn't even begun playing catch up.
It's ironic upon reading this article. When the first iphone came out, my first reaction was wow, I wonder what Nokia will make to compete with this!?! Little did I realize that Nokia was asleep at the wheel.
If you look at all the netbooks out there compared to Nokia's, didn't you think that Nokia made a netbook that Apple should've made? Imagine that design as a phone! They can do it they, just didn't want to!
arosadler
September 28, 2010 at 11:44am
What happened to Nokia? Are they still big over seas? I can't remember the last time I saw someone using a Nokia phone, which is sad. They used to make really durable phones that got great reception. I think if they had made this touch screen device, people would have come. Now they'll never make up the ground in market share they lost. The competition caught up on the quality and surpassed them on functionality.
ericzombie
September 28, 2010 at 8:07am
I doubt any handset maker would have gone back and said yes to the idea, and I'm sure that someone else made touchscreen phones before Apple did (Windows mobile/ipaq/etc phones come to mind).
Think about every product apple makes. They took someone else's idea or product that was so-so or merely okay and "Apple-ized" it and made it a hit. Nokia and every other handset maker could have produced functional touchscreen media-based handsets, but they would have been flops (or were flops, or at least not Apple-big), because they don't have the "Touch of Jobs" to perfect/stylize the product nor the "Cult of Apple" to support their products from initial release into full-steam development.
What a dumb article. Come to think of it, I had a Windows Mobile phone from Verizon that had wireless internet over CDMA, plus WiFi, plus Bluetooth, plus all media (video, photo, audio) capabilities in 2005-2006 on a WindowsMobile 5 based phone......
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